Fool for Love

The American landscape of Sam Shepard’s plays finds perhaps its purest expression in Fool for Love, which is set entirely in a dingy motel room located on the fiery edge of the Mojave Desert.

The film version, directed by Robert Altman, expands the action to include the whole rundown motel grounds (and a few flashbacks), but it’s still essentially Shepard turf: a small, stifling hothouse off the highway to nowhere.

The physical setting of the collapsing motel (created by production designer Stephen Altman and cinematographer Pierre Mignot) is crucial, because it perfectly epitomizes the dead-end emotional world of Shepard’s characters. The people of Fool for Love are locked into inexorable patterns they’d like to escape but are destined to recycle.

May (Kim Basinger) is discovered at the motel by Eddie (Shepard); she’s been hiding out there since abandoning him when he dallied with a rich woman while doing some cowboy stunt-riding in Hollywood. Eddie confronts her to try to rekindle their relationship.

It’s a relationship that has clearly existed for a long time. Eddie tells May, “We’ll always be connected – that happened a long time ago,” a statement we won’t fully understand until late in the film. Their demonic attraction is captured in the moment when May calls Eddie over for a big kiss, then knees him hard in the groin.

They know all of each other’s moves, and the bickering brutalizing and bullying they do during the film has a ritualized quality. There’s no way they can stay together, but in some mysterious way, they belong to each other. (The songs on the soundtrack, written and sung by Shepard’s sister, Sandy Rogers, superbly catch this mystery.)

There is an old man who hangs around the motel and plays an important role later; he’s invested with the sorry depth that only Harry Dean Stanton can convey. Stanton looks as though he can hardly bear living, having survived all the things he’s seen in the world. Late in the film arrives May’s square date for the evening (perfectly played by Randy Quaid, late of Saturday Night Live), who watches in astonishment as the final scenes of the drama play out.

Shepard, through his writing (he expanded the screenplay himself) and his remarkably offbeat acting, obviously knows these characters all too well. His performance is exactly the opposite of a big, intense, stagey interpretation; he plays Eddie with small, furtive touches of violence and crazy humor.

Kim Basinger is his equal, and her performance works on two levels: in the volatility of May’s edgy, naked emotionalism, and in the relish of Basinger’s big shot at dramatic credibility (she’s an ex-model and former James Bond girl). She succeeds at both.

Altman’s direction is at first odd: He eschews the seemingly natural long-take approach (turn the cameras on and let the actors tear the place up) in favor of a more fragmented visual scheme. This approach scatters some of the play’s dynamics.

But Altman does catch the script’s perverse flashes of humor. In the production notes, he concludes his analysis of the play by saying, “It’s funny as hell, because that’s probably where it takes place.” He’s got that, and a lot of other things about Fool for Love, right.

First published in The Herald, March 13, 1986

I recall hearing that Altman was very focused on the idea of having the writer of a movie also play the main role, as a kind of experiment. They did not get along, in the event. Jessica Lange was going to play May, but got pregnant before shooting. I had forgotten Randy Quaid was SNL-involved. Huh.