Director: Taylor Hackford
Starring: Helen Mirren, Joe Pesci, Sergio Peris-Mencheta
Review: 3 stars (of five)
Love Ranch employs the familiar transition technique between many scenes of showing a landscape at high speed, clouds racing across the sky as hours become seconds. If Taylor Hackford had applied that technique to the meandering script, he’d have a better movie. Fortunately, he has three great actors, led by his amazing wife, Helen Mirren, to create scenes that often transcend the films’ weaknesses.
The story, torn from late-seventies headlines: Brothel owners Pesci and Mirren dabble in boxing promotion (’cause the sex industry alone isn’t corrupt enough?), and a flirtation between a young boxer and the aging madame seems bound for tragedy. The script seems too caught up in the real-life inspiration—the colorful former owners of Nevada’s storied Mustang Ranch—yet, having changed the names and added a few melodramatic wrinkles, there’s no point in shuffling through the disorganized pace of the real word at the expense of delivering a tighter story and better exploring its opportunities. Additionally, the stars are required more than once to bring their considerable talents to the rescue of some potentially cheesy scenes (to say nothing of Mirren’s opening and closing voiceovers).
Mirren is a goddamned goddess, managing in a single scene to vividly draw the weariness of a woman beaten by life and encroaching age, the brassy fury of a woman who built Nevada’s first legal brothel, and good humor of an honest madame taking care of her girls. She’s the film’s sin qua non.
Pesci returns to the screen in his first significant role since 1999′s Lethal Weapon IV (and that’s if you allow that anything about Lethal Weapon IV could be called “significant”). Here his Goodfellas psycho mode is tamped down and fleshed out with a little more humanity and pathos (and, I’m thinking, an awful toupe). The role is a little familiar, but he acts the hell out if it.
The surprise is Spanish actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta, a 12-year cinema veteran making his Hollywood debut as the Argentinean boxer promoted by Pesci, who seems to develop an interest in both the brothel business and Mirren. The guy is hugely charming and talented, and holds his own in both playful and emotionally complex scenes with Mirren, and intense confrontations with the formidable Pesci.
The result is a two-hour movie that feels longer and takes its time giving me a story to care about. For some viewers, that would be unforgivable. I thought it was time well-spent—watching Mirren and Peris-Menchata, especially, was worth my time.
There’s a scene I really liked, the most tender moment between Mirren and Peris-Menchata. It takes a strange and cheesy reference to the Donner Party to get them there, but it’s a moment in which this older woman, carrying the regrets of age and feeling her mortality, and this younger man who suffers the guilt of a specific tragedy, are together in a moment of poignant human understanding. The film actually hangs its whole message, Mirren’s final summation of her journey, on the scene, and the performers make it tender and fantastic, and it made me think of how few people find such moments, and how late in life they might arrive, if ever they do.
Whatever else the film fritters away, it gave me those performances and those moments, and for that I was glad to have been there.
