All They Need Is Love

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Willard Carroll is a cockeyed optimist. The writer-director of Playing by Heart thinks our dysfunctions are curable. Or at the very least transcendable. With a little help from the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, he bathes this radically unfashionable idea in a glow so romantic that even Los Angeles, where most of his multicharacter, multigenerational saga takes place, is transformed. The world capital of road rage is returned, in his vision, to something like the balmy prettiness of its prelapsarian prewar era.

This is no accident. It is something like a moral imperative for Carroll. He wants us to understand that a prescription compounded of kindness, patience, civility and a touch of irony can work wonders on anger and despair--even when their cause is mortality itself. For at the heart of Heart are two stories in which couples are obliged to confront death. In one of them, a mother (Ellen Burstyn) and a son who is dying of AIDS (Jay Mohr) try to bring their troubled relationship to a peaceful conclusion in the few days remaining to them. In the other, a long-married couple (Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands) are coping successfully with his incurable illness--until she finds evidence of a past betrayal that threatens to destroy the trust on which they have based their happy, privileged life.

These four are intended as exemplary figures. As we watch them struggling toward acceptance of harsh fates, we are encouraged to believe that everyone else in the film, whose bedevilments are merely romantic, can work things out as well. A colorful, often comic crew includes a woman (Gillian Anderson) so mistrustful of men that she keeps a mastiff to ward them off; a guy (Dennis Quaid) mysteriously given to alternately angry and self-pitying (but always noisy) rants in restaurants; a married woman (Madeleine Stowe) coldly addicted to a sexually stirring but loveless affair; a lonely young actress (Angelina Jolie) hiding neediness under a brassy surface. Most of them find someone willing to help still the insanities that Carroll regards as only temporary. Each comes to some understanding of his or her miseries and to a degree of hope for better times ahead.

Is there something a little too comfortable--and comforting--in the way this movie works out? Possibly so. On the other hand, its emotional range is extraordinarily generous, the conflicts it permits its unimprovable cast to explore are well beyond the call of their usual duties. And Carroll orchestrates the several variations on his redemptive theme expertly, ultimately resolving them all in a way that is both surprising and satisfying. With the bitter taste of movies like Todd Soldonz's Happiness--this film's dark double--still on our tongues, still all the rage, one has to wonder whether the audience for serious movies is still capable of suspending disbelief in the common decency and common sense of middle-class Americans, whether it is willing to try a little tenderness--if only as a relief from chic transgressiveness.

--By Richard Schickel