The film stars Mary McDonnell as May-Alice, a soap opera star whose life is suddenly changed by fate. She has some money and a home down in the bayou country, where her family is from, and after she finishes with rehabilitation therapy (where she is a very poor candidate), she goes back down there to sit in her chair and drink wine and harbor her bitterness.
She has enough money to hire a full-time companion, and she interviews several of them, all with a lot of problems of their own.
A couple are hired for varying lengths of time, before they are fired or walk off the job. She is not easy to work for, and she has just about reached the bottom of the local employment pool when Chantelle, a black woman played by Alfre Woodard, arrives.
Chantelle is a strong woman, too. She is also determined to keep the job. She needs it, for more reasons than we know. She sizes up the situation, sees that May-Alice needs less coddling and a lot less wine, and tries to take charge. May-Alice fights back. And "Passion Fish" is essentially about the struggle of their wills.
John Sayles says he has been interested in such relationships between client and companion ever since he watched them develop in his own family. It is an interesting division of power: The companion is healthy and able-bodied, and has the freedom of movement. The client, like May-Alice, has power over the sources of money, and can try to control the other person through threats to their economic security. So there is a delicate balance, a struggle, sometimes unacknowledged, that goes on all day.
Sayles writes his own movies, which range from "Eight Men Out" to "Matewan" to the powerful "City Of Hope," and he has rarely written more three-dimensional characters than this time.
Although his subject is a minefield of cliches and the material cries out to be processed into a disease-of-the-week docudrama, he creates vivid, original characters for his story - characters like Uncle Max (William Mahoney), who comes to visit and reveals his entire lifetime in a few sentences, or May-Alice's childhood friends, or the actresses who worked with her on television.
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