Kevin Bacon pretty much admitted it: There was something a bit odd about Loverboy, the Victoria Redel novel he and wife Kyra Sedgwick bring to the screen today as director, co-producer and co-stars. In its poetic ruminations about Emliy (Sedgwick), a woman so traumatized by her girlhood alienation that she has a child for little more than possession’s sake, Bacon told a press gathering last weekend that he found an intriguing (if undefinable) appeal in its jumpy storyline and creepy, faltering relationships–both of which he and Sedgwick sought to apply to their adaptation.

Row, row, row your lukewarm family drama: Kyra Sedgwick and Dominic Scott Kay star in Kevin Bacon’s Loverboy (Photo: ThinkFilm)
I think I knew what he was talking about, but not because I had the same experience reading Redel’s novel (in fact, I have not read it). Rather, it is clear that Bacon’s film refracts a workable enough conflict–haunted mother cannot let go of her 6-year-old son–through an assemblage of characters too one-dimensional to resolve anything. There is no antagonist in Loverboy, only a parade of victims: Take Emily as a girl, for example (played by Bacon and Sedgwick’s daughter Sosie), whose parents’ exclusive love for each other leaves the youngster dangling in a honey-hued swamp of ’70s kitsch. Or Emily’s son Paul (Dominic Scott Kay), who is aware of and helpless to remedy his captivity, and whose performance arcs consist of cycles of hysteria, fantasy and soft-focus innocence. Or the well-meaning outsiders (played by Matt Dillon, Blair Brown and an excellent Oliver Platt among others) whose attempts to befriend the pair result in a succession of melodramatic and ultimately tragic meltdowns.
In other words, Loverboy asks you to buy into its archetypes, and then banks on nuance to attract your sympathy. Net yield? Zero. So I asked Bacon: Is this the oddity he had in mind?
“Both as an actor and a director, I’m much more into gray than I am in black and white,” Bacon told The Reeler. “The black and white has got its place in certain kinds of movies, and certainly, I’m the first guy to cheer when the bad guy gets it. I’ve made movies and played those parts that really fit into that mold. With a film like this, though, the lead character is the perfect example: Here’s a character who’s on her way to commiting this heinous crime and yet along the way, I wanted you to see the magical side of her, the funny side of her, the sexy side, the romantic side of this character. She is, in her own way, a victim–a victim of her own kind of crumbling psyche and a victim of some of the pain she suffered as a child. And her parents, they’re not the baddies. That’s a lot more like life to me.”
Me too. If only life was detectable in the film. That said, complaints I have heard about it being a Bacon/Sedgwick vanity project are somewhat off-base; Sedgwick looks like a million bucks, but Loverboy hardly represents the chops showcase she scored in Personal Velocity or even on The Closer, if only because Bacon and screenwriter Hannah Shakespeare disallow Emily from stepping outside the proscribed realm of romance and neurosis. Bacon is serviceable as young Emily’s father, but his direction reflects an amateur’s stifling micromanagement: Dutch angles, slo-mo mother-and-child montages and, most gratingly, Hendrix-as-Pavlov flashback music to remind you what mood you should be in when Emily’s fantasy mom (Sandra Bullock) shows up on camera. I mean, hasn’t this guy been in half of the movies released since, like, 1984? Didn’t he work with Herbert Ross and Rob Reiner? Shouldn’t he know from cliches by now?
At any rate, “vanity project” at least implies “interesting failure” (think the Ritchie/Madonna remake of Swept Away, or Beatty/Bening redoing Love Affair), and Loverboy is less interesting than abjectly boring. In retrospect, maybe it was not “weirdness” that Bacon sensed while reading Redel’s work–it could have just been his better judgment being bludgeoned to death.

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