A Love Song For Bobby Long

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“Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.”

Robert Frost

Read the above quote three times, really fast. Finished? Okay, that’s about how long “A Love Song For Bobby Long” (where this quote came from) played in theaters before going to video/DVD. With great anticipation, I had read about the coming of this film in numerous screenwriting and film magazines. A Golden Globe nominee with a phenomenal cast, there was lots of great buzz about it. The dramatic script, a first-film by writer/director Shainee Gabel, was good enough to attract top-of-her-game Scarlett Johansson as Purslane Hominy and the always interesting John Travolta, as Bobby Long. This film should have stuck to the screen, but due to a lack of major advertising dollars and poor reviews from the vast army of sycophant reviewers, it disappeared faster than Chili Palmer at a wake for his second movie.

The film presents the rich romanticism of the decaying out-skirts of New Orleans seedier neighborhoods, and three people who come to grips with lives haunted by their pasts. Of course this is nearly always what heavy dramas are about, but the character studies here are so fully developed that it seems as if this could have had a place on-stage rather than on film. That may be part of the problem, for while the characters are interesting, the movie is somewhat slow and laborious in places.

The wayward Purslane returns home after learning that her mostly absent mother (she was reared by her grandmother) has passed away. The only things of value left to her: a suitcase filled with her mother’s favorite books, partial title to a run-down house in a suspect neighborhood, and the two run-down alcoholics that reside in the house. Bobby Long and his sidekick, Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht) are supportive, brothers-in-arms drunks that while away sweaty Louisiana days drinking, sitting on the stoop smoking and generally wasting their lives. Lawson, a former student of Professor Long’s, has taken up with the older man intending to write a book about the one-time fabulous Auburn Prof., but eventually we learn their current situation is more one of being forced together by rueful events than that of true friendship.

When Purslane arrives to claim her inheritance the two men, who have no-where else to go, convince her that her mother has left the house to all three of them and that while she may stay, they are not going to leave. Over the course of months an uneasy truce, nearly understanding and friendship, develops between the three; until she learns that they have lied and that the home is entirely hers and they return from the bar one afternoon to find their belongs on the street.

This is a film about redemption, making amends and turning one’s life around, even when there may be no time left for such important activities, and though it moves at times like a ten-ton bulldozer the dialogue and acting are worth the video store search for Bobby Long.