(2004) Adapted from Ronald Everett Capps's novel by director/screenwriter Shainee Gabel, with soundtrack from Nathan Larson and additional songs written and sung by Grayson Capps, this character-driven story of a lonely hearts club of three damaged souls out of key takes place from 2002 to 2004 and was filmed in pre-Katrina New Orleans (but notice the upside-down American flag on a porch).

When Lorraine Will (1962-2002), a local singer/songwriter, dies, Bobby Long (John Travolta) telephones her 18-year-old daughter, Perseline Will (Scarlet Johansson), in Panama City, Florida, leaving a message on the answering machine. Persy takes a Greyhound bus to Louisiana but arrives the day after the funeral because her live-in boyfriend Lee hadn't let her know about the message until too late.

Residing in her mother's two-bedroom house, bookcases full of literature, are a pair of alcoholic derelict reprobates, Bobby, in his late 40s, formerly a college English professor (constantly quoting from famous authors) escaped from Alabama, self-described troubadour and poet, with his former teaching assistant from Auburn University, Lawson Pines, in his early 30s, who has been writing a novel about Bobby "too long, not long enough."

While it's not clear where they get money for their booze, they tell Persy that her mother left the property to the three of them. The scene is so unappealing that she goes back to the bus depot where she reads Carson McCullers's novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, waiting for the bus then decides not to board back to the "Redneck Riviera," as Bobby calls it. Returning to the house, she moves into her mother's bedroom (Lawson then sleeps on a couch in the livingroom) and begins domesticating the premises.

Cecil (Dan Rhodes) tells Perseline, who was raised by her grandmother and invented memories of having a mother she can't remember, that he had been very close to Lorraine ("You meant the world to her"), of whom she shares a striking resemblance, and helped name her after a yellow wildflower (aka purslane). She also hears a rumor that her father had been a saxophone player in her mother's band and a one-night-stand. "I want to be normal," the high-school dropout with only waitressing experience admits, "it's just not my life."

Bobby drives Lawson's car back to Alabama, calls his ex-wife Juliet without speaking to her, and sells the car for $300. Meanwhile, Lawson offers to help Persy get her GED; she agrees if he will quit drinking. When Bobby returns sans vehicle but with presents and a forged transcript, giving Persy enough high-school credits to enroll as a senior, Lawson says: "It's time to tell her" about a secret they've kept to themselves.

Summer fades into fall, Persy begins attending classes, winter approaches, and Lawson steals a Christmas tree for the holidays. A quiet but deepening relationship begins to form between Lawson and Persy, though he also spends time with Georgianna (Deborah Kara Unger), part owner of a bar; he tells Persy of his nine years of penance with Bobby who seeks redemption: "Students loved him, faculty hated him, women wanted him." He also explains some of Bobby's history, how his face got broken in a fight and about a tragedy in his family for which he feels eternally guilty.

On a date with a high-school boy, Persy puts on one of his mother's dresses for an evening in a jazz club where she hears Junior (David Jensen), who suffers from emphysema, playing sax and learns that he had been a member of her mother's band.

Fearful of doctors and of dying alone, Bobby finally goes to the hospital at Lawson's insistence after blood appears in his urine and for an infected toe. Lee shows up with a letter, telling Persy, "They used you," but when she refuses to leave with him Lee pronounces: "A weed is just a weed, no matter how pretty the flower."

Among her mother's things she finds a packet of letters and a song, "My Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" that goes with an inscription inside the paperback copy of McCullers's novel. Bobby quotes from T.S. Eliot's poem "Little Gidding" (the last of his Four Quartets): "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time." (These lines have appeared in a number of other films, including The Magus, The Fog of War, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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