This listless and confused tale of love gone lame is useful only as a crystal clear demonstration of the difference between movie stars and everybody else.
Vincent Eastman (Richard Gere) is a man with more hair than he can handle, speeding down a road through the Pacific Northwest when he swerves to avoid a stalled hippie van in the road and heads straight on into a semi. In the midst of the accident, the movie becomes a flashback of the last few days of Vincent's life. We see that Vincent is recently divorced from his coldly beautiful wife Sally (Sharon Stone), working to be a good dad to their daughter Meaghan (Jennifer Morrison) and banging his wild, redheaded girlfriend Olivia (Lolita Davidovich). Though Vincent doesn't want to be with Sally anymore, he doesn't want to leave behind his family and the architectural business he and Sally own together. So we get a bunch of blase' crap about him being torn between his old and new life and resenting the fact that Sally is moving on with a new man, even though Vincent hooked up with Olivia when he was still married. Then we get flashbacks during the flashback, showing us how Vincent was never really happy with the controlled and separate Sally and how he was swept away by the lively and engrossing Olivia. Then we catch back up to the time of the accident and, after subjecting us to flashbacks within flashbacks, the movie chucks a few fantasy sequences at the audience and closes with an ending that's supposed to be all touching and stuff, but which actually proves these filmmakers never understood exactly what they were doing with the rest of the film.
The most painfully obvious thing about watching Intersection is that Richard Gere and Sharon Stone are movie stars but Lolita Davidovich not so much. Whatever quality it is that movie stars have on screen, you can see it in Stone and Gere but you couldn't see it in Davidovich with an electron microscope. There's no sin in that. Most actors and actresses lack that quality. But if you're doing a story with three main characters and two of them are played by movie stars and the third isn't, that dog won't hunt. It also doesn't help that Davidovich, while pretty enough by any reasonable standard, is not in Stone's league when it comes to beauty. Olivia is supposed to be this amazing woman who reignites Vincent's passion after years of being unfulfilled with Sally, so Davidovich being less impressive than Stone on just about every level fatally undermines that whole idea.
Davidovich can certainly act, though Olivia is such a compromised character she's not really a person as much as she is a puppy dog who'll do anything to make her master happy. Vincent isn't much better. Outside of a scene where he acts like the uncompromising architect out of an Ayn Rand wet dream, he doesn't really do anything but mope around. He's got this lovely, smart, capable woman who gave him a child and is largely responsible for his professional success, but he's not satisfied with her. Then he's got this new woman who's funny and fresh and fiery and only wants to please him, but he's not satisfied with her. I'm supposed to sympathize with this putz?
Sally's the only decent character in the whole story and Stone is up to the job. She got a lot of praise for her work in Casino, but I think this film is where Stone really demonstrated her chops as an actress. Sally honestly loves Vincent and there's nothing wrong with her. She simply doesn't have it in her to give Vincent what he needs.
So, Intersection is a movie almost exclusively about three characters. Only one of them is well drawn and only two of them are portrayed by movie stars. That cinematic math doesn't add up.
There is a ridiculously gratuitous topless scene with Davidovich's perky rack on display. There's also some laboriously ham handed direction that tries to emphasize how deep and meaningful this story is supposed to be. Then there's than ending where these filmmakers forgot that you can't make a story completely about one thing and then make it about something else at the very end.
Intersection is another one of those bad films that isn't aggressively bad. It's just so flawed in so many fundamental ways that it can't amount to anything.
Vincent Eastman (Richard Gere) is a man with more hair than he can handle, speeding down a road through the Pacific Northwest when he swerves to avoid a stalled hippie van in the road and heads straight on into a semi. In the midst of the accident, the movie becomes a flashback of the last few days of Vincent's life. We see that Vincent is recently divorced from his coldly beautiful wife Sally (Sharon Stone), working to be a good dad to their daughter Meaghan (Jennifer Morrison) and banging his wild, redheaded girlfriend Olivia (Lolita Davidovich). Though Vincent doesn't want to be with Sally anymore, he doesn't want to leave behind his family and the architectural business he and Sally own together. So we get a bunch of blase' crap about him being torn between his old and new life and resenting the fact that Sally is moving on with a new man, even though Vincent hooked up with Olivia when he was still married. Then we get flashbacks during the flashback, showing us how Vincent was never really happy with the controlled and separate Sally and how he was swept away by the lively and engrossing Olivia. Then we catch back up to the time of the accident and, after subjecting us to flashbacks within flashbacks, the movie chucks a few fantasy sequences at the audience and closes with an ending that's supposed to be all touching and stuff, but which actually proves these filmmakers never understood exactly what they were doing with the rest of the film.
The most painfully obvious thing about watching Intersection is that Richard Gere and Sharon Stone are movie stars but Lolita Davidovich not so much. Whatever quality it is that movie stars have on screen, you can see it in Stone and Gere but you couldn't see it in Davidovich with an electron microscope. There's no sin in that. Most actors and actresses lack that quality. But if you're doing a story with three main characters and two of them are played by movie stars and the third isn't, that dog won't hunt. It also doesn't help that Davidovich, while pretty enough by any reasonable standard, is not in Stone's league when it comes to beauty. Olivia is supposed to be this amazing woman who reignites Vincent's passion after years of being unfulfilled with Sally, so Davidovich being less impressive than Stone on just about every level fatally undermines that whole idea.
Davidovich can certainly act, though Olivia is such a compromised character she's not really a person as much as she is a puppy dog who'll do anything to make her master happy. Vincent isn't much better. Outside of a scene where he acts like the uncompromising architect out of an Ayn Rand wet dream, he doesn't really do anything but mope around. He's got this lovely, smart, capable woman who gave him a child and is largely responsible for his professional success, but he's not satisfied with her. Then he's got this new woman who's funny and fresh and fiery and only wants to please him, but he's not satisfied with her. I'm supposed to sympathize with this putz?
Sally's the only decent character in the whole story and Stone is up to the job. She got a lot of praise for her work in Casino, but I think this film is where Stone really demonstrated her chops as an actress. Sally honestly loves Vincent and there's nothing wrong with her. She simply doesn't have it in her to give Vincent what he needs.
So, Intersection is a movie almost exclusively about three characters. Only one of them is well drawn and only two of them are portrayed by movie stars. That cinematic math doesn't add up.
There is a ridiculously gratuitous topless scene with Davidovich's perky rack on display. There's also some laboriously ham handed direction that tries to emphasize how deep and meaningful this story is supposed to be. Then there's than ending where these filmmakers forgot that you can't make a story completely about one thing and then make it about something else at the very end.
Intersection is another one of those bad films that isn't aggressively bad. It's just so flawed in so many fundamental ways that it can't amount to anything.