Fool for love

Robert Altman (The Player, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville, Gosford Park) adapts Sam Shepard’s one room play with mixed results. Shepard plays Eddie, a handsome cowboy drifter who arrives in a depressing New Mexico roadside motel, lugging a trailer and horses. The aim of Eddie’s visit is to be re-united with the voluptuous May, a barmaid at this barren pit stop’s hotel. For her part May is being wooed by another man but is inextricably drawn to Eddie, despite the proven destructive nature of their union. Over the course of the evening she and Eddie argue violently and make up passionately as the heart-rending history of their relationship, replete with flashbacks, unfurls. Harry Dean Stanton plays a barfly whose identity holds a key role to these lovers’ sorrow. “Fool for love” garnered mostly negative reviews and found a very limited audience, regardless of praise for Basinger’s bravura performance. Most decried the device of opening up the play, outside of its claustrophobic one room structure, in favour of a wider locale, which may have robbed it of the intimate tensions generated by the ill-matched pair battling it out in a confined space. But despite this the incendiary relationship between the principal characters is astutely portrayed, achieving a suitably tragic tone within a desolate setting.