Playing By Heart

There is more than enough class on that cast list to delude you into thinking that Playing By Heart would be a decent flick at the very least, but for whatever reason, writer/director Willard Carroll's ambitious debut suffers from a total absence of magic.

Something like This Year's Love transplanted to LA, with the saccharine/sentimentality factor multiplied by about a thousand, the film is an over-stretched attempt to document the intertwining lives of 11 rather uninteresting punters as they search for love and connection etc. etc. To assemble a cast of this calibre and come up with so nondescript a movie is no mean feat, but our friend Willard Carroll has pulled it off effortlessly.

The most satisfying scenes feature Sean Connery and the ever-excellent Gena Rowlands as a married couple of four decades' standing who trade extremely sharp conversational barbs back and forth, and have more life and spark about them than the rest of the characters put together.

The acting is varied in quality, but most of it is okay: the biggest problem with Playing By Heart is its vastly over-ambitious scope, its attempt to credibly condense the complexities of 11 lives into two hours of entertainment.

Playing By Heart isn't a badly-written film by any manner of means, and there is just about enough class to save it from being a complete disaster, but it serves as a dispiriting example of Hollywood's total incapacity to make Films About Love without lapsing into misty-eyed sentimental mush. One for rainy-day video viewing with a vat of chocolate ice-cream perhaps, but hardly worth the hassle of a visit to the flicks.