Annette Benning

(On TV, July 2021) On paper, the idea of remaking 1939’s Love Affair (itself remade in 1957 as the better-remembered Cary Grant vehicle An Affair to Remember) with Warren Beatty and then-new wife Annette Benning isn’t all that awful as Hollywood ideas go. Sure, it’s recycling, but it’s recycling from earlier decades, which almost makes it affectionately reverent of Hollywood history. Further burnishing this connection to classic film history is Katharine Hepburn, here playing a canny older woman in her final film role. If you look down the cast list, you’ll find names such as Kate Capshaw, Pierce Brosnan (bearded), Garry Shandling, Harold Ramis and Rosalind Chao in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. Still, even a good cast can’t quite save a clunky script that doesn’t update the most vexing elements of the original films, makes new mistakes of its own and can’t create dialogue equal to the original. Beatty and Benning appear self-satisfied with themselves here, but even their star coupling can’t quite translate to screen heat. A series of unlikely events is contrived to make the film happen like it does (including the engineering the entrance of Hepburn’s character) but perhaps the worst is the heavy-handed ableism that powers much of the last act of the film — something that should have been left in the past, even if it had meant not making this film at all. Not all remakes are good ideas, and this may help to explain why this Love Affair has now sunk so thoroughly in obscurity as anything but Hepburn’s final film.