Face Of Love, The

Synopsis: When a grieving widow Nikki (Annette Bening) encounters Tom (Ed Harris), who looks exactly like her late husband, Garrett (Ed Harris) who accidentally drowned five years earlier, she engineers a relationship with him.

The premise of The Face Of Love, that a woman would meet an exact double of the dead husband whom she adored and that he would fall in love with her is, to say the least, far-fetched.  It’s the sort of thing that one can imagine a European film-maker bringing off as it needs an ability to work with metaphysics and/or magic, not a space in which American film-makers are noted for their success. It is surprising then that in adopting a realistic approach, American film-maker Arie Posin who some may know as the writer director of the entertainingly off-beat 2005 film The Chumscrubber manages to get his film to work as well as it does. This is largely due to the compelling performances of Bening and Harris in the leads.  

Playing a woman unable to truly accept the death of her beloved husband, Bening is wonderful in portraying the veneer of acceptance with which her character masks her grief. Her deceiving of Tom, who has no idea of his resemblance to her dead husband, is played with such ingenuous despair that it almost feels justifiable. For his part, Harris as the duped lover also realizes a touching humanity as he responds to what he believes to be Nikki’s love for him.  Even Robin Williams as a widowed neighbor with a crush on Nikki is nicely understated in his small role. All this is commendable and accounts for a good deal of the film. Where things falls down is in resolving, or more accurately failing to resolve, the intriguing scenario in any meaningful way.

For a while Nikki is able to perpetuate her opportunistic subterfuge. But once the inevitable occurs and the outside world intrudes in the form of Nikki’s daughter (Jess Weixler) who is horrified by the doppelganger her mother has shacked up with, and then an old photograph, the somewhat slow-on-the-uptake Tom and the unmasked Nikki have to face the implications of her deception. Or so you might expect but instead we get a “one year later” coda and a kind of wrap-up that one imagines is a given in lightweight romance novels. Indeed Nikki is offered to us in the final shot as a woman fulfilled by love. Nikki’s duplicity, Tom’s presumed anguish, the whole “double” thing - nothing is addressed, all is forgiven

And that it seems, for all the potential its core idea contains, is all the film ever aspired to be - as the title no doubt unintentionally suggests - the face of love, not the painful depths below its seductive surface. Nikki with her interior design business, her dead architect husband’s stylish house and boho art professor lover, the casual chic threads for her and him (including a daft hat), the art galleries, Tom’s Hockneyesque paintings - it all belongs in the pages of designer décor magazines and is no substitute for the reality on which the film wimps out. It's a disappointment but one that largely comes at the film's end (can I mention here one of the worst continuity gaffes of all time in the scene in which Tom tries on a suit, his collar flipping up and down from shot to shot?). Until then it has enough to hold one's attention.

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