Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen by Maltin Leonard

Author:Maltin, Leonard [Maltin, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780061732348
Publisher: HARPER STUDIO
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

75. LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND

(1997)

Directed by Richard Kwietniowski

Screenplay by Richard Kwietniowski

Based on the novel by Gilbert Adair

Actors:

JOHN HURT

JASON PRIESTLEY

FIONA LOEWI

SHEILA HANCOCK

MAURY CHAYKIN

GAWN GRANGER

ELIZABETH QUINN

John Hurt is a character actor of exceptional skill, but he isn’t the kind of personality performer one would expect to see carrying a movie. That’s part of what makes Love and Death on Long Island so delightful: it offers Hurt a bravura role that fits him like a fine glove from Alfred Dunhill. Or, to put it another way, if you were casting the part of a dowdy British author/intellectual who lives alone with his books, barely interacting with the modern world, who would you cast in the part? My point precisely.

Giles De’Ath was once married; he’s now a widower, and a housekeeper tends to his basic needs. Left to his own devices, he’s fairly hopeless. One day he locks himself out of his house, so he decides to pass the time by going to a movie…but he can’t even do this right and winds up in the wrong auditorium. Instead of an adaptation of an E. M. Forster novel, he finds himself watching a silly teen comedy called Hot Pants College II. (He doesn’t even realize his mistake right away.) Just as he is about to leave, his eye falls on the film’s handsome star, Ronnie Bostock (played by a well-cast Jason Priestley), and he is transfixed. It is a transformative moment for De’Ath: he is overcome. He begins to obsess about the young heartthrob, acquiring fan magazines and even purchasing a TV set and a VCR in order to watch his other movies. (Among the titles: Skidmarks and Tex Mex.)

De’Ath has never experienced a feeling quite like this; he analyzes (and justifies) it in intellectual terms, but it is in fact a wholly emotional response. In due course he decides he must meet his idol in person. He flies across the Atlantic and makes his way to the Long Island town where he knows Ronnie lives.

Love and Death on Long Island is based on a book by film critic and novelist Gilbert Adair, and marks the feature-film debut of writer-director Richard Kwietniowski. It is a film of wit, nuance, and constant surprise that manages to be just believable enough to work. Hurt makes the leading character arch, amusing, vulnerable, and utterly human. Priestley does a good job as the hunk, and such reliable actors as Sheila Hancock and Maury Chaykin fill in the supporting cast, but this is John Hurt’s showcase and he makes every moment count.

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