A Love Song For Bobby Long - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Stephen Holden of the New York Times called the film "another example of Hollywood's going soft and squishy when it goes South. Southerners' blood is redder and richer than everyone else's, we are asked to believe, and their secrets are darker. It must be from all that heat and humidity and time spent marinating in the sun." He added, "t dawdles along aimlessly for nearly two hours before coming up with a final revelation that is no surprise." He felt John Travolta was playing "a hammed-up, scenery-chewing variation of the brainy good ol' boy he played in Primary Colors," and thought Gabriel Macht's "understated performance" was "the deepest and subtlest of the three."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "What can be said is that the three actors inhabit this material with ease and gratitude: It is good to act on a simmer sometimes, instead of at a fast boil. It's unusual to find an American movie that takes its time. It's remarkable to listen to dialogue that assumes the audience is well-read. It is refreshing to hear literate conversation. These are modest pleasures, but real enough."

Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times said the film "is, deep-down, a redemptive makeover story drenched in alcohol, Southern literature and the damp romanticism of the bohemian lush life in New Orleans. A lovely noble rot pervades the film in much the same way that it does the city, a longtime repository of lost-cause romanticism. If there's something a little bit moldy about the setup (drunken literary types, hope on the doorstep, healing from beyond the grave), the movie is no less charming or involving for it, and it's no less pleasant to succumb to its wayward allure and wastrel lyricism. Among other things, the characters . . . really know how to turn a phrase, in itself a pleasure so rare it all but demands any flaws be forgiven."

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone rated the film two out of four stars, calling it "an elegant mess." He added, "The actors labor to perform a rescue operation . . . What doesn't help is that and Macht are both too gym-toned and poised for their loser characters. It's the stunning location photography of camera ace Elliot Davis that provides what the movie itself lacks: authenticity."