Willard Carroll | Playing by Heart / 1998

an alternate world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willard Carroll (screenwriter and director) Playing by Heart / 1998

 

Director Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart might easily be described as the alternate universe of Todd Solondz’ Happiness. Instead of the inability to demonstrate a morally responsible love and experiencing a life of despair, of loneliness and failure, Carroll’s version of Chekov’s Three Sisters is a romantic fantasy of love’s possibilities and the utter success of nearly everyone in the film to achieve an almost fairy-tale-like relationship.

     If at first the story of the sisters appears to be dour, by the time the movie is finished, all have struggled through the thicket of despair and confusion to discover their desires. There is Gracie (Madeleine Stowe) married to Hugh (Dennis Quaid), whose marriage inexplicably has lost it’s meaning for her, mostly because she is convinced that Hugh has utterly no imagination; but it appears to be Gracie who has lost the ability to cry—the emotion she evokes when she is truly happy—and she has taken on a lover, Roger (Anthony Edwards), a liberal-minded minister (we are never told of what denomination) who ultimately discovers that he is still in love with his wife and children.        

     If her character is rather boorish, (she is given to repeating British phrases such as “daggered”), Quaid (whom I have almost always enjoyed as an actor) gives the performance of a life, having signed up for an improvisational acting class, where he is asked to seek out in real life people and perform before them a dramatic monologue. We watch him become a husband who, in a hurry to get home to his family, runs a red light, and crashes into his wife’s car with children aboard, killing them all. Next up he successfully moves a lonely woman with his tale of being a TV executive whose low ratings gets him fired. But the best of all is played out in a gay bar with the wonderful comedian Alec Mapa as Lana, a drag figure who begins their conversation with the lines: I’m Lana…28 years old, and that’s in real years, not Heather Locklear years. I’m also a drag queen.” Hugh responds, “Well I guess I could figure that out,” Mapa responding, “Well, I just didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding. This ain’t no disco, and I don’t want no Crying Game confusion…,” a reference to Neil Jordon’s film of 1992, which I discuss elsewhere in these pages.

      Hugh goes on to tell an old story with a “newish twist” about how he, a married man, has fallen in love with Sam, his wife’s younger brother. And after what appears to be a long story—we only get bits and pieces—Lana, a character who is well-schooled in fantasy, responds: “Can I tell you something…I’ve had a great time with you darlin’, right entertaining it was. But sweetie, who the fuck to you think you’re kiddin’? …Lana may be three sheets to the proverbial wind, but I don’t believe a word out of your pretty straight-assed mouth.”

           The second sister, Meredith (Gillian Anderson), a theatre director, has been burned several times in the past regarding men, and is highly leery of developing new relationships. She has been particularly devastated by discovering the boy next door who she married, Mark (Jay Mohr), was gay, even though they have remained friends. Yet against her desires and a great many walls she quickly raises to keep him away, she quickly falls in love with the somewhat explicably insistent architect Trent (a likeable Jon Stewart) who convinces her to invite him to dinner, and when that falls apart, invites her to his own fabulous home for Chinese carry-in. Finally, after returning to her place to care for her huge dog Barley, they find themselves in bed and in love.  

     In one of the most moving of the many scenarios Carroll takes us through is about Meredith’s former husband, Mark, now dying of AIDS, whose lover died previously, apparently living in New York City. He is visited by his loving mother Mildred (a role beautifully performed by one of the best and underrated actors in Hollywood, Ellen Burstyn). Together they reveal a great many secrets that neither knew about one another, the first being obviously something Mildred has had to come to terms with before her travels from California to see her son, that he is gay and been in a marriage-like relationship with another man. She, in turn, reveals that she never loved her husband, the marriage forced upon her like so many of her age, by expectations and motherly encouragement. The husband, ironically, was an undertaker. Together they forge a new relationship neither son nor mother might have imagined in the past before Mark dies in the last third of the film.     

