With Paul Schrader’s beautiful new film Master Gardener beginning its theatrical run, I wanted to look back to his most romantic and least seen film, the 1999 Forever Mine. Stuck in distribution limbo before being sloughed off to cable and DVD, the movie, apart from its initial showing at the Telluride Film Festival and a screening in the Film Comment Selects series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has not been shown on the big screen. It remains one of the best American movies of the last thirty years and one a ravishing embodiment of movie romance. This piece originally appeared in a slightly different form in the publication formerly known as Salon.
Paul Schrader's Forever Mine—one of the lushest movies in recent memory—will have its big-screen life confined to its recent showing at the Telluride Film Festival. The vagaries of film distribution have confined its release to lower-tier cable stations, and eventually DVD. Which is an aesthetic crime because a movie this gorgeous movie cries out for the big screen.
Forever Mine is the most fluid and openly emotional piece of direction Schrader has yet done. Never an intuitive director, Schrader’s first movies tackled hot, dicey topics (union politics in Blue Collar, porn in Hardcore, male prostitution in American Gigolo) only to cool them out with his distanced intellectualized approach. Something started to change with Patty Hearst (1988). It was as aestheticized as anything he'd made, but there was excitement, as well as fearsome intelligence, in Schrader’s exploration of the "did she jump or was she pushed" enigma of Patty Hearst.
Since then, Schrader has grown from movie to movie, right up through his scalding last picture, his adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel Affliction.
The tenderness and sweeping romance at the heart of Forever Mine are something new for Schrader. From Angelo Badalamenti's ravishing score to the glowing pastels of John Bailey's cinematography to the sensuality of the lead performances from Joseph Fiennes and Gretchen Mol, Forever Mine is awash in the heightened, overwhelming emotion that's the life's blood of movies. It's that most movieish of movies, The Count of Monte Cristo done as a film-noir romance, and yet there's nothing ironic or self-conscious about either Schrader's writing or his direction. You might think of Douglas Sirk except that Schrader disdains the cool, analytic scrutiny Sirk brought to the mechanics of melodrama. Schrader seems to feel that either distance or irony would dodge emotion, diminish it, apologize for it. So Schrader tells this story as if he were encountering this sort of outsize romanticism for the first time--and he makes us feel we're encountering it for the first time as well. Forever Mine, which moves with the grace of a great soul ballad, offers the pleasure that's unique to the movies and to rock 'n' roll: the sense of being swept up and carried along in something bigger than yourself.
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