Bed of Roses

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Starring	Christian Slater, Mary Stuart Masterson
Director	Michael Goldenberg
Year	1996
What it's worth		Cable (If you're sick, stuck in front of the TV, and don't have much better to do with your time...)

Characters are the essential element to any romance. If you genuinely like the characters and feel their attraction to each other, then you'll care whether they end up together or not. Watch anemic, sketched characters who never show much strength of their own, and it puts the whole story in the "who cares" category. Bed of Roses does everything it can to make sympathetic characters you'll really like, but what you end up with instead are losers who probably deserve each other, but not any great couple you want to see on the screen.

Lisa (Mary Stuart Masterson) is a young executive on the go, go, go, and seems to be burying herself in her work to forget personal troubles, which remain undefined for most of the movie. Lewis (Christian Slater), a florist, sees the troubled woman and instantly falls in love. He woos her and chases her, showing unflagging (and sometimes frightening) devotion through setbacks and misgivings to bring her out of her shell and into his life.

The lack in this movie is not the fault of the actors. Slater and Masterson are both very good actors with excellent screen charisma. Pamela Segall does an excellent job with her supporting role as Masterson's best friend, who ends up being the most likeable character in the movie. The effort they all put into their roles is probably the saving grace of the film. But it's not enough to redeem it.

The screenwriters have tried a little bit of everything to get this love story to grab your heart; romantic gestures, dead spouses, dead parents, familial abuse and love, kids with books, anything they can think of. What it does instead is make the movie near to surreal with the strange things going on. New York City is almost unrecognizable as this sunny place with flower shops stuck down alleys where mad killers should lie. Winter is passed over in a hop so we can see flowers go from full bloom in late fall to budding in spring. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of letting us know, without a doubt, that this is supposed to be romantic.

There seems to be a subplot going on about Lisa's work life, and the attention she pays to it. When we first meet her, she's a workaholic without time for a real life, until Lewis begins to draw her into one. Lewis, we find out, used to be on the fast track himself, until he gave it up for a more quality-filled life delivering flowers. Things seem to be coming to a head; will Lisa give up the nasty evil of career in favor of the bohemian life? Can she devote her time to both Lewis and her executive position? The subplot, though, gets completely lost, and is forgotten by the end of the movie, with just a nebulous theme of corporate life equalling lack of romance. The movie may have been greatly helped by dealing with the real issues of what happens to the rest of Lisa and Lewis's life when they begin to get involved with each other, but instead it gets passed over in favor of the narrow focus of the plot.

If this were a time when no good romances had been on the screen in some time, Bed of Roses may have been a breath of fresh air, a welcome change from shoot-em-ups and slapstick. But in the same theaters that are already playing The American President, Sabrina, and Sense and Sensibility, this one suffers by comparison. It has cuter actors to appeal to a younger age range than the others, but that's the only advantage it has.

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