     The third sister, Joan (Angelina Jolie), the youngest, is a regular club-attendee of the Mayan Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. In great public display, she is breaking up with her current boyfriend, as they argue over the pay phone upon who gets what of the pieces of their past life. It is at the Mayan that she also meets pretty boy Keenan (Ryan Phillippe), who becomes clearly fascinated by her endless takes on the world around her, but resists even dating, finally showing up to a movie where she has told him she’d be attending. But even after that evening together, he still keeps his distance, she finally coming to recognize that there seems to be no possible way to break down the barriers he has built against all friends, until he finally admits that his previous lover has had sex with others who shared needles, thus leaving him with one final gift, AIDS.

     Even if they can’t have sex (the first drug that stopped HIV, AZT was developed in the 1980s, but tests took longer and, the drug was not readily available until the 1990s, also causing severe side-effects such as severe intestinal problems, damage to the immune system, nausea, vomiting and headaches; by 1998 other medicines were being developed, but this film seems to have been unaware of those life-saving drugs, and makes no mention of even using prophylactics as protection.

     In her relentless love of Keenan, however, Joan finally gets her man to hug and hold, if nothing else.

    The director tells all of these stories in short scenarios, broken up into small segments—a method director Robert Altman has previously explored, although far more experimentally. The publicists for Playing by Heart even refused critics of the day be allowed to piece these scenarios together in their reviews, as I just have, let alone reveal the final scenes wherein they almost all come together to celebrate the 40th wedding anniversary, a remarriage ceremony, between the sisters’ parents Hannah (Gena Rowlands), who performs as TV chef, and Paul (Sean Connery), the latter of whom has also just been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Yet, they too express distress, in this case over a long ago love affair (sans sex) between Paul and one of Hannah’s assistants. Paul keeps a picture of her, in fact, to remind him that he too could be loved again, but also that his true love is still Hannah.

     By the time of the final celebration, nearly all seem to have found new love and possibilities in their relationships, even Gracie discovering via young Keenan’s admiration of a web game Hugh has created, just how clever her husband is. And in that statement, we now discover his daily employment.

    As these characters all take to the dance floor, the jazz trumpeter who has told Joan that talking about love was like dancing about architecture, is proven wrong. In fact, this talkative movie, much like the later director Richard Linklater in his “Before” series of films, proves you can indeed talk about love.  

     If these figures are meant to represent “real figures,” however, we quickly perceive most of them as romantic stick figures, but the mostly excellent acting, the clever dialogue, the beautiful landscapes created by noted cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and the music by John Barry, all help us settle into this work as we might a good soap opera or a slick Hollywood rom-com.

    Indeed, these very qualities led Roger Ebert, who so loved Solondz’ Happiness, to declare thumbs down to this film.

    Ebert took issue with the picture-book quality of this film, even the articulate dialogue, and easy pleasing choices the director argues for as the characters attempt to rectify their lives’ failures. Ebert wrote:

 

“It’s easy to like the movie because we like the actors in it, and because the movie makes it easy on us and has charming moments. But it feels too much like an exercise. It’s yuppie lite–affluent, articulate people who, except for those who are ill, have problems that are almost pleasant. It has been observed that a lot of recent movies about death have gone all soft and gooey at the center. Here’s a movie about life that does the same thing.”

 

     The critics from Variety and The New York Times basically argued similar points of view.

     It is certainly true that some figures, particularly Gracie and Hugh—except for Hugh’s (Quaid’s) signature pieces—seem flat and uninteresting; there comes a moment when I wanted Hugh to simply get up and leave a wife who sought out the arms of the bland minister Roger, who also officiates over Hannah and Paul’s restatement of their wedding vows.

     And, although they are both fairly interesting, it takes a lot of energy to imagine why Trent continues to woo the sour faced Meredith. He’s handsome, and apparently rich; but what but an angry face does she truly offer him?

     The rest of the cast, however, is so good that even if the story Carroll is telling is wrapped up as if it were a cellophane-covered box of chocolate truffles, I’ll eat and enjoy. And perceiving this work as an alternate to Solondz’ movie—yes, a far superior and challenging film—is, I believe, a fascinating way to perceive Carroll’s work, something that Ebert and others never seemingly even imagined probing.

     I have to admit, I have owned and watched Carroll’s work for years, and every time the truffles call out to me: eat until you’ve satisfied your appetite, which I joyfully do.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).