PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 1/4/05)

Bobby Long isn't exactly the easiest person to love. He's a surly old coot who abandoned his career as an English professor to slowly drink himself to death. With John Travolta white-haired and limping in the title role, A Love Song for Bobby Long is one of those slow-baked Southern character studies about taking an old flat tire of a man and finding some way to love him anyway.

Bobby Long's redemption comes in the form of a young wildflower, Purslane Hominy Will (Scarlett Johansson), a drift-away high-school dropout who now lives "on the redneck Riviera," spooning peanut butter and M&Ms in a Florida trailer park. When Pursy hears about her mother's death, she tumbles on home to New Orleans, expecting to inherit Lorraine's old house, only to discover Bobby and another washed-up drunk (Gabriel Macht) living there already.

The two squatters refuse to budge, but Pursy's just as stubborn, and before you know it, all three misfits are living under the same roof. The house itself is a ramshackle dump, with lawn chairs for living-room furniture and kitchen appliances stained the color of chewing tobacco. Settings like this are poetry for some (master atmospherist David Gordon Green, for instance), who prefer the rusty-nail aesthetic of the American south to the fancy Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive backdrops of your average Hollywood movie.

In her narrative debut, director Shainee Gabel clearly revels in these dilapidated lives, even going so far as to have her narrator profess the movie's mission statement towards the end: "See what is invisible and you will know what to write." It's a sound philosophy, that the best stories are found off the beaten path and the details that matter — the ones that ring truest — emerge from observations we can't all see. But the idea's still just a key to finding something worth saying, not the formula for a good movie.

Like the clothes on her characters' backs, Gabel's script is cobbled together from hand-me-down scraps. She aspires to Tennessee Williams, but winds up closer to the territory of Hallmark television specials. While Williams's characters are explosively confrontational, Gabel favors the sentimental notion that alcoholics eventually sober up, enemies repair their differences, and painful family secrets inevitably bring everyone closer together.

Gabel demonstrates a gift for language — her dialogue marries slang with sophistication, the phrases rolling out too perfect for the characters and yet too good to resist — but she still has a lot to learn about crafting a story (consider how much more powerfully the family secrets resonate when kept under wraps in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby). It's nothing that a little experience — in life and in film — can't fix.

—Peter Debruge