Random Hearts

1999 "In a perfect world, they never would have met."
5.3| 2h13m| R| en
Details

After losing their spouses in a plane crash, an internal affairs cop and a congresswoman find each other's keys in each other's loved ones' possessions and discover that the two were having an affair.

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Reviews

Lawbolisted Powerful
SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling
Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
dvts Without actually having read any of the reviews (except Ebert's), I think I can understand why it would rate so low - it fails as a movie. Kind of. It makes a half-hearted attempt to have a plot and to have plot mechanics and so on. And just doesn't care at all about any of that stuff, and eventually it all just fades away to nothing. Because the filmmakers don't care at all about the cop's case or his career, any more than they care about the congresswoman's career or her race for re- election, or her relationship with her daughter, or even how each of these people grieves over the loss of their spouses or the betrayal. No, the movie's not about any of that, yet that takes up a good portion of it - so it makes sense that a lot of people would go thumbs down on this.And yet - the movie is really good, if you focus just on what the movie itself cared about in itself, and what it was about at heart. And that is, simply, the two leads, and their relationship. And that's it. The rest of the movie doesn't matter at all to the people making it. But that's OK, because - Ford and Scott Thomas are amazing in this. And have amazing chemistry. And are amazingly written. We love the relationship, we really love the two people in it. We want them to end up together (I won't say if they do or not). Badly. And all the rest is just stuff to justify getting them from point A to point B and having the relationship happen and take the steps it needs to take - and that INCLUDES the entire 'premise' of the film itself, including the plane crash and the situation that opens it. So. As I say, I can see why this would get a fail grade. But it's so involving and the good in it is so good - we care so much about what the filmmakers cared about in the movie - that I can recommend it and could imagine watching it again at some point. Even if only for Kristin Scott Thomas's beautiful face with those big puppy dog eyes that are just - so open and emotional. You can fall in love with her, watching this, much moreso than in The English Patient. Her character here is extremely endearing and adorable - two words I've never used to describe any politician, fictional or otherwise. So perhaps she was miscast. But yea. A lovely woman playing a character you could imagine falling in love with (and do fall in love with, watching the movie), being hurt and having a disaster befall her, being vulnerable, and then meeting and falling for as likable and respectable and endearing a MALE performer as we've ever seen on screen. It's a recipe for success and despite the failed movie surrounding it, I think it was a success.Also of note - film features a young Kate "Never Quite Famous" Mara in an early role as the congresswoman's daughter. And there's a late scene of plot movement where a subplot crashes hilariously into the main story, in a way that momentarily threatened to be the most ludicrous such subplot intrusion in the history of cinema (narrowly averted, as she didn't take the bullet, thank God).Is the movie plausible, psychologically? No. It's absurd, psychologically. My OnDemand deal had Peter Weir's (brilliant) "Fearless" as a similar film to this. And superficially, in some plot details, yea I guess they are similar. But the films are nothing at all alike, nor are they about anything similar. The one line towards the end where Scott Thomas tells the press how the cop had been her friend, seen her thru a tough time when she needed it, how they were 'survivors' - all that rings completely hollow and doesn't match the film, which simply depicts a romance. The thing Scott Thomas is talking about at the end there would match the Rosie Perez/Jeff Bridges relationship in Fearless, which was indeed about two survivors of a tragedy using each other's company to cope (or not cope) with a trauma they'd both experienced. But this film isn't about trauma. It sidesteps all of that very quickly and is simply about a romance that, if freed from the requirements of psychological plausibility and the plot, is quite good. So. If you still are interested in seeing a nice and involving romance, despite all those many caveats - check it out.
Geoffrey DeLeons I had never seen a lead actor look as though he has just woken up, in a film, before. What's worse, Harrison Ford, as Van den broeck, appears to be in this somnambulistic state throughout the entire movie. Perhaps the best display of this torpor that Ford walks around in is when he is "identifying" the body of his wife, for legal purposes, after the crash. Ford shows almost no response, and I, therefore, thought that it was not his wife.Kristen Scott Thomas (as Kay Chandler) exhibits so little emotion that (I think inadvertently), some would wonder if she was behind her husband's death. At her first public appearance after that death (at a political fundraiser), she says "Thank you all for your friendship and support and don't leave without letting me talk to each one of you." Very shallow, false, almost like cardboard.Not only is Van den broeck's demeanor stupid (as in a stupor), he actually acts creepy. The first time he visits Chandler, to "talk about" what he assumes is a tryst between their former spouses, he acts so troubled, psychologically, that when Chandler's 15 year old daughter comes home, and is at the door, if I were she, I would have run with her out the door and called the police (one of which, Van Den Broeck is one).I could have forgiven all of this (some people just don't easily, or ever, display emotion), and given this movie a 7, which to me is a grading of "not great, but OK", but I downgraded it to a 6, because of the impertinent scenes regarding Van Den Broeck's investigation of another cop. Note to screenwriter Kurt Luedtke: If you are going to write disparate scenes, make two different movies. In summary, it is torture to watch Harrison Ford mumble and amble his way through a performance that could have been either electrifying or heart-rendering.
