Only You
First screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Norman Jewison. Cast: Marisa Tomei, Robert Downey Jr., Bonnie Hunt, Joaquim de Almeida, Fisher Stevens, John Benjamin Hickey, Billy Zane, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Antonia Rey, Adam LeFevre. Screenplay: Diane Drake (based on the DSM IV). VOR:①
I wish there were something to say. Studio-era directors could have raised this movie's game immensely. An obscurity now, and fair enough.
Actively insane? And actively ill-made, despite a creative lineup that inspires great confidence: Norman Jewison, Luciana Arrighi, Milena Canonero, frigging Sven Nykvist. A couple of those folks are guiltless, and it's not Canonero's fault that in the 90s, men's clothes and especially their pants were made from giant, barely repurposed tarpaulins. Similarly, I can't blame the makeup department or Marisa Tomei for the fact that I don't personally understand aggro-tweezing eyebrows until they are spider silk. Still, even Canonero's outfits for Tomei are sometimes more chic in concept than execution, and (deep breath), I thought Nykvist Goes to Rome would guarantee a better-looking movie than this. Doesn't help to have up-and-down composer Rachel Portman sneaking around with her buckets of acacia honey, pouring it on everyone and everything, like she's John Travolta and the movie is Carrie White.
The real problem is that Only You's script feels written by a teenager who came home from Stalker in Seattle in Summer '93 and thought, "What if Annie were considerably more demented and went all the way to Italy in a wedding dress because a Ouija board told her as an 11-year-old girl the name of the only man she could ever love?" And somehow this got fast-tracked into production, hitting theaters just 16 months later?
That hurried pace meant that a bitter schism among producers about whether Only You needed a wish-fulfillment B-plot, with three voting For and two strongly Against, never got satisfactorily resolved. So in addition to the center-ring in(s)anity of Marisa Tomei racing around Italy because she's heard that her mythic "Damon Bradley" might be there, and may or may not be Robert Downey, Jr., we also have Bonnie Hunt as Tomei's wisecracking sister-in-law, Kate, in the passenger's seat. Kate is sometimes above it all slinging barbs, sometimes pathetically weeping, sometimes on the verge of canoodling with Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida as an Italian store manager who's the only human in the movie, sometimes tsk-tsked by the script for even thinking to stray from her cartoon-villain husband, sometimes misplaced entirely for pivotal stretches of this strangely shaped film, cut together by the pink-hearted editor who later made the romances so moving in Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean. In Bonnie Hunt's long, sometimes sparkling career as comic sidekick, this is not a high point.
Everyone agrees that Hollywood gives people and especially young women notions of love and romance that are untenable and often ruinous. When we're talking about the collective, we more or less have consensus. When we're looking at an individual case, even those caught red-handed amidst deranged malpractice in the name of amore, we hear, "Aww, it's just a movie I thought it was sweet." Only You offers a heroine who is allowing her Ouija board to dictate her romantic life over a decade later, to the tune of last-minute international flights and minor misdemeanors, further stymieing a much-needed entrance into adulthood. This doesn't mean she's not already engaged, to a doltish podiatrist played by John Benjamin Hickey, but the women in these movies are often more willing to seek an escape route from a farcically bad match by searching across an ocean for a man who may not exist than to say to the guy in front of them, "I have to be honest to both of us, this engagement makes no sense." And when the man of her literal dreams does materialize in Italy, and then he lies to her for days, and then gets caught and rejected, and then re-insinuates himself and lies to her for even more days with even greater pre-meditarion, and gets caught and sent firmly packing...guess who she still winds up with? Kissing in the aisle of an airplane that we hope is headed straight for Shutter Island?
I'm not gonna, like, testify to Congress about Only You, but I do think it should come with a Surgeon General's warning about dangerously high levels of Bad Romance. And I was rooting for this one! Robert Downey, Jr., back when almost no one would insure him. Marisa Tomei, any time, but especially when all she heard was, "Jack Palance read the wrong name and the Deep Oscar State won't admit it!!" Let these two make out! Let them strike a lustrously brunette blow against Hollywood's ridiculous blonde hegemony! Let them have fun in Italy! Let me have fun in Italy. Instead I felt invited over to a friend's kitchen where for some reason she wanted me to watch her make cannolis, and for some reason I complied, but she got the same recipe wrong five times in a row, repeating the same mistakes. Good for her for laughing at herself, but why doesn't either of us value our time more than this? Grade:D–
P.S.: I can't do better than the wonderful and unfairly unknown Rita Kempley, Washington Post film critic of the 80s and 90s, who said of this script: "Written by Diane Drake, a former industry executive, Only You marries fairy tale to movie blueprint. All the standard ingredients have been included, but Drake hasn't put anything of herself—or if she has, she's in trouble—into this exercise in the mechanics of ardor." Drake's other credit is Nancy Meyers's What Women Want, hardly a topic on which I'm inclined to trust her, but not as chilling as the fact that Tomei's character in Only You teaches small children!
