When I first saw Keith Gordon, he was Angie Dickinson's son in "Dressed to Kill." Then, he was Rodney Daingerfield's son in "Back to School." Finally, he was bewitched by a car in "Christine." Somewhere during this Wellesian odyssey, he began to direct. First, the stagey "The Chocolate Wars" followed by the heavy-handed and plodding "A Midnight Clear." Now, this.
There is no film school trick that Gordon won't try - repeatedly. He is a very bad director, but worse, he is insistent on being bad. He jump cuts conversations, he visually idealizes everything, there is no shot that is not ostentatious, and he so mistrusts his actors that he diddles with any continuity in dialogue with distracting camera work or haphazard editing.
And he keeps doing it. I'll say this for Spike Lee. He may hit upon a novel angle or shot, but he doesn't go back to the well with it (at least, in the same movie).
And this is a very bad movie, ostensibly about lovers from opposite worlds (the "I want to work within the system and be President" Billy Crudup and the "I want to help the poor and the Allende government and I want you, Billy, to understand that I am your lover and I don't want you to become a cog in THEIR machine") who meet in the 70s. She haunts him into being a better congressman ten years after their union. Blech, barf and retch. If people in the 70s were really as unsophisticated and shrieking as depicted in this film, coupled with the bad fashion, Nixon did them a favor by at least focusing their misery.
Crudup does what he can. He really is an attractive lead and I expect good things from him in the future. Connelly is a non-entity, as she always has been, but her breasts are absolutely fabulous. It is a signal of how little I think of this film that I cannot recommend it even for the nice shot of her yobs. Grade: F.
