Shainee Gabel’s “A Love Song for Bobby Long” may set a new record for literary name-dropping. Its book-loving characters can’t last five minutes without quoting Robert Frost or Charles Dickens or referring to Mark Twain or Willa Cather.
Occasionally they quote from other movies, dropping in a line from “Annie Hall” or “Driving Miss Daisy.” One character becomes obsessed with Carson McCullers’ “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” even making a life-altering decision after reading it in a crowded bus station.
After a few of these scenes, it’s tempting to think of them as the “book people” of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” memorizing their favorite books and wandering the woods reciting them. Certainly they seem to have enough time on their hands. Mostly they succeed only in making you wish you were watching a McCullers adaptation rather than this pleasant but so-so imitation.
Based on Ronald Everett Capps’s novel, “Off East Magazine St.,” Gabel’s script begins with the New Orleans funeral of a Southern singer, Lorraine, whose daughter, Pursy Will (Scarlett Johansson), fails to show up because she wasn’t told in time. After dumping the useless boyfriend who failed to relay the message, she moves into Lorraine’s old house.
Trouble is, it’s already occupied by a couple of hard-drinking writers, Bobby Long (John Travolta) and Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), who spend their mornings sleeping off the binges of the night before. Bobby and Lawson’s relationship to Lorraine and to each other is a little fuzzy, but gradually it’s established that Bobby was once an Alabama college professor (“a troubadour, a poet,” in his words) and Lawson was his teaching assistant.
“I really do enjoy fostering inspiration,” says Bobby, who claims to be pushing Lawson to finish a novel. But Pursy thinks it can’t be based on much more than their daily routine: “I got up, I got drunk, I passed out.”
After an awkward beginning, they form a kind of family, with Bobby taking a paternal role, encouraging the girl’s schooling, and Lawson trying to stop drinking in order to impress her. Gradually several secrets are revealed, starting with an alcohol-infused Christmas Eve confession that humiliates Lawson’s sometime girlfriend, Georgianna (Deborah Kara Unger).
Johansson clearly enjoys playing the sassy Pursy, who has Bobby and Lawson’s numbers and doesn’t mind letting them know it (she earned a Golden Globe nomination for this performance). Macht has almost as much fun with Lawson’s wasted behavior; when he thinks no one’s looking, he blends gin with pickle juice because he has no other mixer. Travolta also emphasizes the comic aspects of his character, though he doesn’t soft-pedal Bobby’s menacing side.
Gabel is a first-time director, and she’s enlisted a first-rate cinematographer, Elliot Davis, to bring some shadows to this laidback story. He’s particularly helpful at emphasizing Johansson’s most poignant moment, when her character suddenly understands that she can rely on childhood memories that she thought were dubious. But Davis can provide only so much shape to this meandering character study.