“A NOIR SOAP OPERA”

By Raymond Benson

Alan Rudolph has had an interesting Hollywood career. He was a protégé of Robert Altman, for whom he worked as assistant director, and then went on to write and direct his own oeuvre of quirky, art-house pictures for four decades. Like Altman’s films, they are ensemble productions often using a stock company of actors. Stylistically, though, they are much more lyrical, almost pretentiously arty. Thematic elements in Rudolph’s movies nearly always involve romanticism and fantasy, and the good ones such as Welcome to L.A. (see Cinema Retro review), Remember My Name, Choose Me, Made in Heaven, and Trouble in Mind, were critically acclaimed and modestly successful.

Love at Large, unfortunately, is not one of the good ones. The movie seems to be in search of a story as it follows private investigator Harry Dobbs (Tom Berenger, mugging a lot and using an odd, gravelly voice) on a bigamy case, but the path is really a labyrinth of possible love affairs for nearly all of the main characters. While Harry’s in the process of breaking up with his current girlfriend (Ann Magnuson), he meets a hot client (Anne Archer, whose beauty does not make up for the extremely mannered performance of a “mysterious dame”) with whom there’s a chance at some hanky panky. He’s also in competition with a feisty, sarcastic female private eye named Stella (Elizabeth Perkins, who delivers the most believable and honest performance in the movie), with whom Harry just might be in love. Each of the women also has her own individual journey of seeking romance. It’s all on the level of a soap opera.

Rudolph was experimenting with this one, and the result doesn’t really work. It attempts to be a movie about relationships and the “meaning of love” (a favorite topic of Rudolph’s) overlain with a highly stylized neo-noir detective plot—a lighter Trouble in Mind, perhaps. The problem is that the noir aspects, and the case Harry is investigating—cries out to be much more than it is. If it had been a further developed, gritty crime plot that actually elicited suspense, the picture might have jelled. Furthermore, the hunt-for-love story, really the backbone of the movie, resolves abruptly and unsatisfactorily for three of the five sets of couples involved. With the sometimes laughable performances and the odd tone with which the actors have been directed, Large at Large is a head scratcher. It might have been much better in the concept stage, but the movie doesn’t realize its potential.

That said, the writer/director’s permeating quirkiness is interesting enough to warrant a viewing. And any movie that casts rocker Neil Young as Archer’s sinister and violent boyfriend is worth seeing for the novelty factor. (Ted Levine, Annette O’Toole, and Kate Capshaw also appear in the picture, completing the list of familiar movie faces from the late 1980s.)

Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of Love at Large looks very good with its colorful Oregon countryside locations and Portland bars and hotels. The transfer is clean and blemish-free. There are no supplements on the disc other than trailers of other Kino Lorber

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