½*/****
starring Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Paul Le Mat, Rosanna Arquette
screenplay by James Howard & Arliss Howard, from stories by Larry Brown
directed by Arliss Howard
by Walter Chaw Arliss Howard's Big Bad Love (or, "Fear and Loathing in Appalachia") is both self-conscious and self-indulgent. It doesn't pass the sniff test in terms of truth and lack of pretense, malodorous with that peculiarly rank stink of hubris. Marking his auteur debut, veteran character actor Howard adapts a collection of Larry Brown short stories wearing three hats (star, director, and writer–co-writer, actually, with brother James), each of which fits uneasily if at all. As a director, Howard tosses so many gimmick shots and narrative tricks (dream sequences, fantasy sequences, magic realism, etc.) at the celluloid wall that it's almost a statistical impossibility for not a one of them to stick–but it happens. Gimmicks like fake voiceover news broadcasts are distracting and irritating at the best of times; when overused, as in Big Bad Love, they're screaming bores rather than endearing quirks. As an actor, Big Bad Love is evidently a vanity vehicle for Howard, and it's again something of a marvel that Howard is so consistently ineffective and emotionally flat. Onscreen for about 98% of the time, Howard's exercise in self-love backfires to the extent that every other performer he shares a scene with blows him off the screen. Finally, as screenwriters, the Brothers Howard prove themselves to lack a sense of grace in their symbolism and a sense of coherence in their narrative.
Big Bad Love is about Barlow (Howard), a drunken house painter who is also a frustrated writer. He dreams about his ex-wife Marilyn (Howard's real-life wife, Debra Winger) and gets the occasional dressing-down from his pageant-veteran mother (an embalmed Angie Dickinson). His best friend Monroe (Paul Le Mat), also a drunken house painter, is in love with funeral-home heiress Velma (Rosanna Arquette). Big Bad Love misuses its soundtrack while overusing the overwrought image of a man (boy, woman) running down a dark highway. Big Bad Love is also trailer park Magnolia: too long, too technically cutesy, too sure of its own cleverness and importance, and possessed of that peculiar, polar tension of being too dense about nothing at all. A little girl dies and there's not a wet eye in the house; a man gets a brain injury and we wonder how anyone can tell. There are so many things wrong with Big Bad Love, in fact, that it's easier just to say what's right: Michael Parks as a grizzled old drugstore owner, though perhaps he's only good by comparison.
