Untamed Heart

Tony Bill directs a fresh and only occasionally too purple script by Tom Sierchio. [12 Feb 1993, p.C]

If you went by the coming attractions and the advertisements, you might expect a predictable romance pitched on the level of a TV sitcom. But Untamed Heart is a movie of rare sweetness. [12 Feb 1993, p.D1]

The movie is kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place.

If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress.

If the script lays the broken heart metaphor a tad too thick and the ending has a fatal inevitability that you can spot a mile off, Bill, to his credit, plays it all straight from the heart (pun intended). Go armed with a very large box of Kleenex.

An offbeat romance as dysfunctional as its lovers. [17 Feb 1993, p.5B]

Slater is monosyllabic and mostly expressionless. When Tomei and Perez speak, they have nothing to say, as contrasted with the rapid-fire lines they had in their earlier films, lines that kept them interested and enthusiastic, so that their performances just glowed. Here, they're as dull as the dishwater in the diner, and so is the entire movie, tragic ending and all. [12 Feb 1993, p.3F]