UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN

Rating: 3

I wish that UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN were a better film than it is because its star, Diane Lane, deserves only the best vehicles. If it is worth seeing at all, and I am giving it a marginal nod, it is because Lane is one of the finest actresses working in film today. She can channel feeling with such conviction, with such clarity, and with such purity that she seems to be living each emotion with every fiber of her being and, more, makes us in the audience feel it, too. If Julia Roberts et als have the glitz and the buzz, Lane has the raw talent and delivers it in every performance.
Readers of the book of the same name by Frances Mayes will find some radical changes from that work. Here Frances is not facing rebuilding a villa with her husband, but rather is on the short end of an ugly divorce. Sent on a gay bus tour of Italy by her lesbian best friends to restore her spirits, Frances is entranced by one of the small towns on the tour. The glorious scenery, a mysterious English woman wandering the open market dispensing cryptic advice, and a villa offered for sale provide an irresistible temptation and almost without realizing what she’s doing, Frances has leapt off the tour bus, bought the villa, and embarked on a new life that she could never have imagined.
Naturally that includes romance with a beautiful Italian man (Raoul Bova) who whisks her off to his seaside village. Broken hearts abound, lovers are star-crossed and Frances ponders just what she’s gotten herself into. Lane soars, from the guarded look at the chance discovery of her husband’s infidelity, to the depths of despair with red eyes and the fetal position, to the glowing, effervescent joy as Frances learns to love again. She can even deliver pratfalls with exquisite timing and wild abandon.
Compared to Lane, pretty much everything else in this film falls flat with two exceptions, the glorious, sun-drenched Italian scenery, and Lindsay Duncan as Katherine, a Brit ex-pat who never quite got over being in a Fellini film years and years ago. Living her own version of LA DOLCE VITA with a string of much younger lovers and outre excesses, she fills the eccentric friend niche in a role that could have been reduced to parody by a lesser actress or a writer with less compassion and, dare I opine, sense of fun. As for the rest, it’s a cavalcade of the cliche. Hence, the fellow bus tourists are predictably immune to the local charm, the contractors fixing up the tumble-down villa are predictably colorful, the repairs themselves are predictably slapstick, and the locals are predictably provincial.
Still, as I said at the beginning UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN is worth sticking around for Lane and for one other reason. Writer Audrey Wells packs a wonderful twist at the end as Frances suddenly realizes that she now has everything she ever wanted and that all she needed to do was dump her emotional baggage to get there. It’s deliciously wry.