She's So Lovely

She's So Lovely is a treasure; a relief from the blandness of what has been passing for entertainment of late; a romance from the other side of the block, where there isn't an advertising executive or a fashion magazine editor in sight.

Written by film legend John Cassavetes ten years ago and directed by his son Nick, She's So Lovely is about insistent and persistent love, - and madness.

Sean Penn won Best Actor at Cannes this year for his performance in this film, but for my money his real life wife Robin Wright Penn is the real star of this bitter, down at heal romance.

Maureen (Robin Wright Penn) is all hips and elbows as She's So Lovely begins, strung out on fags and booze, pregnant, and struggling to work a payphone in her dump of a block of flats.

She's trying to find Eddie (Sean Penn) who's gone missing for a few days.

They tend to hang out in a local dingy bar where they hold a ramshackle court with their mates, played with a downbeat edgyness by Harry Dean Stanton and Debi Mazar.

Eddie turns up but not before Maureen cops a bashing from a neighbour (James Gandolfini). Eddie's a tough guy, "with a gun" and all hell breaks loose.

A decade later Maureen has remarried to Joey (John Travolta), has three children and lives in a middle class suburb. Eddie arrives and makes his claim.

Will Maureen jump and in what direction? What might their ten year old daughter (Kelsey Mulrooney) do? How will Joey react?

She's So Lovely doesn't fully answer all of these questions, just as those sort of salient dilemmas are never completely resolved in real life. We're complicated. We never know all of the answers. Neat answers are the stuff of Hollywood, not real life.

But a truly interesting script like this one is likely to throw us the most intelligent advice from the most unlikely sources.