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Critics Consensus: Perhaps worth checking out if only for the opportunity to see reliably powerful work from Annette Bening and Ed Harris, The Face of Love undermines its leads' performances with a scattershot script and aimless direction.
Critic Consensus: Perhaps worth checking out if only for the opportunity to see reliably powerful work from Annette Bening and Ed Harris, The Face of Love undermines its leads' performances with a scattershot script and aimless direction.
All Critics (72) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (30) | Rotten (42)
The Face of Love's story runs and blotches like cheap mascara.
Many are going to find the plot questionable and the protagonist's actions deplorable. But for those who've experienced loss and grief that seems irreparable, it is a film that will strike a deep and melancholy chord.
Old age, romance, grief, delusion and desperation all intersect in "The Face of Love," a far-fetched tale that nevertheless manages to be affecting.
What's mesmerizing here is what happens in Bening's eyes, in her complicated smiles, in her eloquent quiet.
Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.
Like so much about this film, the finale hints at Hitchcock but settles for soap opera.
... breathtakingly simple but yet so powerful in conveying grief and what it's like for the person left behind.
Even really fine actors like Annette Benning and Ed Harris can't do much with this ludicrous doppelganger story.
... the material repeatedly shies away from the eeriness and unease the intriguing premise deserves-this could have been melodrama of a higher order.
This thoughtful, if slightly melodramatic, film is a throwback to the four hankie pictures of the 1940s...
The Face of Love quickly accumulates emotional subplots that distract from this central idea.
Bening and Harris pour so much genuine emotion into their roles in this Vertigo-like romantic melodrama that they just about carry the film's fanciful premise.
The intention was surely a love story but here we have creepiness as a woman pursues a man who looks exactly like her dead husband. The actors work well however in that creepiness up until the film makers take the easy out of an ending with a bow on top.
Super Reviewer
Annette Bening and Ed Harris up against pure corn and soap.
Five years after her husband Garrett(Ed Harris) drowned in Mexico, Nikki(Annette Bening) is still very much grieving. But she feels well enough so that her daughter Summer(Jess Weixler) can return to her chaotic life in Seattle while Roger(Robin Williams), a family friend, comes by to use the pool. In any case, Nikki decides to visit the art museum she used to go to with her husband. While there, she sees Tom(Ed Harris), a dead ringer for Garrett. To be honest, "The Face of Love" would have worked much better as a short story which would not only have kept things ambiguous, but could have ended long before the story ended up running into a wall. Visualizing this concept would have been tricky under the best of circumstances which this is clearly not. But what makes the movie more than a little watchable and sort of worthwhile is the abundant charisma of and chemistry between its two lead actors. Now, if I could only figure what Robin Williams is supposed to be doing here.
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