Dead Couples Talking
The
future looks bleak for this unfortunate psychic tale.
"Ya know, love's a lot like this
river. It might appear to be the same, but if you take a closer look it's
always changing." So opines Mae (Samantha Mathis), displaying a command of
metaphors second only to George W. Bush, during the opening moments of The
Simian Line. The dialogue doesn't bode well, nor does the revelation
soon thereafter that Mae is actually a ghost, and a peculiarly unfrightening one at that, given that she mostly just
smokes and drinks while displaying a tortuously fake
The ghostly duo
are actually a side plot in the movie, which depicts several couples
going through relationship ups and downs. That one of the couples happens to be
an invisible, deceased twosome is almost incidental. Spread out amongst other
key stereotypes are successful couple Sandra and Paul (Cindy Crawford and Jamey
Sheridan), odd couple Rick and Katharine (Harry Connick
Jr. and Lynn Redgrave, and, yes, you read that
correctly) and young couple in lust Marta and Billy (Monica Keena
and Dylan Bruno). These three pairs, plus the unseen dead folk, gather together
at Halloween for a dinner at which inexplicably annoying psychic Arnita (Tyne Daly, looking like a veteran of many
dinners) shows up. She can see and interact with the ghosts, but since no one
believes her -- and since everyone present has the gall to make fun of her for
being fat and annoying -- Arnita throws a hissy fit and angrily declares that by New Year's, one of
the couples will have broken up.
Now, she's hardly going out on a
limb there, especially given that the lustful youngster couple
are irresponsible, reckless and probably not permanent to start with,
but for some reason the "prediction" throws everyone into a panic.
Minor issues crop up: Katharine starts harping on the age difference between
her and Rick and suspects him of cheating with Sandra. Sandra and Paul work too
hard. Marta finds herself in custody of a small child, and fears Billy will
react badly. The ghosts drink and smoke some more.
Given the pedigree of the cast
(Eric Stoltz also shows up later in the film), one
might expect some decent moments to arise as the mini-melodramas play out. It's
telling, then, that the most compelling performance in the film comes from
Cindy Crawford, making her long-unawaited return to
film after 1995's Fair Game. Or maybe it's just the nicely gratuitous
nude scene she delivers. Whatever the reason, Crawford, undoubtedly mindful of
the scathing reviews she got in 1995, at least appears to be trying, while the
other actors seem like they think they're putting on half-assed improv sketches at some workshop theater production with
zero turnout. Connick is particularly egregious,
decked out like Tom Green and trying to speak like Eminem,
while Redgrave just looks like she's mentally adding
up her paycheck.
Still, the bulk of the blame has
to go to writer-director Linda Yellen, a TV veteran
whose best-known achievement was executive producing the Liberace episode of
VH1's Behind the Music. Since we know most of this cast is capable of
acting, one must assume they received little instruction. Even if they did, who
could blame them for not listening? After all, they are dealing with a script
that tries to play scenes featuring drunken ghosts with silly accents for
tragedy. The film's title, for the record, refers not to the mean IQ of those
who'll enjoy the film, but rather to a fortune-telling term for a line on the
hand that combines both heart line and head line, symptomatic of a person who
can't separate the emotional from the rational. Yellen
may be able to differentiate the two, but she has imbued her film with neither.