Steeped in soggy heat and 86-proof humidity, Shainee Gabel's loose adaptation of Ronald Everett Capps' novel Off Magazine Street is an amiable compendium of clichés about alcoholic philosophers and their woozy charms. Self-proclaimed man of letters Bobby Long (John Travolta), a former university professor committing suicide by booze, and his younger protege, aspiring novelist Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), share a run-down shotgun shack in New Orleans that until recently belonged to hard-loving barfly Lorraine, a sometime-singer and beloved fixture around the lower depths. Lawson purports to be working on a novel inspired by Bobby's experiences, but in fact has little time for anything but playing obscure games of "name that quotation" and matching his mentor drink for drink. Lorraine's untimely but not unexpected demise promises to have little effect on their lives until sullen 18-year-old Purslane (Scarlett Johansson), Lorraine's estranged daughter, turns up — a day late — for the funeral. Bobby and Lawson decide to tell her that Lorraine left them all equal shares in the house and make Pursy, as she likes to be called, feel sufficiently unwelcome that she'll skedaddle back to her trailer-trash boyfriend in Florida and leave them in sodden peace. But the willful Pursy sticks around and a funny thing happens: Bobby and Lawson find they like her and take it upon themselves to help her out of the rut in which she's mired. Pickled but loyal academics that they are, they hope to persuade the high-school dropout to resume her schooling and are willing to do whatever it takes to get her back on track. Pursy, for her part, is shyly attracted to Lawson, and slowly warms to their reminiscences of her mother, which are far rosier than her own faint memories of unreliability and abandonment. Travolta, Macht and Johansson's performances, a decidedly mixed bag, are nevertheless the main event. Johansson oozes the surly wariness of someone prematurely aged by bitter disappointment, but Travolta, white-haired and impeccably dissolute, is visibly stretching and the effort just draws attention to the fact that his paternally cuddly Bobby is a thoroughly unconvincing souse. Though Macht also wears his years of hard drinking implausibly well, he nails the combination of self-loathing and anesthetized resignation that keeps Lawson trapped in boozy limbo. This smooth concoction goes down with a pleasant tingle and leaves behind a warm glow, where a clear-eyed descent into the bottle like LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995) has all the allure of a throat-scraping slug of bathtub gin. --Maitland McDonagh
