Love Affair
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In LOVE AFFAIR, producer-star Warren Beatty tries hard to recreate the glow of Golden Age Hollywood romances; ironically, however, this remake of Leo McCarey's 1939 LOVE AFFAIR (and McCarey's own 1957 remake, AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER), succeeds best when it is least faithful to the original story. Beatty plays Mike Gambril, a LA football star-turned-television broadcaster, who meets Terry McKay (Annette Bening), an aspiring singer, on a plane trip to Australia. When their plane makes an emergency landing in the South Pacific, Mike, Terry, and the other passengers are forced to board a Russian cruise ship heading for Tahiti. During the trip, Mike, who is engaged to a fellow TV anchor (Kate Capshaw), tries to seduce Terry, who is engaged to a wealthy financier (Pierce Brosnan). Terry resists Mike's advances, but is charmed by his Aunt Ginny (Katharine Hepburn), whom they visit when they reach Tahiti. During their return to New York, Mike and Terry have a brief, torrid romance. Before parting, they agree to meet on top of the Empire State Building in three months. Back in New York, Mike gives up his high-profile career on TV to become a college football coach and a painter, while Terry takes a job teaching music to school children in Harlem. After splitting up with Ken, Terry goes to meet Mike for their appointed rendezvous, but she's hit by a car on the way and lands in the hospital. Mike, meanwhile, waits in the rain atop the Empire State Building; when Terry doesn't show up, he thinks she changed her mind. Terry, now crippled, refuses to contact Mike during her prolonged recovery. Meanwhile, Ginny dies, and Mike travels back to Tahiti to mourn his beloved aunt. When Mike returns to New York, he spots Terry at a concert, but remains unaware that she can no longer walk. He finds out where she lives and visits her apartment on Christmas Day to give her a gift--his aunt's shawl. Terry tries to conceal the truth about her paralysis, but Mike realizes what has happened, and the two reunite to continue their love affair. After the success of SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (1993), which inscribed AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER into its plot, "Hollywood's Royal Couple" must have assumed the time was right to remake one of Hollywood's most famous tearjerkers. But the result, a rather tepid affair, failed to score with either audiences or critics. Beatty gambles, and loses, by inviting comparisons of himself to Charles Boyer (LOVE AFFAIR) and Cary Grant (AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER), particularly since he gives a surprisingly tentative performance as an aged Lothario reformed by love. His attempts to recapture the boyish charm of his younger days are undercut both by his movie-star poses and by conspicuous soft-focus photography that fails to disguise his age (57). (Unavoidably, the film refers to Beatty's own notorious sexual past and recent domestication, but--unlike Hal Ashby's trenchantly observed SHAMPOO--has remarkably little to say about the star or his carefully constructed image.) By contrast, Bening succeeds in a more challenging part. Although her "musical" moments are more contrived that many of the plot twists, Bening is tough and funny in the first half of the film, and convincingly masochistic in the second half. Beatty hired some superb talents to remake LOVE AFFAIR, but many of them are dragged down by director Glenn Gordon Caron's velvety kitsch style: Ennio Morricone's score sounds like his themes for WHITE DOG (1982) and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984) reprocessed as elevator music; the highly regarded cinematographer, Conrad Hall, poorly captures the late Ferdinando Scarfiotti's dark, lavish production design; and the supporting actors have little to do (although Garry Shandling makes a surprisingly welcome appearance as Mike's agent, and Katharine Hepburn, although clumsily used, is always welcome). Otherwise, LOVE AFFAIR works best when it deviates from the original plot and characters. The early scenes on the plane and Russian cruise ship, for example, are appropriately light and playful. The melodramatic second half of the movie, however, so slavishly imitates the first Delmer Daves-Donald Ogden Stewart screenplay that it only reminds viewers of how much better it all used to be. (Sexual situations, profanity.)