Playing by Heart

 

Playing by Heart 1998

• Director: Willard Carroll
• Based on book: no
• Cast: Gillian Anderson, Ellen Burstyn, Sean Connery, Anthony Edwards, Angelina Jolie, Dennis Quaid, April Grace, Patricia Clarkson, Gena Rowlands, Madeleine Stowe, Michael Emerson, Jon Stewart, Ryan Phillippe
• Personal “oh yeah him/her” reaction, i.e. have seen this actor in:
• Gillian Anderson – UFO, The Fall, Robot Overlords, L’enfant en haut, The Last King of Scotland, Tristram Shandy, The X Files
• Ellen Burstyn - Walking across Egypt, Main Street, Interstellar, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Requiem for a Dream, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Last Picture Show
• Sean Connery – The Rock, In the Name of the Rose, The Time Bandits, Robin Hood, The Man Who Would Be King, James Bond
• Angelina Jolie- Maleficent, Beyond Borders, The Tourist, Wanted, Changeling, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Girl Interrupted
• Dennis Quaid - Smart People, The Words, American Dreamz, In Good Company, Day after Tomorrow, Far from Heaven, Postcards from the Edge, Great Balls of Fire, Enemy Mine
• April Grace – The Hunger Games, Fame, Fringe, I Am Legend, The Assassination of Richard Nixon
• Patricia Clarkson – Maze Runner etc, The Bookshop, Main Street, Learning to Drive, Shutter Island, Lars and the Real Girl Good Night and Good Luck, Six Feet Under, Dogville, Station Agent, Far from Heaven, The Green Mile
• Gena Rowlands - Paris je t’aime, Hysterical Blindness, Night on Earth, Light of Day, Gloria, Faces
• Madeleine Stowe – The 12 Monkeys, The Last of the Mohicans
• Michal Emerson - Lost
• Ryan Phillippe – Igby Goes Down, Crash, Gosford Park
• Kristin Wiig – The Martian, Paul, Flight of the Conchords
• Why? The cast
• Seen: 15 September 2022      

       Love, loneliness, illness, flirtation, husbands, wives, death, mothers, sons, listeners, talkers, guilt, secrets, denials, AIDS, new love, old love, loyalty, infidelity.

       A string of vignettes with a string of stars. Best is Jolie as a flighty, babbling cat-loving, club-hopper with a big heart, and Anderson as a lonely, stiff-upper-lip theatre director. Most annoying are Connery who is stoically cheerfully soon going to die of a brain tumour, and Burstyn who is already gearing up to her pathetic weepiness of later rolls.

       The others are somewhere in between, so it sort of averages out to average, but Jolie is worth 5* and raises the whole thing to

 3* of 5