Stars and Bars Reviews

Henderson Dores (Daniel Day-Lewis), a very proper young Englishman who has recently arrived in New York to take employment as an expert on 19th-century art, is sent to Georgia to purchase a long-thought-lost Renoir painting worth $10 million. Though the painting's owner, Loomis Gage (Harry Dean Stanton), seems ready to sell, his son Freeborn (Maury Chaykin) threatens to kill Dores because Freeborn has accepted a shady offer of $15 million for the painting. Romantic interest is provided by a computer expert, Irene Stein (Joan Cusack), with whom he falls in love before leaving New York, and by Bryant (Martha Plimpton), the seductive 15-year-old daughter of his fiancee (Laurie Metcalf), who comes along on the trip. Embarrassingly unfunny, STARS AND BARS is the third theatrical feature directed by Irishman Pat O'Connor. The film is a horribly miscalculated attempt at firing a satiric, slapstick zinger at the differences between the stiff, superior ways of the British and the boorish, combative ways of American southerners.