CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
MIAMI Rhapsody is a quite amusing film about the=20 related themes of married life and adultery. Love is,=20 as Louis Armstrong informs us over the credit titles,=20 “just one of those things” and the self-indulgent=20 heroine Gwynn Marcus (Sarah Jessica Parker) comes to=20 the conclusion that love, hardly ever rhapsodic, is=20 like the weather in Miami, “hot, stormy and slightly=20 dangerous, but worth it”, whatever its vagaries are.
The plot is contained within the opening and closing=20 stages of Gwynn’s sessions with a psychiatrist. She=20 reviews not only the chequered married lives of her=20 parents (Mia Farrow and Paul Mazursky), her brother and=20 sister, but her own relationship to her live-in lover=20 Matt (Gil Bellows) and a male nurse (an exotic Antonio=20
The film explores the pattern of betrayals and=20 reconciliations in a smoothly paced narrative which has=20 a fair share of smartly witty lines.
Miami Rhapsody enters into Woody Allen territory as it=20 entertains the neurotic terrain of love, but unlike=20 Allen, director and screenplay writer David Frankel is=20 unable to make enough of the pain that lurks beneath=20 the ritual behaviour of the characters or to make us=20 care sufficiently about them.=20
What it does have is some great Porter and Gershwin=20 songs, and Ella Fitzgerald’s quite marvellous rendition=20 of the golden oldie I Only Have Eyes for You.