Uploaded February 2011 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Hans Zimmer's credit may headline The Whole Wide World, but in truth the score was written by up-and-coming composer Harry Gregson-Williams, who later proclaimed "Hans didn't write any music for [this movie]. In fact, he heard my score for the first time at the premiere." Zimmer's fingerprints are nevertheless smeared all over The Whole Wide World -- bass-heavy synthesizers and bombastic arrangements are just two of his signature moves borrowed wholesale by Gregson-Williams, who also dabbles in a series of melodic contexts spanning from lush romance to epic action to Latin-inspired dance.
When a young man points to the horizon and crows to his date that he ordered up a magnificent sunset just for her, you know you are not in the 1990's but back in some innocent long-ago, eons before the Weather Channel turned climatology into couch-potato entertainment. ''The Whole Wide World,'' which includes more than one such florid declaration, is set in the mid-1930's, in West Texas, to be precise.
The character doing the ordering is Robert E. Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio), the pulp fiction writer best known for creating Conan the Barbarian. His companion is Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger), whose 1985 memoir, ''One Who Walked Alone,'' from which the film was adapted, remembers her stormy friendship with Robert, who died by his own hand at the age of 30.
Wonderfully acted by Mr. D'Onofrio and Ms. Zellweger, the movie, directed by Dan Ireland, is a deep, gently touching study of the relationship between two strong-willed individuals with big dreams and plenty of open sky under which to call them up. Novalyne, an aspiring writer, is a salty, down-to-earth young schoolteacher with a restless heart who knows how to stand up for herself. Ms. Zellweger, memorable in in ''Jerry Maguire,'' gives the character a blunt, twangy authenticity.
Robert is a self-absorbed fantasist whose lurid adventure yarns are his escape from a world in which he doesn't fit. Inside the drab rural farmhouse where he lives with his ailing mother and incommunicative father, he conjures up a make-believe life of heroic derring-do and erotic adventure that shocks Novalyne's puritanical sensibility.
The movie follows a volatile relationship that involves dates for movies like ''The 20th Century'' and that reaches its peak in an impulsive and dramatic kiss on a windswept bluff. The relationship begins to dissolve after Robert announces with characteristic grandiosity that he is not the sort of man to be tied down, and Novalyne, quite sensibly, draws back and begins dating someone else.
Where films about writers tend to shy away from examining the creative process, ''The Whole Wide World'' finds comedy in Robert's intense involvement with the typewriter. The first time Novalyne visits him at his home, she hears him from afar excitedly bellowing the words he is committing to paper. Scenes like these evoke the adrenaline rush that every writer feels during a creative streak when words and images are clicking into sentences and paragraphs. But the difference between almost every other writer and Robert is in the degree of his passion. Instead of finding a comfortable energy level and flowing with it, he becomes maniacally carried away.
The movie's view of this disturbed young author finds just the right balance between affection and pity, admiration and criticism. Robert is a mama's boy under the spell of a seductive, sickly mother (Ann Wedgeworth) who is slowly wasting away from an unidentified illness. His slavish devotion, at once selfless and neurotically dependent, exacts a steep psychological price, and he is prone to violent tantrums. In the film's most unsettling scene, he becomes so enraged when his car won't start that he grabs a knife, rushes into a cornfield and furiously slashes away at everything in sight.
But in Mr. D'Onofrio's finely shaded performance, Robert is as much a charmer as he is a problem child. He has a winning streak of gallantry, and his enthusiasm and mental energy can be dazzling.
''The Whole Wide World'' focuses so intently on Novalyne and Robert's friendship that it pays only cursory attention to the world around them. The other people in their lives are shadowy fringe figures. For all the characters' tumult, the emotional journey that the movie follows feels somewhat flat. When, at the very end, the tone of the film turns stickily sentimental, you can feel the movie awkwardly trying to sum itself up with a grand gesture.
But how many movies have you seen lately that portray a complicated relationship between intelligent young adults exchanging thoughts about life and art who really listen to each other? ''The Whole Wide World'' does exactly that, and it's no mean feat.
