‘I Love You to Death,’ a mediocre dark comedy with a great cast, turns 35

Lawrence Kasdan’s film, from 1990, cast Kevin Kline as an Italian-American womanizer

Image: Tri-Star Pictures

I Love You to Death was a comedy based loosely on a true story that happened a few years earlier, about a philandering husband whose wife repeatedly tries and fails to kill him- and the whole thing ends up both improving the husband’s behavior and fixing their marriage.

It’s a wild story, coming from a director, Lawrence Kasdan, who has made some outstanding films, and features a talented cast, most of whom were at the height of their powers at the time.

But the film, which arrived in April of 1990, 35 years ago this week, just isn’t very good. It’s not that funny, it can’t find the right tone, and it makes some pretty egregious casting mistakes.

The idea of casting Kevin Kline as an egregious ethnic caricature, of an ethnicity that the actor is not, wasn’t nearly as taboo in 1990 as it would become three decades later. But even so, it’s kind of jarring to see Kline cast as a womanizing Italian-American man named Joey Boca, who at all times sounds like he’s about to blurt out “it’s a me, Mario!”

Adding to that, a pair of British actresses, Tracey Ullman and Joan Plowright, were cast as Kline’s wife and mother-in-law, both of whom are supposed to be from Yugoslavia.

Kline’s Joey Boca is introduced confessing to a priest about his innumerable infidelities, and we soon learn how he does it: The owner of a pizza place, he also owns an apartment complex, where he sets up his various mistresses (played by the likes of Heather Graham and Victoria Jackson.)