Love Affair (1994)

Starring: Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Katherine Hepburn, Garry Shandling, Chloe Webb, Pierce Brosnan

First, the Lowdown: A man and a woman, who are engaged to other people, fall in love after their plane crashes. Hilarity ensues.

Mike Gambil is a former NFL-star turned burnt-out celebrity sports announcer with a penchant for philandering who is currently engaged to talk show sensation, Lynn Weaver. While on a trip to Sydney, Mike meets Terry McKay, an interior designer who is engaged to venture capitalist, Ken Allen. Mike and Terry start flirting on and off during their flight, which has to make an unexpected landing on a tropical atoll.

Fortunately, a Russian liner picks up the castaway passengers and ferries them to Hawaii via Tahiti. Unfortunately, it’s a trip that will take two days by boat. Mike and Terry continue to flirt on and off, each time getting closer and closer. The boat makes a stopover at an island that by lucky coincident also happens to be where Mike’s elderly Aunt Ginny lives. Ginny confides to Terry that she thinks Mike’s dalliances are a false façade until he meets the right one. Returning to the boat, Terry decides not to take a short plane that would get her home quicker, but instead wants to spend the remainder of the trip with Mike. On the last day, they agree to meet each other at the Empire State Building in three months.

Confession time first, I have yet to see the original Love Affair, this just came to me sooner in my movie queue. Now that’s out of the way…

Piece of advice, Hollywood, if you want to make a dramatic romance, don’t have Garry Shandling be in your first scene. I’m not saying you can’t have him in your movie, just don’t have him in the first scene. Warren Beatty is a fine actor, except when he tries playing himself – then he just comes off as a caricature of himself. This movie has not aged at all well (there’s a joke about the Ray Charles’s Diet Coke commercials in it) - and is it just me, or do a lot of movies from the mid-90’s look like they’ve been shot by Rembrandt? Everything just looks so muddled and brown. (Except the scenes in Tahiti – during those I kept expecting to see the cast from Lost.)

Beatty and Bening do have a bit of chemistry that shows on camera, but then their dialogue switches from “nervous and witty” to “leadenly romantic”. I’m thinking Beatty watched too much Lifetime network when he was writing the treatment for this, because the characters of Mike and Terry will be chatting along swimmingly, only to have the “romantic” dialogue fall embarrassingly awkward in the room – like a fart in a church.

Love Affair also marks Katherine Hepburn’s final film appearance. She’s supposed to be a witty and eccentric aunt who lives out in the tropics. But instead of her age giving her character, it makes you feel like the producers have exploited a famous old person to make a buck. Hepburn looks incredibly tired during her scene, and also a bit put off. (To make her seem “spunky” she even drops the F-bomb, but does it in such a politely embarrassed tone, it makes me wonder how much she was pressured to say it.)

Line of the movie: “The trick isn’t getting what you want, my dear, it’s wanting it after you get it.”

Two and a half stars. I work hard for the money, so you better treat me right.