Film Screening – Love and Death on Long Island

Love and Death on Long Island (1997, rated PG-13) is a warmly observed study of an introvert trying to come to terms with a new kind of love late in life. John Hurt plays curmudgeonly British writer Giles De’Ath, a widower who lives in a dusty world of books and memories. One day he buys a ticket for a movie, and instead of the literary adaptation he meant to see, he winds up in the wrong theater watching a teen sex comedy called Hotpants College II. Gazing into the blue eyes of its hunky leading man, Ronnie Bostock (an appropriately cast Jason Priestley), Giles feels stirrings of infatuation. He becomes obsessed, buying a VCR to watch the rest of Ronnie’s films, scouring teen heartthrob magazines and trying to relate it all to Shakespeare and classical paintings. Learning that Ronnie has a house on Long Island, Giles travels there to stalk the object of his crush. But when he finally meets Ronnie and his girlfriend Audrey in the flesh, he is forced to confront both his illusions and his long-suppressed emotions.