Playing by Heart

This charming romantic comedy with a Los Angeles setting cuts between seemingly unconnected miniplots the way some Robert Altman movies do. In the final scenes the connections become clear, but until then the links are strictly thematic, having to do with love of one kind or another. A distraught man (Dennis Quaid) offers contradictory hard-luck stories to different women (including one drag queen) in different bars; two couples (Gillian Anderson and Jon Stewart, Angelina Jolie and Ryan Phillippe) each encounter romantic difficulties caused by the fears of one member; a mother (Ellen Burstyn) comforts her son who’s dying of AIDS (Jay Mohr); an elderly couple (Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands) bickers; a younger couple (Madeleine Stowe and Anthony Edwards) pursues a clandestine and emotionless affair. This differs most strikingly from Altman’s work in that the overall thrust of the stories is optimistic–but even the most overly determined happy ending can seem welcome after Altman’s heavy cynicism. The writer-director, whose previous features (Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Runestone) are unknown to me, is Willard Carroll; cinematography is by former Altman collaborator Vilmos Zsigmond and music is by John Barry. Evanston, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum