Sunday, September 18, 2005
The Whole Wide World
After seeing all of the Sopranos and just finishing Curb Your Enthusiasm I was groping for something to add to the Netflix Queue. So I chose the 1996 movie The Whole Wide World — I don't even remember why.
Vincent D'Onofrio and Renée Zellweger play a pulp writer and his near-girlfriend in Texas in the 1930's. He has too much imagination, she has too little; he is over the top and she is contracted, sensible, strong. It is a set piece, except it really happened, down to the emotionally wrenching conclusion.
The movie is an actor's vehicle. This usually doesn't work, and even if it does, the exhibitionism implied by “vehicle” often limits the results. Somehow, this chick-flick movie manages to be more by not trying to be anything other than itself.
D'Onofrio is indeed just great. He looks like a young Orson Welles — he has tremendous range. Zellweger was wonderful, a match and perfect balance for D'Onofrio. There wasn't a moment, a blink, where they didn't fully inhabit their characters.
The questions the movie elicits are good questions because they speak to human relationships and the reaching out for connection and love that is part of our nature; the effort to cross the no-man's-land of personal idiosyncrasy, of built in limitation and understand and relate to another difficult human being, which, last time I checked, are pretty much the only types available.
Whether pulp writer Robert E. Howard was bipolar, or teacher Novalyne Price was too withheld and conventional; whether it was the wrong time for them to have met, or a too heavy burden for a son with a mother dying of tuberculosis to form a significant relationship; whether Howard wanted to be or could be more than a pulp writer, or Novalyne couldn't overcome the strictures of her nature — these are all questions you want a movie to elicit — they speak to the ambiguities of our lives.