05.16.08

I Love You to Death

Posted in comedy, reviews at 10:18 pm by FilmFemme

Kevin Kline has made a career out of playing charming motherfuckers.  A lucrative, funny, compelling but somehow detestable career.

It started with Sophie’s Choice, really, when he played Nathan Landau: a passionate, accented, intellectual, sweaty, animalistic, violent, volatile, charming motherfucker who had an unyielding grasp on Meryl Streep’s Sophie. 

Similar characters would follow in The Big Chill, A Fish Called Wanda and then — tonight’s choice — I Love You to Death.

In this movie, Kline plays Joey Boca, an Italian immigrant living in Seattle (for some reason) and running a pizza joint with his wife Rosalie (Tracey Ullman).  Rosalie is a devoted wife, and despite warnings from her mother (Joan Plowright) and the pizza parlor employee who pines for her, Devo (River Phoenix) that Joey is cheating on her.  In denial or just blissfully naive, Rosalie refuses to believe he is a philanderer until one day, she is at the library in a heinously awesome zebra sweatshirt and catches him feeling up another woman in the stacks.  Rosalie makes her decision then and there: Joey must die.

What follow is a series of MISHAPS that leave Joey at various points scared, wounded, bleeding and sleepy, but not dead. 

Kevin Kline is really hilarious as the philanderer.  I love that the first act includes a scene of him picking up Phoebe Cates at a bar with some cheesy lines that the real Phoebe Cates surely wouldn’t fall for.  It’s funny, I didn’t feel that much kind of electric chemistry between them — but maybe because there was already a certain comfort level.  I also didn’t believe the ass shot was really Phoebe Cates.  Though I hope it was because it was a really nice ass.

Anyway.

River Phoenix is also great as the sweet pizza boy who is in love with Rosalie.  There was a little part where it seemed like he was going to get together with Heather Graham, but that never panned out for some reason.  I guess because he got held up with Rosalie’s schemes (he had to hire William Hurt and Keanu Reeves to shoot Joey).  Funny and endearing without being really great.  Ultimately sweet and you want to watch it again even though you know you probably shouldn’t because you have better things to do with your time.  Kind of, just, a charming motherfucker.

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