Strange and Beautiful: On Paul Schrader’s Forever Mine (1999)

A few weeks ago a friend hipped me to a place that was accepting submissions for a series on the year 1999 in cinema, and on a lark I decided to whip up a piece just before the deadline. Why not? I'd have an excuse to force myself to write something again finally and perhaps pocket a few bucks along the way. Well, it was rejected, so I remain untainted by the world of paid film criticism, and my blog gains its first piece of writing in over a year. I call that a win. But anyway, here's the piece, on Paul Schrader's Forever Mine (1999):

Despite Paul Schrader’s status as a longtime Hollywood maverick (the “writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull” tag follows him wherever his name appears) and his recent resurgence in public film circles —thanks in part to both his latest three-film run of boundary-pushing cinematic objects and his increasingly infamous and unfiltered Facebook posting—a wide swath of his career remains woefully underseen, underdiscussed, and underappreciated. Particularly the 20 years or so leading up to First Reformed (2017), his first critical hit since the Oscar-nominated Affliction (1997), and the current mold for what most people probably think of as a “Paul Schrader film.” One reason for that long lapse in critical attention is perhaps the fact that most of the films during that stretch are not what one thinks of as a Paul Schrader film: a loopy alternate-reality TV film (Witch Hunt, 1994), a strange sex dramedy biopic (Auto Focus, 2002), an IP horror film prequel (Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, 2005), a bizarre Holocaust survivor drama (Adam Resurrected, 2008), and not one but two Nicolas Cage action potboilers (Dying of the Light, 2014; Dog Eat Dog, 2016), to name just a few. But while Schrader’s more talked-about interests seem to point in the direction of a filmmaker content to make the same film over and over again, as the list of his Pickpocket (1959)-influenced films attests (at least six, and all of his last three), there is a side of him just as strongly if not more strongly attracted to projects flamboyant in their uniqueness. In a 1985 interview Schrader points to Stanley Kubrick as a “shining example” for him: “Every time he makes a film you know it will be an outrageous forage into an original world. That’s much more interesting than to keep refining the same movie, over and over.”

An outrageous forage into an original world. That Schrader gave this quote to Roger Ebert at 2 a.m. over a glass of whiskey at the time of the Toronto Film Festival premiere of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) probably goes some way in understanding what Schrader’s headspace was like at the time. Unfortunately, Schrader came onto the film directing scene just as Hollywood was beginning to shift from its decade or so of relatively open-minded production philosophies post-studio system collapse into a more bureaucratic, money-minded mode of operation—outrageous forages into original worlds were no longer, if they ever were, the kind of movies that attracted financing. But that didn’t stop Schrader from doing it all the same, cobbling resources together from wherever he could and making his outrageous best of whatever material he found himself working on.

After a relatively successful first decade of filmmaking, directing assignments were tough to come by in the 1990s for Schrader. Light Sleeper (1992) was turned down by production companies left and right before Schrader put up his own money for the first three weeks of pre-production, taking deferred payment along with star Willem Dafoe and others in order to maximize their (about half of what was desired) budget. In order to introduce himself to the young film executives who knew him only by reputation, and to prove that he wasn’t too “dark” of a filmmaker (a huge no-no for the money people), he took the reins on HBO’s Dennis Hopper-starring Witch Hunt, surely the lightest movie, tone-wise, in the entire Schrader filmography. And then even the Oscars-fêted Affliction (the second Schrader film released in 1997, after the great The Touch) took five years from script to screen due to a lack of interest from financiers, eventually being made only because Nick Nolte took a substantial pay cut to be in it.

Which brings us, finally, to Forever Mine (1999). A film that Schrader, after writing it “a long time” before, had entirely given up on ever making. He had very much wanted to make it, had always wanted to, but by the time he got the opportunity to do so he was much a different person, and in much different era. This clash of timing perhaps accounts for part of the reason why it’s one of the most derided films Schrader ever made. In Vulture’s ranked accounting of the Schrader filmography in 2018, Forever Mine came in dead last. Even Schrader himself doesn’t hold the highest opinion of it—at the time of cast member Ray Liotta’s passing, Schrader memorialized him in a Facebook post reading: “RIP Ray. Wish I could have made a better film for both our sakes.”

But anyone familiar with Schrader’s tossed-off comments about this that or the next thing knows that as often as he can make a provocative and interesting point, he can just as often float an opinion that’s miles away from the truth.

From the second Forever Mine started to make its way from a script idea to a filmic reality, it was doomed to be misunderstood; it never stood a chance. The plotline alone begs to be laughed at, the way you would chuckle reading the back of a paperback romance novel: a young cabana boy (Joseph Fiennes) falls in love with a newly married trophy wife (Gretchen Mol) and her husband (Ray Liotta) tries to have him murdered. He survives and, under a false identity, reenters their lives 16 years later to claim the love that he believes was fated to be his.

