THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 8, 1994 TAG: 9410080048
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, MOVIE CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
YOU'VE GOT TO BE in love, unquestioning, unadulterated, unabashed, totally wacky love to accept ``Only You.''
Even at that, it would have to be not just any love, but the searching, zany kind. If you question ``Only You'' at all, it will fall apart.
Marisa Tomei, looking thinner than any diet known to Western civilization should make any human being, plays a woman named Faith. Since the age of 11, when she got a reading from the family Ouija board, she has believed that the one true love of her life would be a man named Damon Bradley.
But years later, she's given up on Damon and agreed to marry a podiatrist in Pittsburgh, where she labors, by day, as an English teacher. Her husband-to-be isn't overly romantic. His idea of sacrifice is turning off his beeper while proposing to her.
She gets a shock when an old friend of her husband calls and tells her he won't be able to attend the wedding because he's leaving for Venice. His name? You guessed it. Damon Bradley.
Faith, even though she's clad in her wedding dress, makes a run for the airport, and the next flight to Venice. It's one of those moments when the audience is supposed to cheer her impulsive and daring behavior. Faith is taking one last chance at finding what destiny meant to be hers - Mr. Right.
After a few moments to let us all admire the scenery, she meets Robert Downey Jr., as a young man who retrieves her shoe from Italian cobblestones. (Cinderella? Prince Charming? Get it?) She thinks he's Damon. Once he learns how much she likes boys named Damon, he goes along with the masquerade, even though he's actually a shoe salesman from Boston, who is, after all, named Mr. Wright. Close enough?
Not for her. She throws a fit when she finds out he isn't the right guy and, well, the plot thickens.
Things pick up, in the movie's best sequence, when she spots a poolside hunk, played by Billy Zane (of the suspense classic ``Dead Calm'') who is identified as the real Damon.
Doris Day and Rock Hudson used to do these kind of comedies to box-office success. Norman Jewison, the director here, even directed them in one. Jewison, though, is more clearly trying to recapture the innocence and bluster of ``Moonstruck.'' The studio, on the other hand, would like this to be another ``Sleepless in Seattle.''
The truth is that ``Only You'' is likable enough, if you believe the chemistry between Tomei and Downey, which is asking for a good deal of suspension of belief. Tomei is fetching and spunky but she's asked to deliver more charisma than she can muster. As written, Faith is something of a whiner. If she's going to be this unrealistic about love and hope, she'd have to be more of a zany character than this script supplies.
Even so, Tomei is much better than Downey, an actor of wildly varying abilities. He was very good in a supporting role in ``Natural Born Killers,'' the movie that just about everyone hates, in spite of its individual ingredients. He was Oscar-nominated for ``Chaplin.''
But here, he wears more makeup than Tomei and has a much too arch and conniving bent to be acceptable as the boyish suitor. He's not believable as an innocent.
The film is stolen, easily, by Bonnie Hunt as Tomei's tag-along travel companion - her sister-in-law, Kate, who has been having trouble with her abusive husband back in Pittsburgh (Fisher Stevens).
In Europe, she finds a continental lover (Joaquim de Almeida, who was a sinister villain in ``Clear and Present Danger''). He plays Rosanno Brazzi to her Katharine Hepburn in a hint of the classic movie ``Summertime.'' He's the kind who kisses her hand a great deal and speaks, with an accent, about how the female body is the greatest wonder of the world. Hunt's sarcastic asides steal the film.
Romantic movies are so scarce nowadays that we tend to overpraise them when they do come along. ``Sleepless in Seattle'' won such a wide audience, perhaps, because it had no competition.
If your name is Damon Bradley, this is your film. If not, well, it might be a bit much to believe.
If you feel it's your destiny, get a date anyway. ILLUSTRATION: TRI-STAR PICTURES
Faith (Marisa Tomei) and Kate (Bonnie Hunt) pursue a stranger Faith
thinks may be her soul mate in ``Only You.''
MOVIE REVIEW
``Only You''
Cast: Marisa Tomei, Robert Downey Jr., Bonnie Hunt, Joaquim de
Almeida, Billy Zane
Director: Norman Jewison
MPAA rating: PG (adult themes)
Mal's rating: **
Locations: Chesapeake Square in Chesapeake, Janaf, R/C Main Gate
in Norfolk, Kempsriver, Lynnhaven, Pembroke, Surf-N-Sand in Virginia
Beach
by CNB