Bob Swaim has attempted again to append a footnote beneath Webster's definition of "romantic love," to pencil some scholia in the margin, perhaps to stretch a disputed border or annex some unclaimed territory -- in specific, to define love around some not very lovable characters, and under not very favorable conditions. He has attempted to do this, as in La Balance and Half Moon Street, in the thriller genre, which no doubt helps him to get his projects off the ground in the first place, and which gives him plenty of free access to unlovable characters and unfriendly conditions, and which infuses the climate of romance with those shadows of doubt, shades of gray, smudges of outright grime, that so often must pass as adultness in American movies. This is a James M. Cain storyline located in F. Scott Fitzgerald's milieu. Avarice, envy, sloth, lust, deceit, murder, betrayal -- that whole banquet, but served up in an elegant table-setting of the Hamptons in summertime, yacht races, garden parties, formal-dress balls. Yet for all the ominous signposts of nouveau film noir -- the un-American class consciousness, the desecration of human life and sanctification of greenbacks -- there is in this movie, as in Swaim's earlier ones, a vaulting optimism about human possibilities, the potential for change and growth and surprise, that's authentically romantic -- even in the capital "R" and 19th-century sense. The case for optimism isn't totally convincing: the odds-against are pretty steep. But that doesn't make it any the less appealing. With Rob Lowe, Meg Tilly, Kim Cattrall, and Doug Savant. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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