TOMASBBloodhound With a story like this, maybe it couldn't have been paced well anyway. But Random Hearts is like a glossy, stillborn mess that just sort of sits there and waits for you to decide when to turn the channel. Normally the late Sydney Pollack brought a lot more to his films, but here he must have thought star power could be enough. The story is implausible at best, and maybe just a step ahead of ludicrous. Tough Internal Affairs cop and female congressman from New Hampshire lose their spouses in a plane crash. The congresswoman wants to forget the whole thing and move on, but the inquisitive nature of the cop keeps him searching for answers. Finally, after the viewer has long since lost interest in the movie, the two begin an affair as hard to believe as Ted Danson and Whoopie Goldberg. There is WAY too much time dedicated to a subplot involving crooked cops, and this whole angle should have been written out. The whole thing plays out very, very slowly.The acting is good enough, and it is the film's only saving grace. Ford is dour and reserved as the grizzled cop. Thomas is believable and even likable as the politician whose biggest care seems to be if she should run for office again or not. She seems at peace instantly when she learns of her husband's death. The thought of these two having an affair together just isn't plausible, though. No way. It would be easier to take if the film didn't waste so much time with its subplots and parsed dialog. Pollack tries to use similar music to what he used in The Firm to liven things up, but this only makes us recall how much better that film was. And it was far from great. But that is the subject of another review perhaps some day.Was there a good way to tell such a contrived story? Not sure, but this film is a failure. In many ways, it began the downfall of Harrison Ford who has seen his career sag in recent years. Even though it was no classic, the last Indiana Jones film was the best work he's done in years. Random Hearts is essentially a waste of a good cast, director, and over two hours of your time. 4 of 10 stars.The Hound.
sol **SPOILERS** Overlong and somewhat confusing drama involving an airplane crash, Southern Airline flight from D.C to Miami, where two of the crash victims were cheating on their spouses.It's not much later that one of those being cheated on Washington D.C internal affair police Sgt. Dutch Van Den Broeck, Harrison Ford, got wind from her job that his old lady Peyton, Susanna Thompson, was on a flight to Miami to do a fashion shoot for her employer Sacks 5th Av of Washington D.C. Desperately trying to find out if Peyton was on the doomed flight Ducth not only finds out that she was, through a morgue photo at the crash site, but she was using an assumed name! Peyton was using the name of the wife of the person that booked the flight Cullen Chandler, Peter Coyote. Things get even more strange when it's discovered that the late Mr. Chandler's wife, who he's been cheating on, is non other then New Hampshire congresswoman Kay Chandler, Kristin Scott Thomas, who's now in a life and death campaign for reelection!The movie brings the two, Dutch & Kay, together in finding if in fact it's true that they were being cheated on by their marriage partners. And in the process they end up falling in love with each other! If it was just that the film "Random Hearts" would have made for a pretty good adult love story. Instead by putting into the film murder drug dealing both police corruption and political chicanery the movie at times was almost impossible to follow!Dutch who should have taken a leave of absent from the D.C Police Department in order for him to overcome his grief goes the exact opposite direction. Instead he goes full blast in busting fellow D.C cop George Beauford, Dennis Haysbert, for drug dealing by him getting, which is very unprofessional on Dutch's part, very personal about it. This not only leads to Dutch's top informant to get murdered but Dutch almost ending up murdered himself! Or at the least losing his job or being put behind bars for taking the law into his own hands! All of this together with Dutch trying to find out if his wife Peyton was untrue to him seemed too much for the poor guy to handle. As for Kay she had far more pressing problems in the fact if her dead husband's infidelity became public it could very well screw her out of a second term in the US Congress!***SPOILERS*** With the film being much too long, 133 minutes, as well as complicated and confusing you completely lose interest in it at about the one hour mark! It takes a while to realize what exactly Dutch & Kay are so desperately looking for, their cheating partners secret love nest, and when they, independent of each other, finally find it what was the big shocking surprise anyway! It only proved to Dutch & Kay, what we in the audience knew all along, what should have been obvious to them right from the very beginning of the movie!