But a film is not its script, and cinema is an art capable of creating a vibrant world that goes far, far beyond the printed word. Apt for a film that had been conceived years and years before it was made, Forever Mine has absolutely nothing to do with the prevailing cultural moods of 1990s cinema. There is nothing cool about Forever Mine. There is nothing “hip” about it. There is not a single bone of irony in its body. Its full-throated earnestness in the face of romantic cliché was miles removed from the prevailing attitudes of the time, harkening back to an era of Hollywood cinema when you could go to the theatre and watch giant close-ups of beautiful actors pretending to be in love and, amidst its obvious fakeness, be nevertheless moved at the overwhelming realness of it all. “I went back to the cinema of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray,” Schrader would say at the film’s 1999 festival premiere. Back to “the romantic hero, the nineteenth-century hero.”

 

The film’s capital-R Romanticism is unmistakable. Despite being guided by the steady hand of the mature Schrader, it’s clearly the brainchild of a version of Schrader from when he was “very much that kind of obsessional, romantic young man,” in his words. Perhaps the same young man who wrote the script for Obsession (1976), his friend Brian De Palma’s re-working of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that traffics in the same kind of suffusive, ultra-passionate moods, as well as sharing Forever Mine’s head-held-high acceptance of plot contrivances as narrative tools. Schrader was famously frustrated with De Palma for getting rid of the ending he had written, so Forever Mine could be seen as Schrader’s chance to finally direct that same kind of film without having to answer to anyone but himself. And what Schrader has said about Obsession is directly relevant here: “The thing that intrigued me most was the notion of creating a love story so strong that you could transgress the boundaries of time without jarring the audience. The love story could be so strong that the audience would allow you to go into the future to tell it.”

This is exactly what Forever Mine does. Its opening scene shows us Fiennes, right side of his face heavily scarred, clutching a rosary, in 1989, before taking us via dissolve and voiceover to 16 years in the past, Fiennes now a strapping young cabana boy at the opening of his second season on the job at a castle-like beachside resort. Every time the film makes this time-jumping maneuver, it feels less like a flashback and more like Proustian reverie. Fiennes’ scarred face holds so much memory and longing that even the simplest medium shot of him sitting on a plane is drenched in pathos. The feeling of watching the film’s 1973-set scenes is the feeling of being enveloped in an overwhelmingly strong memory, where physical sensations and emotional shockwaves come flooding back in stark detail. Just witness the stunning introduction of Gretchen Mol’s character, who Fiennes sees emerging from the water in a white bathing suit, Schrader filming it like it’s the birth of Venus, a goddess rising from the sea. Time slows down; his world is rewired, rewritten. Love at first sight, nothing will be the same again, etc.—except the force with which Schrader films this and the couple’s first encounters erases cliché and brings it to the level of romantic transcendence, where as a viewer you sit slack-jawed with eyes wide open awaiting the next reverse shot like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.

As a good filmmaker will, Schrader accomplishes all of this nearly wordlessly, and before you know it you’ve fallen under the spell of the film and its romance despite seemingly the bare minimum being provided in the way of explanation or character motivation. Much credit must of course go to the performers, who stand tall amidst this rapid gravitational whirlwind and share soul-deep desires and reluctancies with nothing but their faces, voices, bodies. Mol plays her beauty with both a charming radiance and a moral seriousness, variously holding up and buckling underneath the pressures of her duties and desires with a sensitivity and grace that belies the difficulty of playing character such as hers—like if Emma Bovary was trapped in a B-movie. (One of her most moving scenes is her reading Flaubert’s novel aloud to older women at a nursing home.) Fiennes on the other hand gives one of the most intense performances I’ve ever seen—all furrowed brows, soul-searching eyes, and a voice that seems to come from some hidden part of him, his dialogue eked out in a closed-mouth whisper, strong, earnest. He simmers and smolders, his body statuesque, his presence in the flashbacks like a romance novel cover model stripped of all cheesiness, and his presence in the contemporary scenes—absurd accent and cover identity and all—like something out of a gothic vampire film.

