Stephanie Beacham shines in this film as Harriet Fox-Smith, the black sheep of a hoity English family. The ex-"Dynasty" star is still very beautiful and her Monte Carlo mystique and smoked-honey diction are eternal joys to behold. Beacham was born in Hertfordshire (though some biographies locate her birth in Casablanca), studied mime in Paris, and now lives between London and Los Angeles. Her brother has an OBE, as reward for introducing palm oil to New Guinea, and she won a People’s Choice award for "The Colbys". We could have seen more of this talented actress, but somehow her resume of TV soap appearances (she guested on "SeaQuest DSV" and "Beverly Hills 90210") matches her unique luxe/pop appeal. The well-titled fansite, simplystephaniebeacham.com, with its undulating blue velvet background, captures Stephanie’s ritzy essence best.
Trouble is, she’s only on screen for five minutes in Unconditional Love, and the rest of the movie sucks. Sucks. Lynn Redgrave does it again, somehow managing to overact and underplay at the same time, just as she did in Gods and Monsters, and it’s hard to see how talented, ballsy Kathy Bates could have ever been effective in this silly, feminine film. P.J. Hogan, the director of Muriel’s Wedding, can do much better than this painful celluloid water torture; Rupert Everett really needs to give his millennial poof routine the flick.
Bates plays Grace Beasley, an obedient tv-addict housewife, who travels to London for the funeral of her favorite singer Victor Fox (Jonathan Pryce) after her bored husband Max (Dan Aykroyd) leaves her. She meets Max’s valet, Dirk (Everett) who was actually the murdered star’s secret lover. Victor’s family (Beacham, Redgrave) are determined to keep their late brother’s private life a secret, but Dirk wants to hunt down his lover’s murderer. Grace rejects the Fox family’s self-serving advances and hooks up with Dirk to find the killer.
Needless to say, what follows is a rite-of-passage for all and sundry, with Grace finding various inner strengths and learning about unconditional love, and Dirk doing, well, much the same. The jokes implied in the set up are predictably used from time to time, with Dirk waking up in horror to find Grace sleeping next to him, and various acquaintances of Grace assuming she’s having a wild affair with Dirk, with much flustered explanation required to sort out all the frenzied gossip which ensues.
Romantic-comedy films need to have humour and have some kind of romantic tilt, and this film has neither. Bitter, pompous Everett cannot generate any sympathy as a grieving widow, and the few times we encounter Victor (in ghost form, dressed in a blue sequined suit …) we understand unreservedly why anyone would want him dead. “Zany” family-encounter scenes on American talk shows, with contrite characters jumping up in the audience to deliver unexpected monologues have been done to death in other films, and the murder-mystery that steam-engines the story is completely forgotten most of the time, and when it does surface, mental illness, the problems of the homeless and serial crossbow killings are treated with incongruous and ill-considered brevity.
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