Intersection, a film about a man, two women and a traffic accident, could not have been more crazily miscast if those responsible had worn blindfolds and pulled names out of a hat. Its biggest gaffe — and, naturally, its biggest drawing card — is Sharon Stone’s appearance in the role of Sally Eastman, a woman so sexually standoffish that she complains when her lover wrinkles her dress.
“What’s a girl have to do to get a little action around here?” Ms. Stone also asks, even though all of her star power is predicated on knowing the answer to that question. Two smaller but equally unconvincing details are the fact that Sally lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and that her estranged husband has taken up with a feminist-magazine columnist. The film’s nuttiest scene finds the husband (Richard Gere) and his girlfriend (Lolita Davidovich) using her breasts as clues in a giggly bedroom game. Yes, that’s right: he traded in Sharon Stone for a woman who likes to play topless charades.
The husband, Vincent Eastman, is a successful architect whose whole life flashes before his eyes during the course of the film. As played by Mr. Gere, Vincent is a big kidder. Levity may not be Mr. Gere’s strong suit, but this time he beams and jokes even more compulsively than he did in “Mr. Jones,” a film that cast him as a clinical manic-depressive.
Despite Vincent’s playful exterior, the audience is meant to regard him as a man with a lot of excess baggage in his life, like the yacht on which he first makes love to his girlfriend. “I’m sorry,” he says during this seduction scene. “I’m not very good at this.” Mr. Gere’s delivery of this line ranks right up there with Ms. Stone’s complaints about not wanting to have her clothes mussed.
Ms. Davidovich, as the third of the story’s frisky Canadians, has the sort of role Valerie Perrine has often played, that of the tarty but tender-hearted mistress of a difficult man. Anyone who believes that this bombshell’s magazine column is the talk of Vancouver may also be convinced that Mark Rydell, the film’s director, employs arty shots of an elaborate brass clock because time is significant in this story. Actually, “Intersection” has time on its hands.
As a soap opera elevated by its stellar cast and given the illusion of contemplativeness by repeated slow-motion shots of a car crash, “Intersection” really ought to be more fun. But despite the glossiness, it winds up seeming profoundly uneventful, perhaps because the car crash is the story’s only real dramatic turn. The film’s uncredited fourth star, the scenery of Vancouver, adds visual appeal without raising the energy level, although Harold Michelson’s lavish production design will hold an audience’s interest.
Beginning after the fact of the Eastmans’ marital breakup, the film flits moodily from scenes of their courtship (Ms. Stone wears a Barbie-doll hairdo) and brittle later life (Ms. Stone does Grace Kelly, right down to the pocketbook), with occasional giddy glimpses of Vincent’s second chance with Olivia (Ms. Davidovich). But beyond the drama of one man’s intense and myopic self-scrutiny, “Intersection” has no real forward motion. It’s unclear which of the two accomplished writers credited with “Intersection,” David Rayfiel (several Sydney Pollack films) and Marshall Brickman (“Annie Hall”), has a taste for charades.
One of this film’s few revelations, beyond the fact that it is painful to be a successful architect with two beautiful women in your life, is that Ms. Stone may really make the transition from sex goddess to movie queen if she ever finds the right role. Wearing sleekly attractive costumes and a graceful, determined air, Ms. Stone shows the kind of photogenic fortitude that was everything in the 1940’s and is only a memory today. If there’s any contemporary actress who is equipped to re-invent that kind of stardom, it’s Sharon Stone.
Intersection (1994)
Directed by: Mark Rydell
Starring: Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, Lolita Davidovich, Martin Landau, David Selby, Jennifer Morrison, Matthew Walker, Patricia Harras, Sandra P. Grant
Screenplay by: David Rayfiel, Marshall Brickman
Production Design by: Harold Michelson
Cinematography by: Vilmos Zsigmond
Film Editing by: Mark Warner
Costume Design by: Ellen Mirojnick
Set Decoration by: Dominique Fauquet-Lemaitre
Art Direction by: Yvonne J. Hurst
Music by: James Newton Howard
MPAA Rating: R for some language and sexuality.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: January 21, 1994
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