Reviewed by Russell Baillie
RANDOM HEARTS
* *
Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas
Director: Sydney Pollack
Rating: M
Random Hearts certainly doesn't lack for turmoil. It's got a plane crash, ensuing grief, a discovery of marital infidelity, a cop-on-cop investigation, Washington political scandal and a side trip to Miami. A lot to get
through. So it's little wonder it runs a little long at some 130 minutes.
Trouble is, for all that activity and its potential old-school Hollywood class - pairing Ford and Scott Thomas under the direction of veteran Pollack - it remains remote, uninvolving, ponderous and an often puzzling movie.
All of which means you start to ponder the trivial - like Ford's haircut (a disaster site second only to the movie's crashed airliner) and his ear stud. But maybe that's what tough-but-sensitive Washington Internal Affairs detective sergeants with names like Dutch Van Den Broeck are wearing this year.
We find Dutch apparently happily married, living in a leafy suburb. One day his wife departs on an urgent business trip. Only she dies in a plane crash, as does the man who had booked the seat next to her as her husband.
He's really the spouse of congresswoman Kay Chandler (Scott Thomas).
The survivors meet after Dutch insists on uncovering everything he can about his wife's long affair with Chandler's husband.
Initially, she wants to leave well alone, wary of the political ramifications and the effect on her daughter.
But Dutch bullies her with lines like: "What's the last thing you remember about your husband you know is true?" So off they go, visiting the scenes of the tryst, their mixed emotions inevitably finding physical release with each other.
Meanwhile, in a rather unnecessary subplot, Dutch is trying to finger a ring of cops on the take.
Trouble is, how much happens is in inverse proportion to how much it engages - the performances are restrained to the point of making you wish they'd all get just a little more upset.
And curiously, Ford's stoic character spends the entire movie grappling with his wife's betrayal while Scott Thomas' only seems to ponder why she is oddly attracted to the gruff cop with the bad 'do.
The pair's age-gap screen chemistry can't get this one up to room temperature either.
A tale of two people who find their lives upended in the worst possible way about who you end up caring not a jot - drama-wise, that's got to be a failure.
