May 21, 2008
A ‘Blind Date’ With Tucci

The poster for Stanley Tucci’s Blind Date has a lickety-split 1950’s flair to it. In shades of carnation pink, baby blue, and canary yellow, it appears to announce a lighthearted romantic comedy full of innocent mixups à la Parent Trap.

Not the case. The movie begins with slow, furtive pans of a ramshackle café where the main character, Donald (Tucci), works as a barman who occasionally doubles as a magician. Though his performances are lively and humorous, often involving a bouquet of flowers pulled from his crotch (why audience members accept the flowers so graciously was a bit perplexing to me), his real life is a very different act.

After several more slow pans of the café, we learn that Donald has a blind date. He and his date, Janna (Patricia Clarkson), jump into a conversation that seems disconcertingly intimate and highly inappropriate for a first encounter.

Their relationship remains ambiguous until it is revealed by the movie’s narrator that Donald and Janna are actually married. Their perpetual game of blind date is an attempt to fix their marriage, which took a chilling blow when their 5-year-old daughter (the narrator) died in a car accident.

Night after night, they repeat their charade. Though the character’s assumed personalities are different on every occasion, they consistently face the same difficulties in an honest yet exhausting (for them) and intensely puzzling (for the spectator) attempt to patch up their connection.

The weight of their sadness is continually sensed in Tucci’s unrelenting and often sweet attempts to resurrect their romance, which Clarkson can only respond to with the tension of a woman whose emotions have been dynamited by the death of her child. The acting is tight, intense, and confined to the same space, all of which give the very personal feel of watching a play.

While there are a few precious moments of humor counter-balanced with rage and violence, the film’s overtone is not one of melancholy, rather of intrigue. It succeeds in so convincingly juxtaposing desire and despair that the series of dates and the redundancy of the couples’ emotional struggles are not tedious but fascinating.

The soundtrack is stunning, filled with the slinky, intense exhalations of accordion music and voice from the likes of Pascal Danel.

— Roseann M. Lake