No one could accuse director Nick Cassavetes of reluctance to trade on his father's name. His first film, Unhook the Stars, was a vehicle for John's widow and frequent star, Gena Rowlands. And this, his second, comes from an unproduced screenplay by John (with a small part for Gena as well). It naturally lacks the repertory-company intimacy it would have had if John and Gena and, say, Ben Gazzara had brought it to life, twenty years earlier, in place of Sean Penn and Robin Wright (who act very, very hard as a couple of gutter sweethearts) and John Travolta (very comfy as the coarse suburbanite who comes between them during Penn's ten-year sabbatical in the nuthouse). It isn't easy to imagine that even the older trio, however, could have brought the thing much closer to Real Life: a wobbly, would-be seriocomedy of mad love, demoted in the process to mere daffy love. With Harry Dean Stanton, Debi Mazar, James Gandolfini. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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