This Can't Be Love

Two aging actors, who had a brief but intense marriage in the 1940s, are reunited decades later to find that issues between them are not resolved.

Early on we can virtually glimpse the "feel-good" (knock me over the # head) inevitable ending, but it's the all-too floral and busy music score that truly puts the boot in, completely sealing this film's fate. Here, moments from Katharine Hepburn's semi-fictionalised later life could have played more dramatic and tender, but are instead punctuated with jubilant wind instruments taking us by full-force into a tonally confused realm of lightheartedness. Any tension or depth is cut dead with an incessant noodling of notes which writes every plot development off as something purely whimsical. At one point, Hepburn's elderly character ends up in a jail cell and it's all laughs, apparently, from beginning to end. Some films can be too bleak - 'This Can't Be Love' suffers the reverse dilemma. A lot of wind and too much dismissed poignancy is largely the result of misguided music direction to an otherwise modest idea. I felt as if I could have vomited a flute or clarinet by the end of it.

I can't help but wonder how Jason Bateman must have felt when his agent told him he was going to get to make a film with Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Quinn! Oh to be a fly on that wall....! The film itself is a gentle tale of the two, now retired, actors who've got quite a bit of an history. Hepburn has engaged Bateman as her chauffeur and general dogsbody. He meets a young girl whom he introduces to his boss but he doesn't know that she has a hidden agenda and that involves Quinn, an autobiography and a whole load of trouble for the young man. Hepburn is not at her best here; she is clearly just playing herself, but she gels well with the charming Quinn through their rather set-piece skirmishes. It's a fine piece of cinema nostalgia that might just encourage folks to watch some of their earlier, more challenging films. As it is, it's an easy but unremarkable watch.