Independent on Sunday, UK
December 10, 2000
By David Thomson

Paul Schrader's latest went straight to TV, yet he remains one of America's boldest directors

This is the season when film critics grow grinchy, wondering how to find 10 pictures for annual round-ups. So it's vexing to see one of our most interesting directors, Paul Schrader, delivering a film that cannot quite count. First, Mike Hodges' Croupier was disqualified from the Oscars because it had played on television. Now Schrader's Forever Mine has had its world debut on American TV because the company that made it went bust, their assets sold off to cable for quick money.

I want to be careful describing Forever Mine, for it has an old-fashioned allegiance to fairy-tale narrative. The film begins in 1987, on a plane flying from Miami to New York. One first-class passenger is Maresca (Joseph Fiennes), a still, self-possessed Cuban with a crippled arm and a face seemingly scraped away on that side of his body. As he flies, he dreams, and we gather how he lost his looks.

In 1973, he was a cabana boy at a pink palace of a hotel on Miami Beach. His name then was Alan, and he was a romantic kid. One day he saw a blonde woman in a white swimsuit emerge from the sea, and he fell in love. It is a film that believes in such epiphanies, and the colour scheme, the lush music, the wide screen and the lavish camera movements all contribute to the spacey rapture. The woman, Ella (Gretchen Mol), is recently married to Mark (Ray Liotta), a racketeer-politician. But she cannot resist the adoration Alan expresses for her.

They have illicit nights together, their bodies sprawled across the wide screen. But Ella is a little Catholic, so she needs to confess. Mark's reaction is brutal: he tries to frame Alan on a drug charge, and then he shoots and disfigures him. Thus it is a Monte Cristo-like revenge when, 14 years later, Alan is back as Maresca, so rich and powerful he may be able to save Mark from the long prison sentence he has earned in racketeering. Let me step back from the story, for much as I admire the film, I'm not yet sure that everything works. In the 1987 section of the story, Ray Liotta has shorter hair; he seems plumper and more corrupt - most of which is just acting. Joseph Fiennes has dyed his hair from brown to black. He wears make-up on the bad side of his face, though it is not clear whether he is blind in that eye. He speaks with a Cuban accent. But it seems uncanny that Ella does not recognise him. She treasures Alan's being and image; they are imprinted on her soul. And Fiennes has a rare look, in part because his eyes are uncommonly close. So I'm not sure what her failure to recognise him means - except that Ella herself has changed in no way at all in the 14 years.

I think I know Schrader well enough to see such vagaries as signs of thought. He has an intellectual approach that leaves few loose ends. But is Ella "perfect" still because she remains young in Alan's mind? In which case, I wonder if the film would not have worked better if he had been blinded in the 1973 shooting - making him more sinister and vengeful, but detaching him from the mundane world.

Is Gretchen Mol up to the high charismatic demands of her role? Ella is a soul brought to life by Alan's attention and the warmth of his love. She should be nearly destroyed by his death: she could be ill, stricken, less inclined to look or trust what she sees. If only because I've seen her lately in another film, I thought of Nastassja Kinski, someone Schrader worked with and loved at the time of Cat People. A great beauty always, Kinski has grown into a fine actress, and I think she could have delivered the idea of a woman who has become a shadow of herself.

This is cavilling, the sort of argument only stimulated by challenging works. I'd also dispute how successfully its two dates (Watergate and Irangate) build a sense of a wicked America that needs love as rescue. But the film raises such prospects. Schrader is something of an outsider now. His film Affliction waited nearly two years to find a distributor. Forever Mine never had one. Yet who else recently has made films so good, and so different? Just as Affliction is hard, sparse and grim, Forever Mine is sub-tropical, balmy and full of hope. As yet, I have only seen the new film on TV, yet it is clearly a work of great plastic beauty that deserves a full screen. Equally, the music (from a wide range of sources) needs to be heard and felt emotionally.

Schrader now is 56 and well past the heady days when he wrote Taxi Driver and, as it seemed, half the pictures being made. He has made advances that seem hard for his ally, Martin Scorsese: journeys into style and fresh kinds of experience. So there have been several bold, personal films: Mishima, Patty Hearst, The Comfort of Strangers, Light Sleeper, Touch, Affliction and Forever Mine. Not one has been a hit, and Schrader now lives with the difficulty of getting projects made. Never mind. He is developing, changing, growing - all the things that are so rare in the middle-aged American film-maker.