Bobby Deerfield

Buy This Item Bobby Deerfield by Sony Pictures  Available from Amazon  $15.49  on 11-14-2008     A racing car champion falls in love with a freewheeling lady who is suffering from an incurable disease. Based on the novel "Heaven Has No Favorites" by Eric Maria Remarque. Reader Reviews Dave Grusin's sometimes jazzy and often emotional soundtrack may be the only saving grace for Al Pacino's obscure 1978 film Bobby Deerfield. Released for the first time on DVD in 2008, this is one of Sydney Pollack's lesser known movies, and rightfully so. With picturesque countryside cinematography and inside-the-cockpit video game cameras (during the only real race scene), the film has no action as advertised, and the romantic drama is of the barely perceptible kind. Racecar driver Bobby Deerfield (Al Pacino) is distraught and confused after the death of a good friend on the racetrack. Drowning out the idea of driver error, he desperately searches for a reason for the tragedy, if only to appease himself. He visits another racer at a rehabilitation center who was hurt during the accident, and meets Lillian Morelli (Marthe Keller), a mysterious and spontaneous woman who invariably asks irregular questions. As Deerfield finds himself hopelessly attracted to the nonreciprocal Lillian, he struggles to figure out her irrationalness as she passively stays at a distance. Sydney Pollack, the director of such award-winning films as Tootsie and Out of Africa steps out of masterful form to produce this cinematic grog. The acting is not entirely awful, and the scenery is luscious indeed. But the story never really knows where it wants to go, and after the first half-hour, the audience will be quite puzzled at which direction it wants to take us. Not a racing movie at all, and devoid of the action that the promotional materials would have us hoping for, Bobby Deerfield is instead simply a drama laced with lovelorn romance. The film seems to push the idea that everything is sweeter if you take a chance, but whatever risks Pollack took with his storytelling techniques certainly proved fruitless. Lillian is highly unpredictable, but in an annoying way - one that makes us shake our heads in disparagement instead of interest. As she continually makes spontaneously reasonless decisions, and teases Deerfield with seductress banter, we keep asking ourselves why he doesn't simply leave her. His infatuation is coaxed by mystery alone, and her incessant curve-balls make for an odd romantic pairing. When he finally tries to accept her crazy mood swings and penchant for nonsensical lies, we only pity him for his apparent descent into equivalent madness. Lydia, the hopelessly-in-love fan of Deerfield always appears as the superior choice for the risk-taking racer, and so his abandoning her for infrequent satisfaction rarely makes sense. He is distant from his family and further distanced from logic after his failure to accept the death of his friend, and yet we still are never shown incentives to believe that what he sees in Lillian is anything remotely close to love. The dialogue at a few rare occasions is cleverly humorous, and the camera often lingers on the lovely scenery of Paris, but Bobby Deerfield manages to be devoid of a coherent story or anything beyond moments of madness tied together with unlikely romance. With too much left to assume at the conclusion and an unconvincing love story throughout, Bobby Deerfield is understandably one of Al Pacino's most obscure films. - Mike Massie

Bobby Deerfield Available from Amazon Price: $15.49 Updated on 11-14-2008.

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