A Long Island love story, hold the Buttafuoco

By Siobhan Peiffer

Beau Bauman, SM '99 Trevor Hawkins, DC '99, and Brian Johnson, CC '00

This spirit is driven entirely by the character of Giles De'Ath (John Hurt), a London writer, intellectual snob, and literary recluse. He refuses to enter the 20th century or stoop to the level of mass culture, but, trying to make a concession to modernity by seeing a Forster film adaptation, he stumbles into Hotpants College II, and is immediately smitten by the movie's teen-idol star, Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley). A passing fancy becomes an obsession: De'Ath shoplifts teen magazines to get Ronnie's picture, catalogues the star's birthmarks, and plays his locker-room scenes in VCR slow-motion.

Director/adaptor Richard Kwietniowski has a lot of fun with these almost wordless sequences documenting De'Ath's pursuit, and every humorous detail is exactly right--from the sendup of a Forster movie poster (Merchant-Ivory would be proud) to the mock films in which Ronnie appears (Tex Mex is 90210 meets On the Waterfront). De'Ath the technology-hating aesthete must acquire a television, a video rental card, and an answering machine to pursue Ronnie, and each modern wonder serves only to drive him deeper into his solitary obsession.

The real wonder, though, is Hurt, who makes De'Ath not only plausible but deeply sympathetic. An elderly writer making scrapbooks for the star of Skid Marks is hardly an ennobling scene, but the movie never thinks to condescend. It is too busy following its main character into the latest manifestation of his preoccupation.

As De'Ath nears the end of his quest, we don't really want him to find Ronnie and put an end to the pursuit's ingenuity. De'Ath eventually follows Ronnie home to Long Island, exchanging his genteel London club for a diner called Chez d'Irv (where Irv, the proprietor, describes his guest as "writer. From London. Likes words."). All romantic misgivings prove correct once Ronnie shows up on screen: the film starts spinning its wheels, hoping for a revelation. It doesn't help that Priestley hardly registers. Not quite satirical and not quite human, Ronnie seems more real in the sitcom "Home is Where the Heart Is" than in his own oceanfront house. In order to succeed, Love and Death needs to grant Ronnie presence on film, but Priestley never emerges from Hurt's shadow. Fiona Lowei, as Ronnie's young model-wife, similarly squanders a wonderfully written role.

Ponderous music can't convince us that De'Ath's moments with Ronnie are half as erotic or romantic as his solitary adoration in front of the TV screen. But Love and Death tries anyway, in some slow-motion of hands clasping and unclasping and a blithely incongruous scene of the pair drinking Diet Cokes in sunglasses on a Hamptons beach. If De'Ath's pursuit demonstrates anything, it is the utter solitude of longing; once it's gone there's no satisfactory replacement. For most of the movie, Love and Death takes its cue from De'Ath, telling his story from a respectful distance. When it tries to create proof of intimacy, a poignant romance suddenly seems trivial.

This is, of course, part of the point, and it's something that De'Ath the writer knew long before he went to Long Island. "There is nothing more solitary than an artist's life," he tells Ronnie in the climactic scene, Hurt's voice capturing the triumphant regret every spurned lover learns. The movie's final moments give Ronnie a written record of the saga in novel form and De'Ath a reminder in Hot Pants College III, both artists claiming more integrity than they possessed at the start. Disillusioned but never cynical, De'Ath can still call falling in love "the most irrational desire known to mankind." It's the act of falling--whatever the object--that's crazy and desirable, and this film celebrates all of love's unpredictable charm.

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• Find out more about Love and Death on Long Island at the Internet Movie Database

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