UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
Starring Diane Lane
Directed by
Opens Friday, September 19
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The real Frances Mayes, who is a creative writing professor emerita at San Francisco State University, likes scorpions. The character Frances Mayes, played by Diane Lane in Under The Tuscan Sun, is freaked out by their black stingy bodies.
The novel Under the Tuscan Sun which inspired the film of the same name, chronicles Mayes’s taste bud experiences in Italy. Tuscany would be a heavenly playground for a serious poet with a trained tongue for gourmet cooking, and her passion for the area shows in her book.
Unfortunately, the movie comes across as more pathetic than poetic. Divorced and out of place on a "Gay & Away" bus tour of Italy, Mayes wanders off the bus and falls for a dilapidated villa called Bramasole,. Though it would seem to be a terrible idea to buy the villa, Mayes is convinced that terrible ideas are to be embraced. Back on the bus, the tour happens to drive by this villa and Mayes bails in a flurry of dust. She then proceeds to finagle the purchase of the villa from the hands of a crotchety old superstitious woman. The rest of the movie is about love and failure, an adorable kitten, renovations from hell and a true friendship with a lesbian tossed about in a salad of Roman Catholic icons.
Audrey Wells was inspired enough by Mayes’s book to write a screenplay for this movie, but it appears that Wells opted for a sugar-coated, bite-size sampling of the book instead of giving us a full-meal deal. Sadly, somewhere between Wells’s adaptation of the novel and Lane’s performance, something has been lost.
Lane won accolades with her performance in Unfaithful. Here, however, she plays Mayes without much excitement, although she does get on top of an Italian guy who cracks clever mutations of American jokes.
There are many humorous one-liners and gorgeous vistas in this movie, but when you’re not laughing, too often you finds yourself cringing with embarrassment at the pathetic trajectory of Wells’s storyline.
If you can, sit back and let the film try to take you somewhere far, far away. If you don’t get there, read the professor’s book of the same name and make a more rewarding voyage. As the movie slogan says, "Life offers you a thousand chances… all you have to do is take one." Take a chance if you wish. However, against the mandate of the movie, don’t expect too much, except that Lane will take her shirt off and smack the living bejeezus out of a scorpion that the real Mayes would have probably reverently carried outside in a jar. |
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