RANDOM HEARTS (1999)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Despite the critical consensus that "Random Hearts" was a purely muffled, static melodrama, I found something of interest in it anyway. Not a stunning achievement by any means, "Random Hearts" is dare I say watchable, if also clumsy and underwritten. It is also somewhat absorbing.
Harrison Ford (sporting for the first time an earring) is William "Dutch" Van Den Broeck (who the heck is going to remember a name like that?), a Washington, D.C police sergeant who has just learned that his wife died in a plane crash. He is saddened but he has those detective genes in him, questioning why she was not involved in any work-related trip to her destination, Florida. Sure, she is on the flight to Florida but not under her married name! The plot thickens as we discover that she traveled using the name of another married woman! Yes, Virginia, she has been having an affair and "Dutch" is not very happy about it. He tracks down a Republican congresswoman, Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose husband (Peter Coyote) had been seated next to Dutch's wife on the ill-fated flight. Dutch continually pesters Kay through the whole film, asking her questions about the affair that neither of them knew anything about. Dutch even travels to Florida (!) in what shapes up to be some kind of mystery about his wife - who was she really? Did she lie about everything, not just her job or her flights? I was not clear what Dutch was expecting to find...and the more he kept looking, the more I got interested. Perhaps there was some surprise, some twist of fate to arrive at that would make an already overlong movie at 2 hours-plus even longer. And, in truth, Dutch is only fooling himself.
I hope I did not give anything away but "Random Hearts" is one curious movie. Here are two actors in fine form (though Ford is a little too zombiefied for my tastes), a delicate, restrained script (that veers away from its intended course with superfluous subplots involving political campaigns and Internal Affairs), and some assured direction by Sydney Pollack, and the end result is a vapid mess. There is absolutely nothing in the palm of its hand. The two main characters fall in love with each other but neither is as concerned as they should be about their former spouses The film is far too remote to care about, and the cadences in the dialogue (followed by long silences and pauses) made me realize how little was really being said. There is a hypnotic pull to the movie, and somehow you are carried along waiting to see what happens next. The truth there is nothing at the end of this rainbow.
Footnote: Sydney Pollack shot this film in 1998 through early 1999. Pior to this film, Pollack had also been shooting a role in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." I have no doubt that the pauses and silences in this film were influenced in some way by the late Mr. Kubrick, whose film has it share of pauses and silences between dialogue exchanges.
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