Ray Pride

The smells are unavailing.

Many things about the city of New Orleans and the legends about New Orleans and the palaver that seeps through New Orleans can be called strong, but the smells linger in memory: a precious ripeness.

Shainee Gaibel's endearing "A Love Song for Bobby Long" is several things, but memorable mostly for being a shamelessly overstuffed, lingo-laden slice of Southern chitchat, zinging with literary citations and bibulous banter. The story opens with an extended series of shots of John Travolta's Bobby Long, a middle-aged man with platinum-white hair and a floppy straw hat, making his way across town at a modest-yet-determined rate of speed, outside of the usually shown French Quarter and deeper into the Bywater and Ninth Ward. Cinematographer Elliot Davis ("Thirteen," "King of the Hill") captures the bright colors of storefronts, the dustiness of streets and sidewalks, with sweet acuity.

Late of a June, early of a July, N'awlins is dust and smell, but hardly ever to the rank of stench. New Orleans: a dusty bayou fug encourages all manner of moistness. Pick up a paperback in a used bookstore that's not air-conditioned, and you can smell the rot in the moment. Barroom smoke and beer waft reside outside each tavern and club. The Gulf is ripe, and you can also drive by the factory where fried fruit pies are tendered in the middle of the night, the doors are raised and the air is sticky with powdered sugar and peach and cherry and more.

This sort of scented, deeply romantic, foolishly self-destructive fug is the bed that "A Love Song for Bobby Long" makes for itself: You meander or you mosey, but the scents, they manage to trickle alongside. Bobby Long is an academic whose chosen stink is failure. He's steeped in it. Quick with the secondhand apercu, Bobby is a day-long Quote-o-Matic, slapping down citations from the likes of Robert Frost like quarters on a bar counter, "Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length." With unspecified damage that's sure to slowly unpeel as it does in humid tales like these, Bobby shares his domicile with his former student, Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), a writer who is less Bobby's protégé than witness to a mutual day-to-day pickling. They live in a small, apt house, hardly larger than a shotgun shack, and the décor hits so many notes, including the dusty kitchen that's a little too large with a card table off to one side that's a little too small. Look and space and scent: it's like taking a walk on a different side of that self-consciously forlorn city.

But that's not the story, nor the lit'ry self-consciousness of its stalled characters on the skids; the plotting kicks in with the entrance of one Pursey Will (Scarlett Johansson), daughter to a saloon singer everyone in the district had loved when she was a younger spitfire: much like young Pursey. There are drawn-out complications about just who owns the property, allowing the odd, Tennessee Williams-like trio--alcoholic, loquacious failure; procrastinating, self-denying acolyte; statuesque, headstrong young beauty--to dabble in emotional fireworks. The house is stacked wall-to-wall with more volumes than furniture, like the inside of a neglected mind. Pursey reads books, too, notably a battered, mass-market paperback of Carson McCuller's classic of the sensation of being an outsider, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter."

Cut through the clutter of plotting and see-it-from-a-mile-away family relations, and there is a generous and hopeful tenor to the entire prospect: provisional families are sometimes thicker than blood, literature can be more alluring than life, Scarlett Johansson can embody a particular sort of rarely depicted intelligence in twentyish women, and a belief in romance can lead us to make proper sacrifices the moment we are called upon.

"Bobby Long" will talk your ear off anytime starting on Friday.

(2005-01-25)

Also by Ray Pride

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