Don't Be Fooled

THE BEST MOMENT in Robert Altman's film version of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love comes when the heartsick cowboy Eddie pops a quarter in a motel room Magic Fingers machine. Sprawled out on an unmade queen-size bed, dressed in faded jeans and a trailworn denim jacket, and nursing a tin of day-old Skoal and a bottle of worm-blessed Mexican tequila, Shepard rides the bed like a rundown rodeo star, and when he throws his girl May a particularly wistful smile, all the humor and pathos of Shepard's writing comes shining clean through.

If Fool For Love isn't a great film, it's certainly a wonderful one. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese's unsung After Hours, no finer American film was released in the course of the 1985 year.

The movie is more innocuous than its plot would suggest.

Eddie (Sam Shephard) loves May (Kim Basinger), and May, despite her habit of kicking Eddie in the crotch, loves him in return. But it seems Eddie's been horsing around with a pistol-packing millionaire countess, while May's been seeing a dough-faced lawn maintenance man (Randy Quaid). The whole seedy business is overseen by an alcoholic desert rat (Harry Dean Stanton) who may or may not be May and Eddie's father, who may or may not have driven his wife to suicide, and who may or may not be guilty of bigamy. Ahem.

Now pepper this psycho-sexual stew with a generous dose of True West mythos (lassos, gunracks, motel notells), an ensemble cast as good as they get, honkytonk lovesongs and sets designed by Levi-Strauss, and you've got yourself a bowl of three-alarm movie-making.

Director Altman has given the claustrophobic tension of Shepard's stageplay breadth and richness without upsetting the mood. The story unfolds in a disheveled motel room, a fenced-in playground, a formica dinerette. The action shifts comfortably from the present to the past, the comic to the tragic, the real to the imagined. And the characters, both skillfully drawn and portrayed, swing with lightning quickness from the pathetic to the courageous, from the cruel to the ridiculous.

Shepard is a terrific Eddie, all slurred words and crooked teeth. He has a cocky, lanky body language, like a scarecrow loosed on a three-day drunk. Basinger is better, fiesty and dignified and lovely to watch. The scene in which she washes herself is unspeakably beautiful. Quaid is fine as the boyfriend, with a charm as harmless and crooked as his bowtie. And Harry Dean Stanton gives another superlative performance. He ranks with Robert Duvall as our finest character actor.

FOOL FOR LOVE falters only in its pacing, which is perhaps too slow in starting, too quick in its resolution. The first half hour of the film has a staggered, disjointed rhythm to it, and the climax is perhaps too abrupt and suddenly tragic. Though Shepard's plays are notorious for their refusal to resolve themselves, what distinguishes him as our most audacious playwright translates less gracefully on the screen.

But Altman, whose classic Nashville had an equally jarring conclusion, seems right at home in Shepard's irresolute world. It is his prerogative to leave things open-ended, and ours to question the repercussions of his choice. Altman's version of Shepard's play is certainly more than filmed theatre. The world he gives us is tangible and authentic, and no film in recent memory has as meticulous a look. Eddie's truck is a masterpiece of mud and birdcrap, like a Jackson Pollack custom-designed Chevy. May's motel room is a working model for entropy, strewn with dirty underwear and rumpled blouses. And Eddie's adolescent home boasts a velvet painting of John F. Kennedy, while the ghost-daughter of May's own past bounces behind her on a motel bed, and hugs her, crying, in the foreground of a rusted swingset.

Altman does an equally amazing job of translating Shepard's fascination with the role of myth. In Fool For Love, and other Shepard dramas, characters provide conflicting versions of the past, leaving the audience to sift through an ash-heap of half-truths and seeming contradictions. Altman, ingeniously, lets the camera paint the past, while the characters consciously or unconsciously falsify it. In one scene, May describes her mother holding her hand so hard she fears her bones might crack. The camera shows mother and daughter walking at a distance. Eddie describes the night he and his father stroll silently to a liquor store and share a bottle of whiskey. The camera shows the father walking and talking with his arm around his son, not bothering to offer him a bit of the liquor.

Fool For Love is an important film for a number of reasons. It establishes Shepard as one of our finest screen-writers, and confirms the staying power of Altman, who has always been one of our most solid directors. Shepard's collaboration with Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas, and now his work with Altman, hints at a possible Shepard film canon. Coppola doing Buried Child? Kurosawa's A Lie of the Mind? Kubrick's Curse of the Starving Class? A Lucasfilm version of The Tooth of Crime? The mind reels.

But while prospects look bright for a Shepard-filled future treat yourself in the interim to Altman's Fool For Love. It's better than tequila, or Barbara Mandrell, or Tex-Mex chili, or a pocketful of quarters and a virgin Magic Fingers. And despite Harvard Square Theatre's highway-robbery $5 ticket price, you'd be an ever-lovin' fool for missing it.