Fool for Love

Shepard is perfect as the dumb hick in cowboy gear who likes lassoing the bedpost; and Basinger, as the faded girl in a red dress, brings a curious, tatty dignity to the role, and proves at last that she can act when not required to pout in her underwear. It's the best of Altman's series of theatre adaptations, capturing the original's dreamlike musings on the nature of inherited guilt; what one misses is the sexual ferocity. Read full review

It’s a raw, explosively funny, elemental tragicomedy about the pure willfulness of love...Basinger is the movie’s revelation. She makes May a jumpy, juicy, full-tilt, sensuous creature. Scrubbing in exasperation at the tendrils of hair that cloud her face, clamping herself to Eddie’s leg like a blond barnacle, she has her own funny side too, but what you remember most is May’s longing, so deep it’s torn her up inside. Read full review

[Altman] has made a melodrama, almost a soap opera, in which the characters achieve a kind of nobility. Read full review

It's a good ol' boy version of "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?," but whereas that classic had four characters in direct conflict, "Fool for Love" essentially is a two-character duel to the quick. Read full review

Fool for Love has several exceptional things going for it, namely the performances by Mr. Shepard as Eddie, Kim Basinger as May and Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man. Read full review

The perverse story of a randy cowboy (played by Shepard himself) and his sister/lover Kim Basinger needs the tension of live performance for its incest-as-metaphor diagram to pop out. Read full review

Robert Altman directs a fine cast with all the authority and finesse a good play deserves, so it's too bad the play fooled them all. Sam Shepard's drama of intense, forbidden love in the modern West is made to seem like specious stuff filled with dramatic ideas left over from the 1950s. Read full review

The greatest disappointment is Shepard's own inability to play a Shepard character: a distant, stiff presence, he never seems to enter the emotional battles (with Kim Basinger, as the woman he can't live with and can't live without) that are the play's reason for being. Read full review

This time the feelings don't build much momentum, though, and the action is generally slack. Robert Altman directed, showing his usual healthy disdain for standard storytelling styles, but never quite getting a handle on his characters or their bizarre situation. [6 Dec 1985]

FOOL FOR LOVE is a great play, and the performances from the cast are solid--especially Stanton's and Shepard's--but as a film the whole thing seems rather contrived and stiff. Read full review

So. All this virtuosity, lots of thumps and crashes and even a few empty moments in the desert night. Signifying: Not so much. Not in the movies, which throw a glare even into the corners, which are empty here. Fool for Love has the look of a project that was a lot of work for director, writer and actors. It's not so much fun for the rest of us, either. [28 Feb 1986, p.D3]

You'd think that if anybody could film Sam Shepard's 1983 play and keep it metaphorical and rowdy and sexually charged it would be the intuitive Robert Altman, but the material seems to congeal on the screen, and congealed rambunctiousness is not a pretty sight.