 

Traversing hints of the monster movie, of noir, even of soap opera, Forever Mine is ultimately melodrama through and through. The tension of the narrative in the end becomes a matter of whether or not Fiennes will reveal himself to Mol, and whether or not it will result in the long-fated consummation of his desire to be with her forever. The emotional climax of the film—its melodramatic moment of catharsis—is Mol’s recognition of who Fiennes actually is. The scene is almost frightening in its only-in-the-movies-ness, but it’s played so straight that, like the rest of the film, the question of realism is (or at least should be) the furthest thing from one’s mind. Fiennes enters Mol’s house when nobody is home and places his rosary (the one she gave him as a parting gift all those years ago) on her nightstand. He backs into the shadows, waiting. She arrives and sees his car; she knows he’s there. She says she’ll call the police; he tells her not to. He then emerges from the darkness, and their encounter climaxes with Fiennes dropping the accent, Mol shocked and overcome, their emotions splayed across the floor and each other, embracing, 16 years of waiting and wondering condensed into a single moment. Part of what pushes this over into pure transcendence, rather than the ostensibly eye-rolling contrivance it appears to be on paper, is the music of Angelo Badalamenti, in his third collaboration with Schrader. His work here is intensely operatic, pure yearning and longing and desire in the form of sweeping orchestral compositions; probably most famous for “Laura Palmer’s Theme” from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the main theme in Forever Mine—present at this climactic moment—is strings not synths, but has a similar emotional effect via a rising... rising... rising... melody where the music slowly tips over into an impossibly emotional place, a place where you have no choice but to surrender and give yourself over to what’s unfolding in front of you.

Everything about the movie is coordinated to maximize the emotional impact of the film’s simple two-people-fall-in-love-but-can’t-be-together storyline. Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey spare no expense in creating a world that’s half dream, half memory; hazy, glowing surfaces in a 4:3 frame (another throwback to maximize the classical Hollywood moods), the hot sun of the Florida beach setting giving everything a sparkling, otherworldly aura. Which is all designed to make it seem like Fiennes and Mol are the two most beautiful people in the world, that not even fate can prevent their dreams becoming reality. It all draws you in, making you lean forward in your seat just to get a whiff of the intoxicating aroma of the film’s romance. It’s old Hollywood escapism at its finest: not making you forget the world, but so forcibly drawing you into its own heightened fantasy world that you lose yourself in the unfolding drama, reality intermingling with unreality towards the purpose of experiencing emotions realer than real. Schrader’s liberal use of dissolves furthers this sense of unreality, morphing time to the will of the drama itself. When Fiennes is framed for a crime by Liotta to get him out of the way, he spends his time in prison writing love letter after love letter to Mol; Schrader edits the sequence into a dynamic montage of images and voiceover, letting the cuts and dissolves actively convey the emotional weight of the letters rather than letting the words do all the work. The close-ups during the film’s emotional climax are the kind of thing cinema was invented for, the kind of thing that single-handedly justifies the practice of watching movies in the dark on 40-foot-tall screens.

 

It's ironic, then, that Forever Mine wouldn’t actually be released in movie theatres at all. The film premiered at TIFF in 1999, but distribution offers weren’t enough to cover the $18 million budget; production company J&M Entertainment was forced to file for bankruptcy and the insurers ended up selling Forever Mine to the cable TV channel Starz as part of a package with a handful of other unreleased films from the company. So it wouldn’t be until a year after its premiere that the film appeared on television in 2000; a DVD release followed in 2001. (It’s appropriate, then, that today the easiest way to see the film is watching it free with ads on a number of streaming websites, such as Tubi.)

The film somehow seems to wear it’s disregarded-ness proudly, as it had never been destined for zietgeisty popular status from the moment it went into production. “The film I wanted to make should have been made ten years before. It had lost its historical slot,” said Schrader. In a culture that was becoming increasingly ironically detached, in a medium and industry that was beginning to undergo its most seismic change since the switch to talkies (Schrader’s old friend George Lucas had just released The Phantom Menace), Forever Mine was a cinematic object that just didn’t belong. A classical, romantic melodrama with an almost religious fervor, desire and memory writ large over every scene, a work of expressionistic art at the crossroads of Flaubert and Proust. Perhaps audiences just weren’t equipped to encounter a film that made good on the quote that opens it, from 19^th century English literary critic Walter Pater: “It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.” If there’s two things Forever Mine absolutely is, it’s beautiful and strange—given its vibes forward filmmaking, I think audiences today are in a better place to appreciate it than ever before. It’s a clear cousin of a different strange and beautiful 1999 film, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, another tale of lust and desire that audiences and critics mostly didn’t take to at the time—a fellow outrageous forage into an original world, to bring it full circle with Schrader’s appreciation of Kubrick. That was Kubrick’s last film, and 25 years later the aging Schrader may finally be gearing up to make his own last film, if his recent Facebook declaration that “Everytime I think I’m ready to die I come up with a new script idea” is any indication. Eyes Wide Shut has rightfully had its reputation restored amongst cinephiles for the masterpiece that it is; I impatiently await the day that the same can be said for Forever Mine.