Hans Zimmer's credit may headline The Whole Wide World, but in truth the score was written by up-and-coming composer Harry Gregson-Williams, who later proclaimed "Hans didn't write any music for [this movie]. In fact, he heard my score for the first time at the premiere." Zimmer's fingerprints are nevertheless smeared all over The Whole Wide World -- bass-heavy synthesizers and bombastic arrangements are just two of his signature moves borrowed wholesale by Gregson-Williams, who also dabbles in a series of melodic contexts spanning from lush romance to epic action to Latin-inspired dance.
When a young man points to the horizon and crows to his date that he ordered up a magnificent sunset just for her, you know you are not in the 1990's but back in some innocent long-ago, eons before the Weather Channel turned climatology into couch-potato entertainment. ''The Whole Wide World,'' which includes more than one such florid declaration, is set in the mid-1930's, in West Texas, to be precise.
The character doing the ordering is Robert E. Howard (Vincent D'Onofrio), the pulp fiction writer best known for creating Conan the Barbarian. His companion is Novalyne Price (Renee Zellweger), whose 1985 memoir, ''One Who Walked Alone,'' from which the film was adapted, remembers her stormy friendship with Robert, who died by his own hand at the age of 30.
Wonderfully acted by Mr. D'Onofrio and Ms. Zellweger, the movie, directed by Dan Ireland, is a deep, gently touching study of the relationship between two strong-willed individuals with big dreams and plenty of open sky under which to call them up. Novalyne, an aspiring writer, is a salty, down-to-earth young schoolteacher with a restless heart who knows how to stand up for herself. Ms. Zellweger, memorable in in ''Jerry Maguire,'' gives the character a blunt, twangy authenticity.
Robert is a self-absorbed fantasist whose lurid adventure yarns are his escape from a world in which he doesn't fit. Inside the drab rural farmhouse where he lives with his ailing mother and incommunicative father, he conjures up a make-believe life of heroic derring-do and erotic adventure that shocks Novalyne's puritanical sensibility.
The movie follows a volatile relationship that involves dates for movies like ''The 20th Century'' and that reaches its peak in an impulsive and dramatic kiss on a windswept bluff. The relationship begins to dissolve after Robert announces with characteristic grandiosity that he is not the sort of man to be tied down, and Novalyne, quite sensibly, draws back and begins dating someone else.
Where films about writers tend to shy away from examining the creative process, ''The Whole Wide World'' finds comedy in Robert's intense involvement with the typewriter. The first time Novalyne visits him at his home, she hears him from afar excitedly bellowing the words he is committing to paper. Scenes like these evoke the adrenaline rush that every writer feels during a creative streak when words and images are clicking into sentences and paragraphs. But the difference between almost every other writer and Robert is in the degree of his passion. Instead of finding a comfortable energy level and flowing with it, he becomes maniacally carried away.
The movie's view of this disturbed young author finds just the right balance between affection and pity, admiration and criticism. Robert is a mama's boy under the spell of a seductive, sickly mother (Ann Wedgeworth) who is slowly wasting away from an unidentified illness. His slavish devotion, at once selfless and neurotically dependent, exacts a steep psychological price, and he is prone to violent tantrums. In the film's most unsettling scene, he becomes so enraged when his car won't start that he grabs a knife, rushes into a cornfield and furiously slashes away at everything in sight.
But in Mr. D'Onofrio's finely shaded performance, Robert is as much a charmer as he is a problem child. He has a winning streak of gallantry, and his enthusiasm and mental energy can be dazzling.
''The Whole Wide World'' focuses so intently on Novalyne and Robert's friendship that it pays only cursory attention to the world around them. The other people in their lives are shadowy fringe figures. For all the characters' tumult, the emotional journey that the movie follows feels somewhat flat. When, at the very end, the tone of the film turns stickily sentimental, you can feel the movie awkwardly trying to sum itself up with a grand gesture.
But how many movies have you seen lately that portray a complicated relationship between intelligent young adults exchanging thoughts about life and art who really listen to each other? ''The Whole Wide World'' does exactly that, and it's no mean feat.
