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Here’s your setup: Elaine (Frances O’Connor) and David (Simon Baker) are a nice, attractive married couple. Affection is still there for both of them but we can sense they are headed into that level of marriage known as contentment. We know this basically because they aren’t going at it like rabbits on the night of the apocalypse. Chet (Gregory Smith) is a 15-year old at a nearby high school who apparently does nothing but swim, get picked on and work at the ice cream shop.

One night Elaine and David walk in and strike up a conversation with the young lad consisting mostly of “guess our ages” like he was a carnival barker whose prize was free dessert. For whatever creepy reason, Elaine looks Chet up and down like he was Brad Pitt instead of the skinny, barely out-of-pubescence kid that he is. Even more creepy considering the subtext of how Elaine has already told us that she’s not ready to have a child. Unless he’s about 15.

The couple immediately take Chet into their lives like some kind of surrogate child, inviting him out for a night on the karaoke town with their lesbian friends, to their house for dinner and even promising to take him to Disney World. I’d love to see that commercial spot, since once you’ve just committed statutory rape what are you going to do now?

Oh, have I jumped ahead? What the hell. Yes, Chet and Elaine jump each other’s bones almost never acknowledging the age factor, only the adultery factor which leads her to immediately tell poor hubby. David, meanwhile, has been privy to the crush of one of his students at the all-girls school he teaches the history of the Khmer Rouge to. But not a single element of any of this is more fascinating then how David’s classroom is stuck with the world’s most ineffective blackboard eraser in history.

That’s the kind of thing I was thinking about during Book of Love, which continues to fly in the face of anything resembling a plausible situation or emotion (save for David’s one true reaction at work to the bad news.) Just once it’d be nice for one of their friends to ask why the couple is hanging around with this kid. Or someone to tell the filmmakers that bad symbolism sticks out even more when the drama is unconvincing. Oooh, David and Elaine sit in their respective cars while its raining. Her wipers are going, his face is blurred by the raindrops. It’s amazing that B.J. Thomas isn’t heard on the soundtrack. After David is asked to be a sperm donor for the lesbian baby, we cut to a shot of a spouting lawn sprinkler. Subtle.

“Does the grammar really matter as long as you get the idea right,” asks one character? My answer would be ABSOLUTELY especially when the idea is all over the map. You can get credit for something, but Book of Love is beyond even that. O’Connor has been an actress I’ve respected for awhile now, but between this and Timeline I just don’t know anymore. Maybe she can endlessly twirl herself at the end of this film into a good role. It’s only part of an inexplicable epilogue where one character ends up with another (whom he’s never met in the course of the film) in CAMBODIA only to discover that there are still some land mines out there. It’s only a shame they weren’t standing on it holding Book of Love’s script when it went off.

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originally posted: 01/26/04 16:07:48
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