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Seen recently on “The New $1,000,000 Pyramid with Dick Clark” --
William Shatner: “Drinking and driving. Oil and water. Condoms and sea urchins. Uhhh... Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas!”
Rowena Rampling (a veterinary cosmetic surgeon’s assistant from Boise): “Things that don’t mix!”
Bell: “DING!”
Rumor has it that, back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, RKO Radio Pictures president Howard Hughes employed a neat little trick whenever he was suffering a creative dry spell. He’d write the names of all the actors he had under contract on slips of paper and put them in a brandy snifter, put the names of actresses in another, and all the available soundstage, backlot, and location settings in a third. He’d formulate movie ideas by taking a slip of paper from each glass: “John Wayne,” “Susan Hayward,” and “abandoned nuclear test site in the Utah desert.” Think I’m kidding? Ever hear of something called The Conqueror, starring The Duke as Genghis Kahn? Remember, the film once believed to be cursed because half the cast and crew later died of cancer since nobody at the time thought twice about traipsing around ankle-deep in radioactive fallout?
Of course, producers today would never do anything so crassly primitive. Not when they can go to Office Max and buy a copy of Microsoft Random Casting Generator, update 2000 --which is how Random Hearts was apparently dreamed up.
Harrison Ford, coming off another film in which he starred with a much younger woman (Anne Heche in 6 Days, 7 Nights), and Kristin Scott Thomas, who in her last cinematic outing also hooked up with a way-older guy (Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer), do that Mae September thing all over again. He plays Dutch Vandenbroeck, a D.C. cop (as in, District of Columbia, not DC like in “AC/DC,” the now-antiquated term for sexual switch-hitting which borrows its connotation from “alternating current/direct current” and isn’t the least bit applicable to the Australian band AC/DC since they, like Dutch, are about as “direct” as you can get) working in Internal Affairs (nudge, nudge). She’s Kay Chandler, a feisty, refined Republican Congresswoman who dispatches liberals with icy charm and then serves them up on a croissant for breakfast.
But all is not well in the Capital. Following a tragic airline crash in which there spouses are killed while sitting together sipping mint juleps in first class, suspiciously analytical Dutch figures out the two were sneaking off to Miami together. He shares his info with Kay, who, after hating his ruddy, jowlish face for about ten minutes, suddenly gives in to the fabled Han/Indy grin and realizes she’s fallen for him arse-over-teakettle during a scene where they paw each other senseless in a parked car while the audience laughs uncomfortably at the lack of star chemistry. Kay and Dutch try to carry on despite all the scrutiny she’s getting in the middle of a nasty re-election campaign, while he has a couple obligatory action scenes in a thankfully distracting subplot about some corrupt fellow cops.
Directed by Sydney Pollack -- who should know better, having done such award-winning and -nominated films as Tootsie and Out of Africa -- Random Hearts, like its ill-fated jetliner, simply never gets off the ground. In the process a wonderful supporting cast, including Charles Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Guilfoyle, Peter Coyote, and Pollack himself -- one of the few directors who’s also a decent actor, having recently assayed a small but memorable role in Eyes Wide Shut -- goes largely unused. The only thing that kept me interested for more than a minute was playing Spot the Earring, since Ford appears to be wearing in one lobe a stud that’s so tiny I couldn’t be sure if it was really there or if my brain was just trying to help me out by finding something to do in the two-and-a-quarter hours when Kristin Scott Thomas wasn’t showing off her parents’ excellent genes and the obvious talent of her personal trainer. D+
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