FILM REVIEW

The Whole Wide World

"To make life worth living a man or a woman has to have a great love or a great cause...I have neither."--Robert E. Howard

A film festival favorite of 1996, "The Whole Wide World" is the story of Robert E. Howard, pulp fiction writer, and school teacher Novalyne Price. Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio) was the author of the Conan, Kull, and Red Sonja stories that ran in such magazines as "Weird Stories." As the film opens, he is living with his parents--his father is a physician and his mother is sickly, possibly from tuberculosis. Robert spends his time writing and attending to his mother's needs.
Novalyne (Renee Zellweger) is a feisty young teacher who dreams of becoming a writer. When she hears that a published writer, Robert Howard, lives in town, she phones him, but he doesn't return her calls. She gathers up the courage to call on him, and so begins a complicated relationship. Though only a couple of kisses are exchanged on screen, it is a relationship filled with passion, humor, pain, and regret. The dusty 1930s Texas landscape adds to the visual setting.
Zellweger and D'Onofrio are terriffic! This is a gem of a film.