Playing by Heart

This is one of those movies that you've never heard of, but it has an all-star cast. With names like Angelina Jolie, Sean Connery, Gillian Anderson, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Anthony Edwards, and Ryan Phillipe, you'd think this would be a pretty good movie. And it certainly had an intriguing format. The film follows pairs of people as they struggle with love -- falling into love, falling out of love, regaining love, and remembering why they loved each other in the first place. Each pair has their own obstacles, but they overcome those problems in the end to discover (or rediscover) love. That sounds like a horrifically sappy and boring premise, but the movie isn't that bad. Each story is very different -- one couple has been married for years; one pair is a mother and her dying son; one couple involves an alcoholic woman and man with HIV; still another involves a priest and an adulterous woman. And it's interesting to try to figure out how they are all related.

However, after winding a twisted tale, the connection proves overly simplistic, and I didn't quite know what message the movie was trying to get across. Love conquers all? Clearly no, since most of the movie talked about how terrible relationships could be. Is the message that love hurts? No, because most of them end up happily attached. I think the writer of this film had a great idea to weave several narratives into one movie, but ran out of ideas when it came time to put it together. And since there were five different story lines, none of them was developed enough to stand on its own. For that reason, the movie misses the mark on almost all levels. It held my interest for a while, especially when Jon Stewart was dating Dana Scully -- I never thought I'd see that. But ultimately Playing by Heart wasn't quite clever enough.
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