COMEDY: THE FORMS, PART II: MRS. DOUBTFIRE, THREE OF HEARTS
he'll help her win Ellen back. Connie's idea is to have Joe woo Ellen - part of Joe's pitch is that he can seduce any woman, any time - and then dump her, so she'll come crawling back to Connie. To that end, Joe audits Connie's class, and writes poetry that's really representing Connie's feelings. Naturally, Joe and Ellen really fall in love.
This is a tired romantic setup that Bogayevicz and writers Mitch Glazer and Adam Greenman have given us, and the truly galling thing is it didn't have to be this way. The characters of Joe and Connie are interesting enough on their own. While female prostitutes are almost always there for sexual pleasure, male escorts, or so this movie would have us believe, aren't. Sometimes, as with Connie, they're cover, but also, sometimes older woman use them to make them feel young again, or some women just don't want to go places alone. Plus, while even then it had become a cliche for a woman and a gay man to be friends, the opposite almost never happened. The friendship that develops between Joe and Connie is convincingly played. It's also nice that even though we see some of the challenges Connie faces being a lesbian, it's presented in a matter-of-fact way.
The problem, of course, is the development of the Joe-Ellen relationship. Part of the problem, of course, is Baldwin and Fenn don't have a lot of chemistry. This is also due to the fact that Fenn's character isn't drawn well, and while Fenn is certainly easy to look at, she doesn't bring much depth. And again, the whole plot takes off from stale romantic conventions. Plus, the subplot about Joe starting to feel used in his job also feels old hat, as does his relationship with his pimp (Joe Pantoliano). Baldwin and Lynch are good together (Lynch, who's married to Glazer, said in an interview that part of the reason she took the role was because of the rarity of male-female friendships in movies), but it's not enought to make THREE OF HEARTS feel fresh.
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