Dallas's biggest JFK fan, fashioning her clothes after Jackie's (though her hair after Marilyn's: does she know something subliminally?), sets off on the Greyhound, against her husband's express wishes, to attend the Presidential funeral in Washington. An uncontrollable motormouth with no concept of privacy, she takes an interest in her nearest fellow traveller, a laconic black man (Dennis Haysbert, with an almost Paul Robeson-esque or an at least Brock Peters-esque basso reverberance) in the company of a seemingly mute little girl. She soon takes too much interest in him, unwittingly setting the FBI onto him at a stopover, and repentantly joining him and the little girl on the lam: sort of a racial Thelma and Louise, with de rigueur scenes of three rednecks ganging up against a lone black, and the wild-eyed husband pulling a pistol from his suitcase in the climactic confrontation -- nothing to raise the spectator's upper eyelids. The heroine's innocent faith in the Kennedys, the government, the United States of America, might be moderately touching ("I thought that the Negroes liked President Kennedy"), except that Michelle Pfeiffer lays on the touchingness with a repellently heavy hand (brassy Southern accent; stiff, quick, busybody movements). The movie overall is rather less heavy-handed, a gently manipulative, smoothly professional, blandly impersonal piece of social consciousness. It can do no worse than attract the self-congratulator. Directed by Jonathan Kaplan. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.