A Love Song For Bobby Long (2004)

melodrama
directed by : Shainee Gabel
featuring : John Travolta - Scarlett Johansson - Gabriel Macht - Deborah Kara Unger - Dane Rhodes
running time : 1 hour 59 minutes
Bobby Long (John Travolta) is a washed up former literature professor with a voracious drinking habit. He lives in a rundown house in New Orleans with Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), his former star pupil, also an alcoholic. Lawson is allegedly writing a novel about Bobby. Their depressive little corner of the world is disrupted when Lorraine, the beloved eccentric singer who owns their house, dies. Her teenage daughter, Pursy (Scarlett Johansson), who hasn't seen her mother in years, arrives in town too late for the funeral, and crashes at the house. Afraid of being thrown out on the street, Bobby convinces Lawson to tell Pursy that the house has been left to all three of them. Pursy, having little else to do, decides to move in, and starts cleaning up the place, making it her own. Lawson is involved with Georgianna (Deborah Kara Unger), who works at the local bar, but he quickly develops a crush on the comely Pursy. The cantankerous Bobby seems determined to drive the girl away. As Pursy settles into the diverse little community, all of Lorraine's old friends tell her how much she looks like her mother, and she begins to uncover some startling truths about her family history. A Love Song For Bobby Long is based on the novel Off Magazine Street, by Ronald Everett Capps. It was adapted for the screen and directed by Shainee Gabel, who co-directed the documentary Anthem.

Adapting a novel for the screen is a tricky process, and unfortunately it's clearly one that neophyte writer/director Gabel has not mastered. Early on in A Love Song For Bobby Long, the overly literary voice-over ramblings of Lawson Pines (Macht) ("New Orleans is a siren of a city") begin to grate. Later in the film, someone asks Bobby Long (Travolta), "Does every word outta your mouth have to be in character?" Bobby is a larger-than-life character who may have been fascinating on the page, but onscreen (embodied by Travolta), he and his story strain credulity. Appropriately bloated in this case but still over-the-top, Travolta can't muster the subtlety or grace to transcend the clichéd characterization of this cantankerous fallen Southern intellectual. On the positive side, Gabel does capture a certain gritty local flavor in her New Orleans locations. Macht is an appealing presence, and Johansson brings a recognizably human soul to her portrait of Pursy. The actress has enough grit beneath that impossibly beautiful surface to make us believe that Pursy has had a difficult life and is more than a little bit lost. But the film itself is lost in translation. Full of grandiose literary references and tragic tall tales that are never dramatized, the story, despite an obvious red herring, makes its way to a predictable conclusion. Worse yet, it grows increasingly maudlin along the way, exemplified by one final, dreadful pan.