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Bookmark this pageRandom Hearts (1999)
Director: Sydney Pollack
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Dutch (Ford) is a greying, aggressive Internal Affairs officer in the Washington, DC, force. Shocked to hear his wife has died in a Miami-bound plane crash; his own investigation reveals she was booked on the flight as one half of a fictitious married couple, with the now-dead husband of Congresswoman Kay Chandler (Scott Thomas). Contacting the woman, he tells her his life seems a lie; she, meanwhile, wishes to preserve a professional silence. Adapted from a Warren Adler novel, this might have been tailor-made by director Pollack to ease Ford into more straightforwardly romantic territory. In that sense, there must have been a failure of nerve, since the film involves the increasingly edgy Ford in an over-elaborate police corruption subplot angled to present the actor's undiminished physical powers as vividly as Dutchy's stubborn yet vulnerable character, and the chasm between his life and that of his lover-to-be. The director's evident intention to etch detail and emotional power into the conventional Hollywood template with strokes of East Coast psychological realism - seen best in the tense scene of the leads' first encounter, worst in the spontaneous eruption of passionate fumbling in an airport limousine - is inadequately realised, leaving the performers exposed but not revealed.Author: WH
Cast & crew
Director: Sydney Pollack
Producer: Sydney Pollack, Marykay Powell
Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Charles S Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Dennis Haysbert, Richard Jenkins, Paul Guilfoyle, Susanna Thompson, Lynne Thigpen, Sydney Pollack, Peter Coyote, Edie Falco, Jack Gilpin, M Emmet Walsh full cast
Genre(s): Thrillers
Duration: 132 mins
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