Accidental Love is a bizarre, discarded time capsule of a film, and its failure is fascinating. Not only because it’s a weird, tone-deaf satire with no business to be released, but in seeing how such a wrongheaded film could (kinda) come from the mind of renowned filmmaker David O. Russell, here under the pseudonym Stephen Greene.
For those unaware of its tumultuous filming, Accidental Love, formally titled Nailed, was released and finished behind the Academy Award-nominated filmmaker’s back. Following four production shutdowns and questionably raised funds from producers, he left with only one scene unfinished—the scene that’s, oddly, one of the best in the final film.
Once thought to be lost in the sands of time, out of nowhere it came with its horrible new title and a out-of-the-blue release date capitalizing on its all-star cast—Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tracy Morgan, Catherine Keener, Paul Reubens, Bill Hader and James Brolin, just to name a few. One has to assume this comes as the producers try to earn profits back from whatever investments they made.
As the film was hastily thrown together without any input from Russell after 2010, it’s hard to blame the filmmaker entirely or even discern where his film begins and the producers’ direction ends. Save for some of Russell’s signature long, unyielding takes and constantly loud characters, Accidental Love hosts few-to-none of the filmmaker’s markings, from his work either of late or before. If anything, it feels like an extended, unfinished single-camera sitcom pilot with big names, dated humor and unearned potential.
Intended as a political farce rallying against the injustices of the American health care system, something of a fictional, high-concept version of Michael Moore’s Sicko if you will, Accidental Love follows Alice Eckle (Biel), a good-hearted small-town waitress soon to be engaged to local hunky sheriff Scott (James Marsden). On the night of their proposal, however, fate intertwines with her future as a nearby nail gun lodges its metal tack into her head.
Unable to remove the nail due to Alice’s not having health insurance and her parents (Steve Boles and Beverly D’Angelo, respectively) lacking the funds to cover the procedure, she and her equally bizarrely injured new friends Reverend Norm (Kurt Fuller) and Keyshawn (Morgan) rush to Capital Hill. They go to Washington to gain the trust and support of young politician Howard Birdwell (Gyllenhaal), who finds Alice’s various mood swings and erratic behavior incited by her injury persuasive in more ways than one.
It’s easy to see Russell was attracted to the screenplay’s take on modern day American health concerns. Based on the book Sammy’s Hill by Kristin Gore, Al Gore’s daughter who also co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Silverstein (Drawn Together) and Dave Jeser, Accidental Love wishes to dispel the woes of underprivileged Americans in a quirky and high-concept way. It would play into both Russell’s politics and love for wild, off-the-cuff characters and possibly produce something out of Russell’s typical wheelhouse but amiable and crowd-pleasing in ways he hadn’t been before.
However, Accidental Love sadly gets lost in both its production woes and also its inability to stick to its convictions. Every character is more extreme and cartoonish than the next, which makes sense when considering two animation writers wrote this. When Morgan is among your more restrained performers, you know you’re in trouble. This kills Russell/Greene’s sense of reliability and ultimately makes for an uncomfortable viewing of a filmmaker uncomfortable with his own movie.
While Alice’s weird behavior is explained and makes sense, everyone else’s detracts from agreeable and heartfelt reality they wish to make. Even when it’s focused, it become a blisteringly annoying call-to-arms, with characters speaking like political messages instead of human beings in conjunction to acting like buffoons.
It’s so on-the-nose and unsubtle, and yet it never has more to say than what’s admitted in the first 20 minutes. Its message is oddly flat, and whether or not this comes from its jumbled production it never becomes clear what exactly Russell/Greene wants audiences to take away from Accidental Love and its wholly unbalanced characters.
The sense of urgency never escalates, even though Russell does try to make it do so to his credit, and it instead focuses too often or not enough on the uneven characters. Russell/Greene’s parade of nonsense and anarchy, again, is indeed to be funny and wacky in ways his past works were not, save for maybe I Heart Huckabees, but only comes off as irritating and incessant.
That said, however, the cast is committed. They may not be well directed, but they all are eager to please and game to play. It’s a shame a cast this excited and talented must be wasted, but there are some nice touches given by Keener and Reubens— the only two honed performances in Accidental Love—as well as Brolin and even Kristie Alley in their sadly limited appearances. They don’t make this movie tolerable, but they do make this bumbling mess of a feature and its overbearing script elevate. They create a charisma and stealth at times that makes Accidental Love glimmer, if mildly, in sweetness and rich care.
It’s a shame, for reasons both in and out of his control, Russell couldn’t make his passionate feelings as vibrant and likable as he did later on in Silver Linings Playbook in his study of mental disorder. It’s too easy a pun to say Russell didn’t nail this one, but I’m not below making light of how a movie called Accidental Love was a mistake to release.