Watch The Whole Wide World For Free

Such a frustrating disappointment

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The whole wide world is a love story about the real-life pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard and his admirer Novalyne Price. Following Howard's suicide there were a lot of rumors going around about him that indicated he was loony and crazy. Novalyne Price wrote a single book in her life centered on setting the record straight about Robert and describing him from her eyes. The two leads in this movie were great. Renée Zellweger played Novalyne Price, one of her first acting roles, and Vincent D'Onofrio played Robert E. Howard, one of Dan Ireland's favorite male actors. Both actors were sincere in their roles and brought forward very powerful performances, but neither performed in a tacky over-the-top way either. It was believable and emotional. There were certain parts in the movie that showed us how Robert thought when he was coming up with his action stories. For example, in one scene he is shown walking down the street punching the air and grunting as he pretends he is fighting off someone. This looks really weird to the ladies looking at him from the outside, but to the viewer of the movie we feel like we are in his head due to the strategic sounds and music used. As we have a close shot of Howard's face we hear the sounds of swords hitting and action music to accompany that helps us understand why Howard is acting the way he is. This strategic use of music was extremely powerful and aided the viewer in achieving the ultimate goal of the film to understand Robert E. Howard as a writer. This movie is a love story and so apathy sometimes just comes with the territory, but this movie at times definitely felt like it dragged on. I didn't feel like there was enough actual substance and action for the movie. There were many scenes that just felt like repeats. Novalyne and Robert just drove around in a car and talked for the majority of the movie. While I realize this movie is supposed to depict the true love story it does not serve well for entertainment's sake. When the movie finally did get to the climatic point where we realize that Robert and his mother have a bond that is interfering with his life it is not shown enough for the audience to understand what is going on. I only understood this troubling relationship after I finished the movie and read several reviews and comments on Howard's life. As I was watching the movie it did not make sense to me why Novalyne seemed to be so bitter about Robert caring for his mother who seemed to be on her death bed, it just came off as a lack of compassion towards Howard. The idea that this dramatic scene was supposed to tell was that Howard's mother was keeping him from engaging in new relationships, but the scene was not near dramatic enough. Although overall I thought this was a charming and deep movie (and refreshing due to the lack of sexuality in this love story) I did not think that Novalyne Price had enough of a story from her point of view to be made into a movie. I also thought that since this love story was entirely from her point of view and since she and Howard were never really committed to each other it was difficult for me to fully accept it as a story of true love because I did not fully understand Howard's feelings in the matter.

Instead of watching another "so-so" movie, give this one a try. There's not a lot of action (no car chases, etc.), but it is an intelligent movie with good acting, good writing, and a story you probably never heard. I am not a Renee Zellweger fan but as this is one of her earlier films, she is watchable. She is very good as a small town teacher/writer wanna be. Vincent D'Onofrio is great in the lead. It is hard to believe he is a New Yorker as he becomes this troubled Texan. You will probably cry at least once while watching it. The DVD was actually cut, leaving out some "not essential(?)" portions that would have made the movie better.

I have to admit up front, I originally sought this movie out because I'm a dedicated fan of the enigmatic pulp genius Robert E. Howard, who ended his prolific career by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in 1936. This movie is based on the memoirs of a woman he was involved with named Novalyn Price. So again to be up front, this movie is very pleasing to me as a fan of Bob Howard. It reveals some of the negative aspects of this man (although skimming clear of his extreme racist views, which to be fair he tended to show more in his writing than in his personal behavior) but also shows us a lot of his heart and the beauty of his writer's soul that always found such tortured expression in the famous "Conan" and "Solomon Kane" stories. But I think the movie is going to be just as pleasing to those who are not fans of Howard's writing -- perhaps even more so, because this isn't really a movie just about a writer, it's about a relationship between two writers. And it's a messy, very realistic relationship at that.This was a very early film for Renee Zellweger, and I was impressed right away with the ability she shows here in this film. None of her subsequent and often acclaimed performances have matched what she did here, opposite the great character actor Vincent D'Onofrio who brings Howard himself to vivid life. The movie is all about these 2 people -- there are no action scenes, there is no real drama except a manufactured drama that Bob Howard creates to compensate for his inadequacy and lack of resolve. There are many powerful scenes where these 2 people are consumed in an atmosphere of natural beauty, which suggests the world of imagination inside these writers -- Novalyn says from the hillside "you can see the whole wide world from up here" and Howard says "other worlds, too." Always the sense of what Bob Howard's imaginary world could look like is bubbling beneath the surface of what we see -- never do the film-makers stoop to any actual visualization of the fantasy universe, but sound effects and music are effectively used to create that sense of his dangerous and exotic fantasy world, while at the same time there is an emptiness around Novalyn's literary aspirations which contrasts with it. There are always two stories battling here -- a love story between two human beings and a sort of journey in stasis between two writers.There's no way to put into precise words just how incredible I think D'Onofrio's performance is here. Again, as a longtime fan of Bob Howard, I can say that the performance matches my image of him down to the smallest physical mannerisms. As a treat for fans we even get to see Bob in his late phase when he wore a sombrero and liked to walk the streets of El Paso "disguised" as a Mexican. All of Bob's paranoia and his contradictions are on display, and even more fascinating when put into the light of day by dramatic action -- he was a man whose ego demanded absolute self-sufficiency, but who had such deep emotional ties to his small circle of family and friends that he was unable to cope with any kind of loss in his life. The manufactured drama when Bob finds out that Novalyn is dating his friend Truett is just one of the more harmless examples of this, but Novalyn's perspective as expressed in the film enables us to see how deeply Bob Howard's behavior must have hurt and alienated the very people he needed and trusted so deeply. The pain and confusion are brilliantly expressed in Zellweger's performance, and there are also a pair of excellent supporting performances from Ann Wedgeworth and Harve Presnell as the Howard parents.This is a beautiful film, this is a film that has a world of emotion while having absolutely no stylized or melodramatic plot devices to push us one way or the other in our feelings -- it just unfolds at the pace of its story and draws us in to the lives of 2 people in a particular place and time. They are people who don't seem to fit -- a big awkward hulk of a fantasy writer whose hard working Texan neighbors think he's a sissy, and a headstrong woman trying to make a career for herself in the same conservative universe. But through the eye of this cinematic gem, they both seem to belong in this time and place and we feel as if they left a bit of their hearts behind in their writings so that we could discover it with them.

It's not often that biographies are produced about pulp writers, but this little gem scores on all counts. It's sweet, funny, earnest and insightful, conveying the difficulties faced by a young writer on his way up. Vincent Donofrio and Renee Zelwegger make a great team (a pity they have not been matched up again), and the film succeeds as drama, romance and biography. The technical credits are fine, with a warm feel for the time and place of Howard's home and environs. If you're a Conan fan (bookS and/or films), this will be of special interest, as you may have thought of Howard as a macho jock, salivating over the typewriter as he composed his adventure stories.