Terrence Rafferty

. . . . The strength of the play was it simplicity and its directness; the movie preserves those qualitites by telling the story in the ordinary, straightforward Hollywood manner. "Frankie & Johnny" is now a vehicle for Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, and that's as it should be, too; in the movies, there's nothing simpler and nothing more direct than the sight of actors we love pretending to fall in love with each other. Pacino and Pfeiffer are more glamorous than the characters they're playing, but, in a weird way, their star power is perfectly appropriate here: it's the meat-and-potatoes stuff of big-budget movie entertainment.Error! Reference source not found.

Besides, the presence of Pacino and Pfeiffer guarantees that our interest in the main characters' relationship won't be overwhelmed by all the supporting characters and peripheral activity that McNally and Marshall have added. . . .

. . . [T]he stars' performances elevate the material; they supply "Frankie & Johnny with movie-scale authority and resonance. . . . [combine with previous paragraph? sure!]

Pfeiffer is extraordinary. In this picture, she doesn't appear to be wearing any makeup, and her hair just hangs there, and her wardrobe is unglamourous (mostly jeans and a frumpy waitress's uniform); she still looks smashing. (McNally's description of Frankie in the play script--"striking, but not conventional, good looks"--is apt if you read "not conventional" to mean "supernatural.") Her Frankie is beautiful in the way of a woman who doesn't know that she's beautiful, or doesn't want to know. Pfeiffer makes us understand that being attractive to men hasn't, so far, done Frankie a lot of good--that she's rather play down her looks than risk attracting more trouble. The actress seems to bring together in this character the different qualities of several of the women she has portrayed on-screen in the past few years: the tough cookies of "Married to the Mob" and "The Fabulous Baker Boys"; the reluctant Mme. de Tourvel of "Dangerous Liaisons," trying desperately to repel the advances of an implacable suitor; the honest, reserved Soviet heroine of "The Russia House." And this is a role that requires her to use everything that she has learned from her previous work. Frankie is, in her closed-off way, a far more volatile character than Johnny, because, unlike him, she's never quite sure how she feels or who she wants to be: she veers between the urge to surrender to her lover's vision of her and the impulse to resist that temptation at all costs. Her feelings change course very quickly, and Pfeiffer, without doing anything showy, makes every one of these emotional shifts lucid and thrillingly natural. Frankie isn't a happy woman, but Pfeiffer never lets the character become drab or mopey. The story wouldn't work at all if Frankie weren't, in some sense, as passionate and willful as Johnny: we have to feel that there's as much energy and vigor in her defensiveness as there is in his aggressiveness. Although it's perfectly apparent to us that Frankie has allowed herself to settle for a life of low expectations and modest rewards, there's something perversely bracing in the way she fends off Johnny's attempt to invade her narrow emotional turf. Her ferocity is a sign of life, and Pfeiffer does full justice to it. This is a superbly detailed rendering of a woman with a fanatically conservative heart.

. . . . Frankie speaks to the part of us that wants to postpone the inevitable. She won't just give in to Johnny's fully developed romantic script, accept the whole package on faith; she has to study it, to figure out how its details adds up, to decide--in her own sweet time--whether this story makes sense for her. (She has the temperament of an extremely demanding critic.) . . . . In "Frankie & Johnny" McNally produces the exquisitely attenuated pleasure of romantic comedy by a different method [than the "classic Hollywood romantic comedies of the thirties"]: the obstacles in the path of love are all internal. That's why . . . "Frankie & Johnny" is still essentially a two-character piece. The machinery of farce--the opening and closing doors, the unlikely hiding places, the hastily assembled disguises--is flet rather than seen, because it's inside Frankie and Johnny. As we watch them, we can sense the thoughts and emotions that are scurrying across the private movie screens in their heads. And when the farce is played out and the lights come up, for Frankie and Johnny and for us, we understand why romance and comedy make an ideal, inevitable couple.

Terrence Rafferty
New Yorker, date?