Anything But Love
If you spent any time hanging around the drama department in high school or college, you knew girls like Billie Golden. Where their roommates wore blue jeans, they sported chic dresses and pressed white gloves. They worshipped at the altar of Hepburns Kate and Audrey, favored Fred Astaire over Tom Cruise, and moved to the strains of a Cole Porter song that only they could hear.
Isabel Rose, who plays Billie and who co-wrote the sweet, ungainly little movie in which the character appears, may even be one of these wistful nostalgia junkies. She has just enough distance, however, to know how out of step with the modern world -- how lonely -- such a woman can be. When ''Anything But Love'' opens, Billie is singing her heart out at the JFK airport Skylounge, where her dreamy renditions of Tin Pan Alley standards are interrupted by the hacking of an octogenarian audience. Later, a friend mentions that auditions are being held for Carnival. ''The show?'' asks Billie. No, the cruise line.
Directed and co-written by Robert Cary, ''Anything But Love'' -- which has been making the festival rounds since 2002 under the title ''Standard Time'' -- very much wants to be a throwback to Hollywood's golden age. It lacks the necessary budget and panache, though, and it never decides whether Billie deserves sympathy or a good shaking. Rose prompts both: With her aquiline nose and determined jaw, she's far from beautiful, but neither was Bette Davis, and like her, the actress understands the value of elegance, bearing, and the right hat.
''Anything But Love'' catches Billie at a crossroads. She has hit her early 30s and the cabaret act just isn't catching on. She lives in Queens with her alcoholic mother (Alix Korey) and works as a waitress at a midtown hotel where Eartha Kitt sings in the lounge next door. The reappearance of high school crush Greg Ellenbogen (Cameron Bancroft), all grown up into a Wall Street hunk and looking for a girlfriend who isn't named Muffy, seems to be the qualified answer to her prayers.
Meanwhile, Billie needs to take piano lessons to get a solo gig at the refurbished Skylounge, and her teacher is Elliot (Andrew McCarthy), a cynical soul with hidden sensitivities and a white-on-white rehearsal studio that features swooning views of lower Manhattan. Having set up this romantic dilemma (and squeezed in two love montages for the price of one), ''Anything But Love'' lets Billie put off her decision until well past the point of no return -- what should be screwball becomes downright irresponsible.
You go along for much of the ride only because Rose yearns so affectingly, for the right guy, for the right song, for 1934 to come around again. You even forgive the actress's unbecomingly thin singing voice, so firm is her conviction that willing it will make it so. Some people might call that delusion. Billie calls it style.
It's harder to forgive her costars. As Greg, Bancroft displays all the emotion of a male underwear model, and the women in his WASPy social circle are Stepford-wife fish in a barrel. As Elliot, McCarthy trots out the same peevish glower he did back in his Brat Pack days; his one concession to adulthood is a three-day stubble that never grows longer or gets shaved. Neither man seems the right match for Billie. Actually, Gene Kelly's the guy for her, but he's busy being dead, and ''Anything But Love'' only fitfully conjures up the long-lost world he represents. Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.
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