REVIEW

		AUSTIN CHRONICLE, MARCH 7, 1997 STILL BREATHING Dir/Scr: James F. Robinson; Prod: Marshall Persinger; Co-Exec Prod: Joyce Schweickert; DP: John Thomas; Ed: Sean Albertson; with Brendan Fraser, Joanna Going, Ann Magnuson, Toby Huss, Angus MacFadyen, Lou Rawls, Michael McKean, Celeste Holm, Junior Brown. 35mm, 109 min., 1997 (WP) "It's my first feature," relates director James Robinson. "I'm old, though. I'm 41 now, and I started making films when I was 11." For someone so willing to concede his age in a time when Hollywood has enshrined youth more than ever before, San Antonio native Robinson has crafted a remarkably buoyant, ageless film that redefines the term romantic comedy in purely Texan terms. It's at once achingly sweet and savagely funny, poignant and at times downright hilarious, but, above all, it effortlessly connects with viewers' hearts, reaffirming what we'd like to believe above all else: that one true love does exist, and we can find that person after all. Brendan Fraser's turn as the eccentric San Antonio street artist Fletcher McBracken is done with polished ease -- it's easily his best role to date, and Joanna Going's cynical Roz Willoughby is a luminous, doe-eyed creation -- half-L.A. scam artist, half-true believer. When Fletcher has a vision of Roz -- the vision -- he travels to Los Angeles to find her, woo her, and convince her that he's the one. Tough, bitter, and damaged by life in the fast lane, she takes him for a fool, and then finds herself back in San Antonio, meeting his family (All About Eve's Celeste Holm is the matriarch every family should have), his friends, and suddenly doubting the dusty house of cards that has been her life thus far. "Being in L.A.," says Robinson, "you start becoming this commercial kind of leech, and as a filmmaker I wasn't even making any money off being a commercial leech. So I decided to write a movie that I could shoot for almost nothing in San Antonio, and I decided to write it as if it were going to be one of my favorite films, regardless of who made it." And did Robinson have a vision of his wife Denise Pizzini (whom he met while she worked as set designer on Like Water for Chocolate) à la Fletcher McBracken? "No, unfortunately I didn't," he says, laughing. "But I did grow up as a little kid thinking that there was one person. I kind of bought into that as a kid, thinking there was one person for me. I used to worry: What if she was in Siberia, or Bangladesh, or the Congo? How was I going to find her? Later, I gave up on all that stuff. Sadly." You wouldn't know it from Still Breathing. From its lush, love-fogged cinematography to its haunting, lyrical score, the movie plays like one long valentine to the sometimes archaic notion of true love. It's a tiny, lustrous gem with a wonderfully large heart. -- Marc Savlov Reprinted by kind permission of The Austin Chronicle.
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