Plane crash brings 2 people together in 'Random Hearts'

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): What could possibly be worse than hearing about your spouse's tragic death?

Bill "Dutch" Van Den Broeck (Harrison Ford) and Kay Chandler (Kristin Scott Thomas) discover the answer to that question in the film Random Hearts. Happily married, the two individuals are strangers to one another until a fatal accident draws them together. When Dutch's wife and Kay's husband are among the people killed in a plane crash, their lives are about to change as heartbreaking truths are revealed.

Neither one of them finds out right away, even though they have been hearing news of the tragic accident all day. Dutch, an Internal Affairs officer at the Washington D.C. Police, is busy trying to nail down a corrupt cop while at the same time thinking about the dinner date he is planning to have that evening with his wife, Peyton (Susanna Thompson).

Dutch only begins to realize what is happening when he calls home and gets Peyton's message instead, saying that she has left on a flight to Miami for an unscheduled business trip. It doesn't take him long to ascertain that his wife is among the victims of the plane crash, but what's curious is that she isn't registered under her own name. Things get even more suspicious as Dutch finds out from Peyton's work place that she is not assigned to go out of town that day.

Dutch's further investigation finally brings him to Kay's door. "My wife was sitting next to your husband on that plane," he tells her. "They were going together."

This revelation is the last thing Kay needs at this moment of grief that she and her young daughter are trying to come out of. Besides, Kay is a New Hampshire senator working on a bid for re- election, and the suggestion that her husband is having an extramarital affair, and is actually killed while having one of his trysts, could really rock her chances.

But she can't deny that Cullen (Peter Coyote), her husband, has lied to her, telling her that he was going to New York while he ends up dead at the bottom of the sea in a plane that was going to Miami, and with a woman registered as Mrs. Cullen Chandler. Dutch's later discoveries even convince her that the two lovers had gone to Miami together several times before.

Dutch and Kay themselves go to Miami to satisfy their curiosity about the places their spouses had spent time together. And it doesn't take a genius to predict what happens between them at the end of the trip.

Random Hearts starts out as an intensely dramatic film, presenting the moments of uncertainty and painful search that follow a plane crash. Anyone who was shattered just learning about the TWA accident in New York several years ago will be affected by this film's first 40 minutes, which include the traumatic moments when airline representatives come to the survivors' homes, and also a grim underwater shot inside the fuselage of the drowned plane.

The screenplay, adapted by Darryl Ponicsan and Kurt Luedtke from Warren Adler's novel, also creates the potential for great drama, asking the question, what if some of the passengers in a plane crash are actually cheating on their spouses? And what if one of the spouses is a politician who can't afford any hint of scandal at the moment?

Unfortunately, the film fails to deliver, wanting to depict a romance between survivors, but coming up instead with the lamest excuse for film characters to fall in love. If director Sydney Pollack was patient enough to keep the film going for some time before letting the two really fall for each other, the movie would have been able to keep some plausibility intact. Instead, we are given a vulgar, preposterous scene at the parking lot, which seems rushed, and diminishes any hope for the film to remain elegant and believable.

As Dutch, Ford lends effective gravity, inhabiting a cuckold who vents, "I'm paid to notice things, and to know when people lie. But I didn't have a clue." He's actually at home playing blue-collar roles, even if he has spent the last decade performing in a suit (playing lawyers, millionaires, federal agents and the U.S. President). Nevertheless, Pollack can't resist to overdo it, giving his leading man scruffy hair and that annoying ear-pierce, trying hard to convince.

Scott Thomas, on the other hand, is effortlessly convincing as an American politician, with her masterful American accent, her smart blazers and Hillary Clinton hair. And after The Horse Whisperer the year before, she seems comfortable co-starring with American movie icons three decades her senior.

But the truth is, the two don't really create any spark. And without their chemistry, there is really no story. The film just goes on and on, mixing up pain, anger, romance and the nonsense about Dutch's obsession to find the two lovers' hideaway, but it actually ends when the two characters meet the first time. Even Oscar winners like Luedtke and Pollack (who collaborated on Absence of Malice and Out of Africa) can't do anything about it. Especially Pollack, once an important director of the 1970s and 1980s (Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie) who has wasted the 1990s turning out weak concoctions such as Havana, Sabrina and now this one.

The only thing we can treasure out of all that rubbish is the great soundtrack of Dave Grusin (also a frequent Pollack collaborator) which makes for good listening on a late night drive.