Playing by Heart . Tucson Weekly . 01-25-99

Playing by Heart

DIRECTED BY: Willard Carroll

REVIEWED: 01-25-99

Going to the movies is, to some extent, a way to rent some feelings for 110 minutes. With action films, you get exactly what you pay for, and all the feelings are returned, intact, when the credits roll. Other films, like "feel-good" movies, sometimes leave an audience buoyed for a few hours or even the rest of the day. Then there are the deeply disturbing movies--films like Happiness, Eraserhead, or the almost impossibly painful Happy Games--that can leave a viewer sickened and edgy for days or weeks. If you pro-rate your $7.50 admission fee over the time it takes to recover from one of these films, they wind up being your best emotion-rental value, but they often involve getting far more than you bargained for. Thus, the best mid-range value in feelings for sale is probably the tear-jerker, as it has a very strong pay-out during the time it's being watched, and then, if well done, produces a pleasant, post-cathartic feeling as the audience departs for the parking lot. With that in mind, Playing by Heart is well worth the money. A five-hanky film, it's only rarely maudlin, and is well written and well paced. A Robert Altman-style narrative weaves together the romantic tribulations of three sisters (Gillian Anderson, Angelina Jolie and Madeleine Stowe) and their mother and father (Gena Rowlands and Sean Connery) over the course of a series of evenings in Los Angeles. While all the actors do smashingly well (except for Ryan Phillippe, who's so beautiful that he's got an excuse for just standing around and pouting), there are stand-out performances by Jolie as a manic hipster with great fashion sense, and Dennis Quaid as a depressed guy who pretends to be a lot of different depressed guys. Also starring Ellen Burstyn, Jay Mohr, Anthony Edwards and Nastassja Kinski, with cinematography by the over-talented Vilmos Zsigmond (Deer Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies).

--DiGiovanna

Interviews
Playing by Heart

Capsule Reviews
Playing by Heart
Playing by Heart
Playing By Heart

Film Vault Suggested Links
The Winter Guest
The Whole Wide World
The Lovers on the Bridge

Rate this Film
If you don't want to vote on a film yet, and would like to know how others voted, leave the rating selection as "Vote Here" and then click the Cast Vote button.