But it plays with my emotions

The novel Loverboy was never going to make an easy transition to film, even with the right stars, director and script. Without any of those things, it never has a fighting chance.

The shorthand description of the plot might be, for those of you who know the movie & book World According to Garp: Imagine if Jenny Fields was crazy. In a bad way, not the good way that she is.

The book depends-like Endless Love, an even worse film of an even better book-on the interior monologue of its lead character for much of its power. And though the movie tries to make that come across through the use of voice-over, it really puts more weight on Kyra Sedgwick's performance than it can bear.

I don't mean to be unkind to Sedgwick, who has been good in movies like Born on the Fourth of July and Singles, and she's not even that bad here, just IMO miscast. But I'm not sure who the right casting would have been, and it seems likely it's not all Sedgwick's fault.

Sedgwick's husband Kevin Bacon (yes, that one), not incidentally, was the director. In the DVD commentary Bacon reveals he felt the ending of the book was ambiguous; it is not. I'm left to infer that he missed the bittersweet irony of the book's ending.

So they changed it. Bacon and a screenwriter ironically named Hannah Shakespeare did not help Sedgwick's performance with a script that wants to make her character sympathetic. The novel arguably succeds at this because we are inside the woman's head and, although we naturally condemn her actions, at least we feel we understand her motivations. And when we come to the end we feel she has-metaphorically-dug her own grave.

I won't reveal exactly how this is changed in the film for those of you who have not read the book, but they "lightened it up," to a degree that ends up making it unintentionally even more disturbing.

This is almost a caricature of the actor's classic mistake: To try to make your own part-or your wife's- sympathetic or sand down the rough edges of a piece, at the cost of losing its flavor.

And this film is a classic example of why, with certain obvious exceptions like Clint Eastwood, most actors shouldn't direct.