Spoilers.
Speaking to you as your forensic anthropologist, and I know I'm not, and -- oh, won't you please sit down? It wouldn't be hard to reconstruct Jenna Elfman's face if her skull were found in the densely wooded area where most bodies are found. It's an unusual splanchnocranium. She has a sizable jaw, flaring zygomatic arches, and then the upper part of her face squeezes itself together into a narrower skull.
Superficially she has close-set eyes that are narrow. Her lips are narrow too (and very expressive). It would be more accurate to say, about her body, that every once of fat is properly distributed, rather than that there is no ounce of fat at all. She's beautiful, and she has a tall dancer's body. (She taught Paco how to dance near the beginning of "Serpico.")
Doctor Stillman is a stereotype. A nice famous Jewish doctor, the kind of guy with a face as interesting as a hard-boiled egg, who will obey orders at home and do what he's told, when he's not out making himself famous or raking in mountains of shekels.
Jenna Elfman thinks they had an affair, when evidently they didn't. (I'm not sure I believe that. Stillman may be a schmuck, but Elfman's legs are each 5 feet long.) She develops a case of "erotomania," which is made to sound like something that only a total basket case would suffer from. It's the "delusion," which is a technical term for a belief that flies into the face of all evidence to the contrary, that a famous person, such as a renowned neurosurgeon, is in love with you.
Put it another way though. Don't do the dumb things that Jenna Elfman does in this movie -- send snotty voice mails to the judge and so forth -- just believe that there is a relationship between you and someone else, whether one of love or hate, and in FACT that other person doesn't even count you as a significant other. Elfman may be nuts, but in a lesser sense we all are, aren't we?
It's so EASY to look at the head of the cheerleading squad (or whatever it's called) or the captain of the football team in High School and misinterpret his glance, the momentary fixture of your gaze and the other's, as meaning something that it doesn't. Like the handwriting on the wall, some of these things are interpreted in the way that's most convenient for us.
That's what makes this above average, if we can only see it. Yes, Elfman is off her rocker (revealed only gradually, and nicely done too). But we're all off our rockers, if less so.
Speaking to you as your forensic anthropologist, and I know I'm not, and -- oh, won't you please sit down? It wouldn't be hard to reconstruct Jenna Elfman's face if her skull were found in the densely wooded area where most bodies are found. It's an unusual splanchnocranium. She has a sizable jaw, flaring zygomatic arches, and then the upper part of her face squeezes itself together into a narrower skull.
Superficially she has close-set eyes that are narrow. Her lips are narrow too (and very expressive). It would be more accurate to say, about her body, that every once of fat is properly distributed, rather than that there is no ounce of fat at all. She's beautiful, and she has a tall dancer's body. (She taught Paco how to dance near the beginning of "Serpico.")
Doctor Stillman is a stereotype. A nice famous Jewish doctor, the kind of guy with a face as interesting as a hard-boiled egg, who will obey orders at home and do what he's told, when he's not out making himself famous or raking in mountains of shekels.
Jenna Elfman thinks they had an affair, when evidently they didn't. (I'm not sure I believe that. Stillman may be a schmuck, but Elfman's legs are each 5 feet long.) She develops a case of "erotomania," which is made to sound like something that only a total basket case would suffer from. It's the "delusion," which is a technical term for a belief that flies into the face of all evidence to the contrary, that a famous person, such as a renowned neurosurgeon, is in love with you.
Put it another way though. Don't do the dumb things that Jenna Elfman does in this movie -- send snotty voice mails to the judge and so forth -- just believe that there is a relationship between you and someone else, whether one of love or hate, and in FACT that other person doesn't even count you as a significant other. Elfman may be nuts, but in a lesser sense we all are, aren't we?
It's so EASY to look at the head of the cheerleading squad (or whatever it's called) or the captain of the football team in High School and misinterpret his glance, the momentary fixture of your gaze and the other's, as meaning something that it doesn't. Like the handwriting on the wall, some of these things are interpreted in the way that's most convenient for us.
That's what makes this above average, if we can only see it. Yes, Elfman is off her rocker (revealed only gradually, and nicely done too). But we're all off our rockers, if less so.