Something to Talk About
First screened in August 1995 / Most recently screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Lasse Hallström. Cast: Julia Roberts, Dennis Quaid, Kyra Sedgwick, Robert Duvall, Gena Rowlands, Haley Aull, Brett Cullen, Muse Watson, Anne Shropshire, Ginnie Randall, David Huddleston. Screenplay: Callie Khouri.
Amazing that one of Julia Roberts's least-talked-about movies, especially from her 90s-spanning commercial heyday, is the one called Something to Talk About. Also amazing that Roberts, Sven Nykvist, and Gena Rowlands (sniffle, tears) got together to make something, directed in U.S. horse country by Swedish Lasse Hallström and inexplicably executive produced by Goldie Hawn, who isn't in it.
Also amazing that this 1995 dramedy, neither a hit nor a worrying trouble spot like Mary Reilly or Michael Collins, quietly contains the best-cast family of four in all of Hollywood history. I believe that Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick are sisters more than I believe my own brother is my brother, and when you seat them next to Rowlands and Duvall, the bloodlines announce themselves.
Something to Talk About starts out better than I remembered, before reminding me why my memories were so vague. Somehow missing that anyone married to Dennis Quaid in a movie will be cheated on, Roberts's Grace has a memorable way of discovering and then reacting to the infidelity—with Nykvist perfectly capturing, with all his years of experience, the exact degree of humiliated and furious flush that seeps into Roberts's face as she tries to conceal that epiphany from her daughter, sitting right beside her. For the next 45 minutes or so, Roberts gets her first real on-screen run-through of sustained anger, or almost any anger, and it's thrilling to watch her do it, years before Erin Brockovich wielded it as one of her many formidable energies and before Anna in Closer quietly seethed and self-hated and sorrowed and seethed again.
The script, by Thelma & Louise's Callie Khouri, initially charts a strong course, two parts drama to one part comedy, through a woman's horrified embarrassment at what she now considers an adulthood of wrong choices but also her instant, firm decision to show no leeway to her straying partner, even as she's reprimanding herself. Sedgwick is a perfectly saucy executive officer in bringing Quaid down a peg (or, in her most memorable moment, down to the floor). She's also a tart voice of honesty to her sister as well, even if I never quite understood why she's so committed to very high heels while stalking around the dirt corrals and pebbled driveways of the family ranch. Ten feet from her front door, every single day, these shoes are already a problem? Roberts does great work, too, in scenes where papa Duvall tries to shame her into forgiving Quaid and quiescent mama Rowlands tries to help her see that sometimes men "slip" but they shouldn't be castigated for it. Everyone is good enough in all these passages that you stop thinking of Hallström as the guy who soon became an anodyne Cider House ruler and Chocolat-ier and remember he was, in 1995, continuing a really strong run of quietly offbeat, tonally rangy, emotionally perceptive family studies, including the wonderful, dumbly disregarded Once Around and the winningly singular What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
By hour 2, Hallström and Khouri, however united or divided, seem to lose control of their story and of why they're telling it. They want Roberts and even Rowlands to become spitfires of newfound self-respect, but they also kind of espouse the "sometimes men slip" philosophy previously up for critique. They want Roberts to resume the veterinary career she abandoned to be Quaid's wife and Daddy's ranch manager, but they also don't really want to show us any of her professional mettle. Ever. Like, at all, until one of many obvious reshoots near the end where she's Walking Out of a Class™, demurely clutching some books like Sandra Dee. There's a whole important horse derby that's kind of marginal but sometimes central to Something to Talk About's competing plotlines, and it contains two other erratic threads about Duvall's overestimation of his abilities and about the ingratitude he shows to a seasoned trainer and rider, Hank, who's barely a character except when he is. Ditto for another guy whose name I've already forgotten, played by Brett Cullen, who is plainly set up to be Roberts's too-speedily-chosen transitional fling, then as in point of fact a very good option for her, then as an abrupt non-entity as the movie hems and haws and re-hems and double-haws about how much punishing of Quaid is too much.
It's weird and dispiriting to see a movie that's all about a woman (and maybe women?) coming into her own that absolutely quails at coming into its own. I also see evidence here that the core team might have wanted a sloppy, lifelike story that ends neither in heroic autonomy nor in compulsory reconciliation, and where people kind of commit to sudden, exciting changes in outlook or action but also retreat from them within days. I would get that, and it would be consistent with some of Hallström's signatures and with why a cast of this caliber would sign up. But as is true of its late-change title, Something to Talk About has a kind of milquetoast identity crisis that is unlikely to mean much to anyone, unmooring the movie from being any of the things it had a strong shot of being. For the last 45 minutes, whether because of more reshoots, or an intended character point, or a pandemic of indecision, nobody can even agree on a hairstyle for Roberts. Chaos reigns!
Still, I admired watching these actors explore and relate throughout, even when I stopped believing or even totally tracking their story. And I don't always mind a movie that generates a lot of interest till halftime, even if it eventually loses its nerve and its way. You can see, too, that Roberts is enjoying some newfound flintiness, and working equally well with the actress playing her young daughter as with the legends playing her parents. People were wondering if her career was running out of steam around this moment, but even if we grant the hindsight factor, it's pretty clear she was just gearing up. Grade:C+
