River's Last Picture Show -- ''Thing Called Love'' Has New Meaning Since Death Of Actor

Movie review

XXX "The Thing Called Love," with River Phoenix, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, Sandra Bullock. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, from a script by Carol Heikkinen. Uptown. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised because of language. -------------------------------------------------------------------

"People die, and they don't come back."

The line is spoken by Samantha Mathis, in the role of a fragile would-be country singer whose father died a year ago. The last time she saw him was in the emergency room. She still has trouble sleeping.

"The Thing Called Love" is partly about her escape from grief and trauma, as she leaves New York, hoping for a career in Nashville. She forms a new family of friends, works out her feelings in her songs and rushes into marriage with a budding country star, played by the late River Phoenix, who isn't ready to be tied down.

Throughout the movie, a motel billboard quotes country songs while ironically commenting on her progress. "Love hurts," it says at one point. "You can't love something you never had." "I miss you already and you're not even gone."

Film changed by events

All this was part of the movie a month ago, when it was first screened here for the press. Looking at it again this week, knowing that Phoenix is gone and that Mathis, his off-screen girlfriend, was with him when he died, I couldn't see it the same way. Although it was intended to be a lightweight romantic drama, it has become something else.

Singing and sparring and joking together, Mathis and Phoenix almost become mirror reflections of each other. Their chemistry is irresistible, but there's an ache to it now. The script was supposed to be about hope, renewal, finding a nest; now it's a meditation on mortality. More than any recent film I know, this picture has been irrevocably changed by subsequent events.

In some ways, of course, it's still the same movie: a well-crafted showcase for young actors, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who demonstrates the same empathy with youth that he brought to "The Last Picture Show" 22 years ago. Working from an uneven script that was being rewritten as they went along, Bogdanovich and his actors consistently freshen a familiar show-biz saga.

Alternately sassy and vulnerable, Mathis is the movie's true star, sharing her best moments not just with Phoenix but with Sandra Bullock, as a roommate with a self-esteem problem; K.T. Oslin as a tough but caring critic; and Dermot Mulroney, who is especially endearing as a young songwriter who becomes easily infatuated ("Why is everybody I love married to everybody else?").

Reminiscent of Dean

Watching Phoenix in his last film, I couldn't help thinking of James Dean's final performance, as the cranky loner, Jett Rink, in "Giant." Here again is an actor in his early 20s, previously identified with playing troubled adolescents, utterly submerging himself in the role of a moody, anti-social Texan (the song Phoenix wrote for his character, "Lone Star State of Mine," says it all). Last week, Bogdanovich talked about a sequel that might have been made, and it's certainly no stretch to imagine Phoenix taking his character into old age as Dean did.

Long before he knew that these actors would share the same fate, critic Donald Lyons wrote that "Phoenix takes the body language that was James Dean's great invention to richer and sadder depths." It's an eerily fitting epitaph.