Jeremy Herbert
I Love You to Death opens with a sinner negotiating the wages of sin. “I mean, it was more than seven times, Father, more like ten or twelve times, but, y’know, it was like on seven different occasions with five different women, but some of the women more than once,” confesses philandering pizza king Joey Boca. “Some of them… quite a few times.” The scene ends before the priest can crunch his penance numbers, but the point is taken — Joey Boca can’t keep a story straight to save his life.
For director Lawrence Kasdan, it was the key to the entire film: “This movie is about bad information.” Joey barely hides these affairs from his wife, Rosalie, who believes his lies over the warnings of employee and admirer Devo. When the truth comes out, Rosalie decides to kill him at the suggestion of her mother, Nadja, who believes she must already know a dozen hitmen already thanks to a steady diet of supermarket rags. After her first and only recruit fails, Devo enlists the seedy James brothers, who confidently negotiate their rate despite never actually having killed anybody before. And on and on it goes. The ignorance would be unbelievable if it wasn’t, according to the real-life Joey Boca, “99 percent accurate.”
Frances Toto tried to kill her cheating husband, Tony, so many times that screenwriter John Kostmayer removed one attempt for the sake of pacing. In fairness, next to bludgeoning, poisoning, two bullets, and a failed car bomb, tripping him down the stairs does seem a little quaint. It didn’t make any difference to Tony, emotionally or mortally. Forty years later, he’s still married to Frances and shrugs off his failed homicide as “one time where we had some rough time.”
Because Kasdan told the cast not to research their real-life counterparts, Kevin Kline only knew that he was the second choice after Sylvester Stallone. As a result, he does to Italians what he previously did to Americans in A Fish Called Wanda. Joey Boca is a terminally horny theme park mascot of his culture, treating every mound of dough like a heaving bosom and purring “Monopoly” into a four-syllable love song. At a 2025 screening of the film, Kline offered an unapologetic mea culpa for the entire cast: “We all looked for things to make this as stupid as possible.” Although this defense is fair for most of the company — William Hurt is essentially playing The Dude if he moved on to meth — there’s one notable exception.
“I’m not funny in it,” warned Tracey Ullman in a contemporary interview, “but what happens to me is funny.” In the spirit of her ten-time Emmy-winning TV series, she approached her first starring role with wigs and dentures and accents, but Kasdan vetoed all shtick. As Rosalie, she is the thin, human line separating this black comedy from a cartoon and Joey Boca from the Road Runner. “Soon as I saw Joey, I knew he was the one,” she says, waxing poetic about a pick-up line he just recycled on a woman in a bar the night before. Ullman’s sincerity is almost too heavy for the later hijinks to lift off — her reconsidered suicide attempt belongs in a movie where Keanu Reeves is not playing an amateur assassin — but without it, there is no heart except the one that everybody’s trying and failing to stop. Not that it was always beating so loudly.
“We reshot the ending, added new scenes, and took out scenes that were difficult,” admitted Kasdan in a rare discussion of the film for Back Story 4. Test screenings “despised” the first cut for its cruelty. Without any request from distributor Tri-Star, the director voluntarily undertook a salvage operation, lightening up the film’s blackest comedy. But in pursuit of an audience, he lost what made him fall in love with the script, the first he ever directed that wasn’t his own. “I have more regrets about I Love You to Death than anything I’ve done.”
Now and again, all of its characters are addled by something. Lust. Greed. Revenge. Pasta. Narcotics required and recreational. After spending four years in prison for attempted murder, Frances Toto herself admitted, “I don’t think I was thinking straight.”
In this delusional grace, I Love You to Death is a comedy of passion. Joey, for all his sleaze, makes it plain to mistress number who-knows that he can’t leave his wife: “It’s a good marriage; I buy the food, she cooks it.” As a proud Italian caricature, this might as well be a sonnet. When Rosalie decides to poison him, she still hides it in his favorite dish, and he still goes back for seconds even after the fatal indigestion sets in. Before she’s ready to hear the magic words, a sloppier pitch for his untimely demise makes her say them out loud: “I want him dead, but I don’t want him hurt.”
Tony Toto holds no grudge against his wife, who spent four more days waiting for him to die than her fictional counterpart. “Do I forgive her? Yes. Nothing happened to me. Is okay.” Because love, the undying kind you’d kill for, is stronger than bad information, and I Love You to Death is stronger than bad test screenings.
“I Love You to Death” is streaming, with ads, on the Roku Channel and YouTube. It is also available for digital rental or purchase.
“Crooked Marquee’s Bad Romances” is an annual spotlight on anti-Valentine’s Day favorites. Follow this year’s recommendations here; you can also read our entries for 2025, 2024, and 2023.
