Heartsick

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

After many years of study and practice, Harrison Ford has just about mastered the art of talking without moving his lips. Kristin Scott Thomas is newer at the game of masking her emotions, but chilly elegance has achieved near total mastery over the sexiness she exuded in The English Patient.

And that's pretty much all the news from Random Hearts, a grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal. Ford is a Washington detective named Dutch Van Den Broeck; Scott Thomas is a Congresswoman named Kay Chandler. Both their spouses are killed in a plane crash, and he suspects--his obsessive nature and the habits of his profession driving him on--that they were lovers. She perhaps agrees, but prefers denial and resumption of her re-election campaign.

This is very sensible of her, especially in light of Dutch's maniacal pursuit of all the dreary details of the adulterous back story. This investigation of the painfully obvious is glum and endless and appears to have been designed by writer Kurt Luedtke (working from a Warren Adler novel) to show Dutch in the worst possible light. Apparently, though, Kay has a taste for sullen plodders. No other explanation is offered for her decision to enter into a brief, nervous affair with Dutch.

What director Sydney Pollack, one of the movies' great romantics (Tootsie, Out of Africa), saw in this lugubrious tale is even harder to imagine. There's no heat, wit or glamour in his telling of it. The movie is like bad gossip: a scandalous premise that comes to no interesting--or even amusingly ironic--point.

--By Richard Schickel