“See what it is invisible, and you will see what to write. That’s how Bobby used to put it. It was the invisible people he wanted to live with. The ones that we walk past every day, the ones we sometimes become. The ones in books who live only in someone’s mind’s eye.”
A Love Song for Bobby Long was originally released in 2004, and is to me one of the most overlooked films in our collection. Its screenplay is based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps. Also featured throughout the movie are quotes from some of our most famous writers, and it is filled with themes from the book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It’s a movie inundated with the love of literature.
The movie takes place in the heart of New Orleans, where both beauty and 
ugliness meet. Through the loss of a close friend and absent mother the story unfolds to the finding of a long-lost daughter, Purslane Hominy Will, who returns to her childhood home only to find it occupied by two alcoholics: a former literature professor, Bobby Long played by John Travolta and his young protégé, Lawson Pines whom Bobby has chosen to chronicle his life. They reside together in the rundown house, where the drama and emotion of roommates finally reaches a crest – for all three are connected by a broken past not fully evident. Only as secrets come to the surface do they all become aware of just how much they need each other.
~posted by Kara P.
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