Passion Fish (Mike's Take)

Passion Fish

Written by John Sayles

Oh boy. I gotta tell you, man, I’m completely of two minds on this movie. For everything I really, really liked, there was something to frustrate me lurking right around the corner. Every single time. One step forward, one step, you know?

So this is going to be a pretty scattered write-up. Most of the stuff I really liked came in the first half, and most of the stuff I didn’t was in the back-end, so my cynicism will gradually creep in as I go. To me, this is a movie that starts strong and rambles its way to a pretty unsatisfying conclusion.

But about that first half, there are so many little things I appreciate. It’s the kind of subtle stuff that you might not notice if you weren’t aggressively taking notes like we are. I LOVE that the movie opens in the hospital. Like Lorenzo’s Oil, this movie isn’t wasting my time. May-Alice is in the hospital and it only takes a minute to figure out why. She’s paraplegic. We also learn she’s a soap opera star because the very first lines are her playing her character on television, which is a very clever touch. We know her past life, and we know what the rest of her life is going to be almost immediately.

She’s sent to her hometown to recover and a parade of caretakers come and go. I liked these scenes a lot, too. May-Alice’s acerbic nature caught me off guard, and I began to really like her, or at least enjoy her. It should be said that Mary McDonnell absolutely kills it in this movie. When it works, it’s usually because of her. Maybe my favorite small detail in the whole movie is how her native Louisiana accent slowly comes back over the course of the story.

Eventually, Chantelle comes into the picture. She’s a tough cookie, as they say. She ain’t gonna back down. Their dynamic is interesting and, once again, I like that the movie doesn’t go for histrionics. They feel like real people caught in a tough situation. But even though Chantelle’s relationship with May-Alice is ultimately the whole point of the movie, her introduction brings with it most of the movie’s problems. Characters flit in and out of their lives and never go anywhere. May-Alice’s alcoholic uncle, Chantelle’s drug dealer ex-boyfriend, May-Alice’s high school classmates, etc. That last one gave us a scene I actually enjoyed, but it never really built to anything. Only two characters really stick around, and they’re kind of sort of love stories? I don’t know. Passion Fish goes a long towards establishing that Rennie and Sugar could have a real impact on the ladies’ futures, but it never goes anywhere with either. Rennie is married and Sugar is… I don’t know. He disappears after the zydeco festival towards the end.

And then there’s Chantelle’s actual motivation for sticking around in this thankless job: she used to be a drug addict (which, admittedly, does parallel nicely with May-Alice’s apparent alcoholism) and lost custody of her daughter. She needs to get her life together so she can get her little girl back. But that whole thread isn’t introduced until like the last ten minutes! And for a movie that’s more than two hours long, that’s obnoxious. I have no time to get to know her kid, or care about her.

Once again, it leads to something I DO like. It’s a neat idea that Chantelle just wants her old life back right around the time May-Alice decides to let hers go. But it could have been developed more. Chantelle doesn’t have any real motivation for staying until the movie’s final moments, as far as we know. In all, this movie bugged me as much as it sometimes surprised me.

Two scenes I want to talk about that I couldn’t fit in above:

Okay, does every movie about someone with a disability have to feature a brief fantasy sequence where they don’t anymore? It has to be the most common trope of the entire genre, whether it’s about a real person or not. I actually rolled my eyes.

And, I did really like the picnic with her former co-stars. I thought it was going in one direction (they would all think Chantelle was some kind of rube, and that Louisiana was a hellhole) but they seemed genuinely concerned for May-Alice’s situation. In fact, my favorite scene in the whole movie was the girl who took over May-Alice’s character telling the story of the first part she ever had, in that weird indie alien movie. It’s a great little monologue. The only problem is that I have no idea how it relates to what’s going on in Passion Fish. All it did was make me feel bad for her when you find out later that she was fired because viewers refused to accept her.

So, yeah. Passion Fish. A movie that was somehow both exactly and nothing like I expected. Easily the weakest of 1992 thus far for me, but we’ve got two more to go! Onward and upward!