Christian Slater by Nigel Goodall

Author:Nigel Goodall [Nigel Goodall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782198932
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Hard Time

Christian’s last mainstream movie, Bed of Roses, was regarded in many quarters as being something of an odd movie – especially for Christian, who film critic Roger Ebert considered was far better as ‘a cool, laconic outsider than as a dreamer with a song in his heart’. Ebert was unconvinced by Christian’s performance in the movie, simply because ‘the story lays it on so thick, he was simply buried by the material’.

In this, Ebert is probably right, but Christian might also have suspected that the biggest downfall about the film was him. As bad as the critical reception was, Bed of Roses stumbled even harder when it met its first audience. It opened in January 1996, just one month ahead of Christian’s first action flick, and most agreed with Ebert that the film, although billed as a romantic comedy, generally had ‘nothing funny about it’. And, like Ebert, most thought that Christian so often plays a smart-alec that it’s confusing to see him playing a straight-shooting, vulnerable man who doesn’t want to blow his chance at love. As the San Francisco Examiner’s movie critic, Barbara Shulgasser, correctly noted, ‘You keep expecting him to say, “Just kidding. I don’t really love you.”’

One can’t help but wonder why there was so much critical objection to Christian’s performance. When one considers that in the modern fairy tale Untamed Heart he played a strange, enchanted orphan boy who maybe, just possibly, had the heart of a baboon beating inside his chest, a role for which he was fawned over, it’s difficult to see why people then took such exception to his part in Bed of Roses. He was, after all, playing a similarly poetic role. Perhaps the problem was that both audiences and critics weren’t sure whether they were supposed to view the movie as a romantic fable.

The story revolves around a man named Lewis Farrell (Christian), a former stock trader with a heart of pure gold who gave up the rat race after the death of his wife and child and now operates an obscure little florist shop in New York so that he can watch the joyous expressions on the faces of his customers when he delivers flowers to them. But that’s not all: he also has the peculiar habit of sitting in with the grade-schoolers for story hour at the local public library and sending lavish floral arrangements to perfect strangers.

Written by first-time writer and director Michael Goldenberg, the film begins with just such a delivery. While walking the streets one night, Lewis looks up into the window of an apartment building just in time to catch Lisa (Mary Stuart Masterson) at her lowest ebb, sobbing into the curtains after a particularly intense day during which, at the very moment she landed her biggest professional deal, she was informed that her foster father had passed away. And, if that wasn’t enough, her pet goldfish had also died.

For some reason, Lewis decides to follow her to work, find out her name and address, and send her a glorious bouquet of flowers, without a card.

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