The Thing Called Love

And the movie stands as a fitting memorial to River Phoenix, whose performance lingered in my mind for days after seeing it. [12 Nov 1993]

The best things about The Thing Called Love are its cast, style and mood. It has a snap, pace and rhythm we don't ordinarily see in today's movies. The dialogue scenes have a headlong pace and crackling self-confidence reminiscent of Howard Hawks, and the three- and four-way love combats recall Ernst Lubitsch. Read full review

Watching Phoenix in his last film, I couldn't help thinking of James Dean's final performance, as the cranky loner, Jett Rink, in "Giant." [12 Nov 1993, p.D3]

Phoenix is fine in an odd, transitional role, but Mathis (who looks more like his sister than his girlfriend) really steals the show with a bright, sassy performance. Read full review

Perhaps there's not much new to say about the dues and disappointments involved in breaking into the country music scene, but the scenes are fresh and the emotions real in Peter Bogdanovich's tune-laden, mixed-mood drama. Read full review

Mathis and Bullock are especially good, and Phoenix and Mulroney, playing out a jealousy-prone friendship as if they were Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms in Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, do a fair job with their roles. Read full review

Such strained touches notwithstanding, The Thing Called Love charms and touches, not the least for revealing Bogdanovich as a rare filmmaker still interested in human behavior, keeping the action mostly in medium shots and extended takes to better catch the emotional nuances from character to character. Read full review

The whole movie is something of a country-music clich, and it takes all of your imagination to be as enthusiastic about the characters' singing as they are. But The Thing Called Love is worth a look on the big screen. [16 July 1999]

Mildly engaging, formulaic. Read full review

For a movie intended to explore the conflicts and difficulties inherent in any kind of love (be it humans for each other or for their music), The Thing Called Love is largely unsuccessful. More than anything else, it ultimately appears to be little more than a predictable melodrama. Country fans will probably find in this motion picture an appropriate expression of their music. Everyone else is likely to view The Thing Called Love with about as much enthusiasm as they would reserve for the latest Randy Travis release. Read full review

It's a genial and mostly well-crafted picture, if hardly one that breaks new ground. [27 Aug 1993, p.L21]

You sense River Phoenix would rather be elsewhere, and whether he’s responding to the movie or to something larger is not ours to say. But the feeling persists. It’s like watching a premature ghost. Read full review

Thin and predictable, and a flop of awesome proportions in the US, this has occasional bursts of freshness, but mostly leaves you with the nagging impression that Mathis ended up with the wrong guy. Read full review

Despite her underwritten character, Mathis easily takes top acting honors with equal parts toughness and tenderness. Read full review

The Thing Called Love, Phoenix' final movie, should not be used as a memorial to his career; "Stand By Me," "Running on Empty" and "My Own Private Idaho" are much better examples of his talent, which was considerable. [12 Nov 1993, p.3G]

Embraces its many cliches like they were nuggets of gold.

But at the center of the film is an actor whose mind and heart are far, far away, and he is like a black hole, consuming light and energy. He's running on empty. Sometimes there are even scenes where you can sense the other actors scrutinizing Phoenix in a certain way, or urging him, with their tones of voice, to an energy level he cannot match. It is all very sad. Read full review

The Thing Called Love should have been a nice, middle-key romance, with a few gentle digs at Nashville's fevered, wildly competitive country-music scene. Instead, it's a hapless, well-intentioned mess -- running in half a dozen directions at once, looking half-planned and semi-improvised, and featuring a skittish, overly mannered performance by Phoenix. [16 March 1994, p.E1]

This is stilted stuff. The acting is disjointed, the movie should be subtitled Three Actors in Search of Their Characters. River Phoenix gives a somnambulant impersonation of Christian Slater impersonating Jack Nicholson, and Samantha Mathis spends much of the movie trying to figure out exactly who her character is. Read full review