Annette Benning and Ed Harris in a movie—how bad can it be? Very. The Face of Love has a tantalizing and fantastic premise: a widow sees a man, a painter, that looks exactly like her late husband and pursues a relationship with him. Unfortunately the overall execution of the story lacks any emotional honesty or practical realism to root the fantastic premise in a reality that can fully explore it without thinking that the whole enterprise is absurd.
Americans just aren’t that great with processing death and love, and this story requires a deft hand at both. I think that a Spanish such as Guillermo del Toro or French director would do a better job because even though The Face of Love does not use magical realism, it does border it with this premise. I have to buy the initial love story between the couple, and I didn’t. A Fantastic Woman is a great example of a movie that succeeds at getting its audience to completely buy into the idea that the two people that we’ve only known for a few moments are completely in love, and when one dies, the loss will be unfathomable and devastating. Here it just feels like an acting exercise for one actor to play two different men. Most movies centering widows have a prurient element that the filmmakers want the character to simultaneously be faithful and given perfect characteristics, but also date other people.
The Face of Love kills off the husband so quickly that it made me think that either the movie should have never shown the husband interact with the wife or more time should have been spent with them as a couple. He annoyed me instantly that honestly I did not feel his loss keenly. It was as if he only saw the end of A Star Is Born and thought of it as an activity suggestion, not a potentially dangerous diversion. Without her obsessive behavior throughout the movie, I would not have known that she was that deeply in love with him. Maybe it is the point, and she was unaware of it herself.
I realized that The Face of Love had no idea the emotional impression it actually had on viewers with actual feelings that live in the real world when Robin Williams was cast as the neighbor. I love him. He is a national treasure, rest in peace, so happy to see him, but in dramas, he can be creepy, and his turn as the friendly, nice guy neighbor made me anxious because I thought that maybe the movie was actually a thriller with a neighbor stalker, not a drama. Well, it isn’t. Let’s say there is no doppelganger eligible bachelor to dash the neighbor’s hopes at making a closer connection with the beautiful widow. His character is still not an option because he seems kind of entitled as if she owes him the next dance, and he has been waiting for her husband to kick the bucket. Maybe it was murder? I don’t think the filmmakers were intending to set off alarm bells, but they did.
The Face of Love also seems to think that there is only one direction that this story can take, and I absolutely disagree. There are at least three possibilities, but the lack of imagination explains the writers’ depiction of the widow’s Rube Goldbergian and unrealistic efforts with her new beau. There are so many variables: the widow’s reaction to encountering the doppelganger, the relationship status, and the revelation of the resemblance. Depending on the timing of each and the stage of the relationship at the time of the revelation, the relationship could work out or not or it could transform the nature of the relationship. The fact that the writers immediately decide that it will be a romance isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it could be a slower burn. When you get to the denouement, it doesn’t feel earned, especially the way that the painter reacts to everything and how the painter’s friends and family react and treat her once they meet her. It felt as if their reaction was the opposite of how most normal people would react if he told them the whole story.
There is a missed opportunity as the widow and her daughter fail to connect because of the opposite trajectories of their personal romantic lives throughout The Face of Love, but it is not explored in a meaningful way. When the protagonist cautions her daughter from getting so absorbed at the beginning of the movie, it alluded to the possibility that there was room for improvement on her marriage so potentially her relationship with the doppelganger could surpass her prior relationship, but instead the concept of the effect of love kind of sits like a poorly wrapped, ill defined blob for us to project warm, fuzzy feelings on and feel as if the protagonist and the painter were ultimately enriched regardless of whatever became of their relationship. I was incapable of believing that.
The Face of Love has a great cast, and none of the blame should be placed at their feet. I love Benning and watch her in anything; thus how I ended up watching this movie despite the poor reviews. Casting Harris was brilliant, especially considering that he played a painter before, specifically Jackson Pollock so it probably adds to his character’s credibility, but generally these people are ridiculous. This movie is a magical world where financial considerations are never a problem. The neighbor has the time to swim every morning. Is he retired? I actually know artists of all ages. Professors don’t get paid that much unless they have tenure, and since he was not a famous artist, I’m thinking that he doesn’t get paid that much for his paintings. Everyone has beautiful houses and can jump on a plane without a pause given to vacation time or the cost of the ticket. Being a stager is actually a thing. I also know architects, and they don’t necessarily have the ability to have huge beautiful homes in Los Angeles perfectly built to suit their tastes. Gorgeous to watch, but it was just another weight to add to my fraying suspension of disbelief.
If The Face of Love was using the conceit of her new relationship as a way to show her inability to move on despite her practical efforts to do so, and it turned out that the painter never existed, I think that the story could have worked, but the movie unfortunately makes the same mistake as the protagonist. While it acknowledges that he is a different person and shows us his life as an individual, it never treats his feelings as something that could diverge from hers in significant and possibly negative ways. It is possible to empathize with the widow and the painter without a meeting of the minds between the two characters. I just don’t buy that by the end of the movie, he would still be looking back at their relationship with rose colored glasses.