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Random Hearts

The movie Random Hearts was based on the book Random Hearts.

Which one did you like better, the movie or the book?  There are 4 votes for the book, and 5 votes for the movie.

Movie details for Random Hearts

The movie was released in 1999. Random Hearts was produced by Sony Pictures. More information on the movie is available on Amazon.com and also IMDb.

Actors on this movie include Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Dylan Baker, Christina Chang, Bill Cobbs, Peter Coyote, Charles S. Dutton, Susan Floyd, Paul Guilfoyle (II), Dennis Haysbert, Bonnie Hunt, Michelle Hurd, Richard Jenkins, Nelson Landrieu, Kate Mara, Brooke Smith, Lynne Thigpen, Ariana Thomas and Susanna Thompson.

 

Read More About This Movie

Reviled by critics and largely ignored by moviegoers when released in 1999, Random Hearts is a pox on the reputations of Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, and director Sydney Pollack, but it doesn't entirely deserve its lowly fate. The movie's lugubri... Read More
Reviled by critics and largely ignored by moviegoers when released in 1999, Random Hearts is a pox on the reputations of Harrison Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas, and director Sydney Pollack, but it doesn't entirely deserve its lowly fate. The movie's lugubriously paced and its repressed passions are dulled under the weight of relentless melancholy, but Pollack deserves credit for defying the Hollywood Zeitgeist with a mature, substantial film about the power of betrayal to reach beyond the grave.

Ford plays a Washington, D.C. detective; Scott Thomas is a Congresswoman in the midst of a re-election campaign. When their spouses die in a plane crash, the cop is convinced they'd been having an affair, and his obsessive, masochistic quest for the painful truth draws him closer to the Congresswoman despite the mutual risks to their careers and domestic privacy. While she hides behind a façade of denial, his agonized investigation makes him simultaneously unappealing (a risk Ford may have taken as a challenge), sympathetic, and sadly compelling.

Pollack takes his own chances by keeping everything so relentlessly downbeat, but anyone receptive to the story will find that Random Hearts is a subtly rewarding study of tormented adults who've discovered too late the weaknesses of their seemingly stable marriages. It's anything but cheerful, and a subplot involving a corrupt cop (Dennis Haysbert) is a formulaic distraction. But Random Hearts provides welcome relief from dramas that flirt with emotional anguish without delving into its deeper consequences. --Jeff Shannon

Book details for Random Hearts

Random Hearts was written by Warren Adler. The book was published in 1984 by Hodder & Stoughton. More information on the book is available on Amazon.com.

Warren Adler also wrote War of the Roses (1981).

  

Read More About This Book

What the author of The War of the Roses did for hate,he now does for love. He's a happily married man. She's a happily married woman with a little boy and a good life. Or so they both believe. There's absolutely no reason why they should ever meet.Until a... Read More
What the author of The War of the Roses did for hate,
he now does for love.

He's a happily married man. She's a happily married woman with a little boy and a good life. Or so they both believe. There's absolutely no reason why they should ever meet.

Until a commercial airliner crashes into the Potomac River. Two of the victims are linked by a clue that at first stuns and baffles, then draws together their surviving spouses.

The explosive discovery leads them on a journey that forces them to confront the mysterious and random nature of love--and the transforming power it wields over men and women caught in its relentless maelstrom.