All's Wells

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 8, 1999 | by Gary Arnold

A `serious' romantic comedy by a new director is a flawed But exhilarating debut.

Guinevere floats right to the top of the year's best original screenplays and joins a short list with A Walk on the Moon and Election. This freshly distinctive movie was written and directed by Audrey Wells, whose previous writing credits include The Truth About Cats and Dogs and George of the Jungle. Neither of those films anticipated the emotional savvy and singularity of Guinevere.

Her oddball love story, recalled in flashback by the heroine, pairs a collegiate wallflower from San Francisco named Harper Sloane (Sarah Polley) with a droll seducer 30 years her senior, an exiled Irish photographer called Connie Fitzpatrick (Stephen Rea). Harper meets Connie while he's photographing the wedding of her older sister -- she begs him to crop her from the official wedding photo. Connie obliges but leaves Harper with a flattering souvenir: a lovely individual portrait, caught when she was off guard.

Harper's sense of inferiority is ascribed mostly to her junior, ugly-duckling status in a family of overconfident legal smarties. Dorothy Sloane (Jean Smart) looms as the supreme intimidator, a formidable source of domestic sarcasm and discontent. What Dorothy says at key moments during the movie is appalling but perceptive. In a typical audience-pandering script, Harper or Connie would present some sort of righteous denunciation of the bitter Dorothy. But Wells lets this vindictive woman nail her immediate targets and retire from the field of rhetorical battle an unchallenged but implicitly miserable victor.

Unfortunately, psychological and conceptual acuteness deserts Wells when she feels the pressure to resolve her story. Although Guinevere unfolds without a hitch -- we see Harper flee the forbidding bosom of her family and take refuge with Connie, the scruffy, amiable, seductive bohemian who knows just the right things to say to calm and entrance coltish consorts -- the movie starts to deflate once the contrasts are illustrated.

Wells also makes the mistake of overdoing her feelings of pity for Connie, who experiences a kind of physical breakdown during a vacation trip to Southern California, followed by an encounter that exposes him as a has-been and beggar within his profession. Nevertheless, one misses the subtler, cumulative approach of the episodes that brought Connie and Harper together as an impassioned odd couple.

Going soft and evasive on Connie also seems to rob Stephen Rea of acting opportunities down the stretch. He's promoted from amusing, opinionated rascal to beloved invalid, not exactly an improvement. Sarah Polley, who has her first genuinely likable role as Harper after being overrated as a young malcontent in The Sweet Hereafter and Go, also loses the chance at an active role in the heroine's separation from her faltering but still indispensable first lover. Jean Smart, who has been sneaking up on audiences since playing the delightfully sozzled neighbor in The Brady Bunch Movie, may soar to an Oscar nomination with her performance as Dorothy Sloane.

Nevertheless, Wells operates here at a higher level of exploration and aptitude than one expects in Hollywood. She has transcended the trifling games of love played out in big, wheezing hits such as You've Got Mail and Runaway Bride. She has a bracing eye and voice. If she can sustain them through an inspired fade-out one of these days, the promise of Guinevere will be rewarded completely.