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Garry Marshall (
Pretty Woman) directs the screen adaptation of Terence McNally's play
Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune, the story of a short-order cook (Al Pacino) who drives a waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer) crazy with his adamant courtship and mixed messages. The film is okay and not much more than that, the major stumbling block being Marshall's failure to scrub away enough star veneer on Pacino and Pfeiffer to accept them as minimum-wage drones with nowhere to go but toward each other. Fortunately, Marshall's feel for the texture offered by supporting players--Hector Elizondo as a café owner, Nathan Lane as Pfeiffer's inevitably gay neighbor-buddy, Kate Nelligan as another lonely waitress--keeps things interesting enough.
--Tom Keogh
The movie version of Terrence McNally's 1987 play "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" is a sweet-tempered romantic comedy whose main characters are a New York coffee-shop waitress, Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer), and a short-order cook, Johnny (Al Pacino). McNally, adapting his two-character play for the screen, has expanded and drastically rearranged his original story. He and the director, Garry Marshall, have attempted to place Frankie and Johnny in a variety of settings, to stretch the narrative out over a longer period, to surround the lovers with lots of other people-and to incorporate all this extra material without dissipating the emotional tensions of the main characters' relationship. Although the new characters and settings sometimes give the movie the feel of a sitcom, the filmmakers keep the basic principles of romantic comedy in view, and the stars' performances elevate the material. Pacino brings out the comedy and the ambiguity of a middle-aged man's sense of emotional rebirth: he's exuberant, touching, and a little scary. And Pfeiffer is extraordinary; her Frankie is a superbly detailed rendering of a woman with a fanatically conservative heart. The strength of the play was its simplicity and its directness; the movie preserves those qualities by telling the story in the ordinary, straightforward Hollywood manner. This is a vehicle for Pacino and Pfeiffer, and they're more glamorous than the characters they're playing, but, in a weird way, their star power is perfectly appropriate here: it's the meat-and-potatoes stuff of big-budget movie entertainment. Kate Nelligan and Nathan Lane are standouts in a large supporting cast, which also includes Hector Elizondo and Jane Morris. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
