Random Hearts

Action, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

Harrison Ford	William Van Den Broeck
Kristin Scott Thomas	Kay Chandler
Charles Dutton	Alcee
Bonnie Hunt	Wendy Judd
Dennis Haysbert	Detective George Beaufort
Sydney Pollack	Carl Broman
Richard Jenkins	Truman Trainor
Paul Guilfoyle	Dick Montoya
Susanna Thompson	Peyton Van Den Broeck
Peter Coyote	Cullen Chandler
Kristin Scott-Thomas
Charles S. Dutton	Alcee
Lynne Thigpen
Dylan Baker
Christina Chang
Bill Cobbs
Susan Floyd
Paul Guilfoyle (II)

Director	Sydney Pollack
Producer	Sydney Pollack; Marykay Powell; Warren Adler
Writer	Warren Adler; Darryl Ponicsan

Reviled by critics and largely ignored by moviegoers when released in 1999, Random Hearts is a pox on the reputations of Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, and director Sydney Pollack, but it doesn't entirely deserve its lowly fate. The movie's lugubriously paced and its repressed passions are dulled under the weight of relentless melancholy, but Pollack deserves credit for defying the Hollywood Zeitgeist with a mature, substantial film about the power of betrayal to reach beyond the grave.

Ford plays a Washington, D.C. detective; Scott Thomas is a Congresswoman in the midst of a re-election campaign. When their spouses die in a plane crash, the cop is convinced they'd been having an affair, and his obsessive, masochistic quest for the painful truth draws him closer to the Congresswoman despite the mutual risks to their careers and domestic privacy. While she hides behind a façade of denial, his agonized investigation makes him simultaneously unappealing (a risk Ford may have taken as a challenge), sympathetic, and sadly compelling.

Pollack takes his own chances by keeping everything so relentlessly downbeat, but anyone receptive to the story will find that Random Hearts is a subtly rewarding study of tormented adults who've discovered too late the weaknesses of their seemingly stable marriages. It's anything but cheerful, and a subplot involving a corrupt cop (Dennis Haysbert) is a formulaic distraction. But Random Hearts provides welcome relief from dramas that flirt with emotional anguish without delving into its deeper consequences. --Jeff Shannon