Susan Granger’s review of “Love Song for Bobby Long”
Are you ready for John Travolta as a pot-bellied, hygienically-challenged, low-down drunk? In this melodrama set in Louisiana., a motley assortment of misfits are thrown together by circumstance Cranky Bobby Long (Travolta) is a former Auburn professor who is drowning his seamy past in a bottle and shares a dilapidated house in New Orleans with his former teaching assistant and protŽgŽ, Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), who is writing Long’s biography. Their boozy existence is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of feisty 18 year-old Purslane (Scarlett Johansson), a day too late for the funeral of her estranged, free-spirited mother who owned their tacky abode. Convinced that the men have a right to squat there, Purslane gradually forms a bond with them and they, in turn, convince her to get a high school equivalency diploma. As their friendship and trust grows, years of veiled secrets and half-truths are very gradually revealed. First-time director Shainee Gabel wrote the maudlin screenplay based on Ronald Everett Capps’ “Off Magazine Street” novel. Spiced with poetic, literary quotations and metaphors, it’s pretentious and utterly predictable, while Gabel’s direction is pedestrian. In several instances, flimsy scenes are actually saved by cinematographer Elliot Davis’ creative yet naturalistic lighting that augments Sharon Lomofsky’s gothic, atmospheric production design. And while it’s curious to see John Travolta’s heavy-handed, disheveled characterization, along with Scarlett Johansson’s poignant surliness, it’s Gabriel Macht’s intelligent, deeply textured, shadowy performance that’s the most memorable. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Love Song for Bobby Long” is a ponderous, seedy 6, restructuring yet another dysfunctional Southern family.
