From a Jim Harrison novel (with plenty of hunting rifles and a phantasmic wolf to prove it), a slice of American Gothic carved out of a farming community in upstate Michigan where the two middle-aged teachers in the two-room schoolhouse -- Dennis Hopper, adopting Dennis Weaver's limp from Gunsmoke, and Amy Irving -- have kept up an amorous "arrangement" from separate addresses for six years. Mr. Svenden's mother, and housemate, has cancer ("It's worse than having a baby every day") and not long to live. The school itself is scheduled to be closed down at the end of the semester. What will the future bring? Before we can find out, the present brings a new student to the school, a blonde sex kitten (Amy Locane, with her lasciviously lopsided smile) who takes a shine to the mature Mr. Svenden. Boarding her horse in his barn matches desire with opportunity: "I'm Lady Godiva!" Hopper is a good deal older than his explicitly proclaimed forty-seven (Julie Harris, the mother, would have had to be ten when she gave him birth), and his uninhibited strip-off with Irving (real-life wife of the director, Bruno Barreto) is of much more moment in the lives of the characters -- their first time with the lights on -- than in the careers of the actors. We've seen Hopper, at least, with his pants off before. But it is still a pleasure to see him, after so long a string of weirdos and psychos, in a more "normal" mode, a domesticated mode, an underplaying mode. It is something of a surprise, even, to see how well he can find his way back. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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