# Simpatico (1999)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

SIMPATICO (Fine Line) Starring: Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolte, Sharon Stone, Albert Finney, Catherine Keener, Shawn Hatosy, Kimberly Williams, Liam Waite. Screenplay: Matthew Warchus and David Nicholls, based on the play by Sam Shepard. Producers: Dan Lupovitz, Timm Oberwelland and Jean-Francois Fonlupt. Director: Matthew Warchus. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, adult themes) Running Time: 106 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

Sometimes, a play makes for a good film. Sometimes it doesn't. It's tough to put a finger on what can make a stage-to-screen translation fall flat, but I know it when I see it. Sometimes it feels as though a filmmaker doesn't know how to make a set piece feel like a film; other times the director seems to be doing little more than turning the film over to the actors reciting their lines. A play turned into a film can become AMADEUS, it's true. It can also become OLEANNA.

SIMPATICO doesn't fail because director Matthew Warchus can't give Sam Shepard's play a distinctly cinematic life (he does) or that he lets the actors run roughshod over the production (he does that too, but it's not the fatal flaw). In this case, the play itself is the thing. Jeff Bridges stars as a successful horse breeder named Lyle Carter who is preparing for his latest sale, a Triple Crown-winning stallion named Simpatico. Unfortunately, Carter has a dark past that's about to come back to haunt him in the form of old pal Vinnie Webb (Nick Nolte). Vinnie claims to be in legal trouble in California, trouble that could also make things uncomfortable for Carter. As the lives of the two men intertwine again, we learn in flashback of a scheme that gained the young Carter (Liam Waite), Vinnie (Shawn Hatosy) and Vinnie's girlfriend Rosie (Kimberly Williams) a huge bankroll. It was also a scheme with plenty of repercussions into the present, including changing the life of a one-time racing commissioner named Simms (Albert Finney).

Structurally, SIMPATICO is about as sound a script as they come. Revelations about the characters' pasts appear ever-so-gradually, each one adding a shade of significance to events that have gone before. As a tale of guilt and coming to terms with one's mistakes, it's intriguing enough consistently enough that you'll want to keep paying attention. It even offers some genuinely cinematic pleasures, from John Toll's eclectic cinematography to Stewart Copeland's jangly soundtrack. Far from the too-typical 1990s script of 1-2-3 plot development, SIMPATICO's story clicks along with unique rhythms.

Those rhythms just happen to be the rhythms of a play. No matter what is happening on screen in SIMPATICO, it never for a moment feels like the story belongs on film. The characters speak to each other in the clipped tones of a dialogue-dependent medium, full of loaded pauses and oblique references that should come with big glowing asterisks noting "Pay attention, this will be important later." Sub-plots and character developments are so fraught with significance -- Carter and Vinnie slipping casually into one another's lives; a horse that's not what he appears to be -- you can see the author nodding to himself at the cleverness of it all. Even the actors generally look like they're playing to the rafters, with Nick Nolte all a-growl as the seedy Vinnie and Albert Finney telegraphing his character's unambiguous ambiguity (only Catherine Keener, as a vaguely simple-minded woman unwitting involved in the story, shows a welcome subtlety). By the time Sharon Stone blows into the film from some community theater Tennessee Williams production to play Carter's wife, it seems almost impossible that all this is transpiring on a movie screen instead of live and in person.

It should go without saying that striving for thematic depth and complexity is not exclusive to the live theater, nor is a labyrinthine plot unworkable on screen. There's simply a quality to SIMPATICO that makes it feel grossly artificial as a film experience. It's easy to watch the film and understand what would make this story a slick, atmospheric character study as a play. As a film, however, it's inert, moving along so deliberately you may begin to feel that you're watching a staged reading committed to film. I don't know if someone could take Shepard's play and make it a workable film, but I know this one isn't it. SIMPATICO may make you want to go out and see it as a stage production ... unless, by the conclusion, you feel that you already have.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 paddock attacks:  4.

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