Forgotten Movie Review: 'Miami Rhapsody' Forgotten for Good Reasons

Miami Rhapsody

Directed by David Frankel

Written by David Frankel

Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Mia Farrow, Gil Bellows, Antonio Banderas, Mia Farrow

Release Date January 27th, 1995

Published January 27th, 2025

Miami Rhapsody stars Sarah Jessica Parker as Gwyn Marcus, a neurotic, recently engaged, young woman who is struggling with the concept of marriage. She loves her fiancé, Matt (Gil Bellows), but her ideas of marriage have been rocked by the recent problems in the longtime marriage of her parents, Nina (Mia Farrow) and Vic (Paul Mazursky). Dad believes that mom is cheating on him and he’s right. Gwyn confirms that Nina has been sleeping with Antonio (Antonio Banderas), the nurse for Gwyn’s grandmother.

But, it’s not just Gwyn’s parents whose marriage has hit the skids. Gwyn’s little sister, Leslie (Carla Gugino), just got married and over the course of a few weeks the marriage is just about over as Leslie starts cheating on her husband. Speaking of cheating, Gwyn’s older brother, Jordan (Kevin Pollak), cheated on his pregnant wife with the wife of his business partner. All of these infidelities coincide with Gwyn’s engagement to Matt and, naturally, all of the chaos and mistrust, has poor Gwyn questioning whether marriage is worth the hassle and potential heartbreak.

As you can sense from that brief description of the plot, Miami Rhapsody relies on a lot of coincidences. And the plot centers on a lot of characters that we are supposed to like being awful to the people they are supposed to love. Everyone, including Gwyn’s dad, who I’d failed to mention before, is cheating. And Gwyn keeps tripping over everyone’s affairs in the strangest series of coinciding events imaginable for one family. To say that the action of Miami Rhapsody stretches believability is an understatement.

Writer-director David Frankel, making his feature directing debut before going on to success as the director of The Devil Wears Prada, nine years later, doesn’t help matters by carelessly crafting the film in a fashion that is clumsy and off-putting. An early scene where Gwyn and Matt are getting engaged is captured so poorly that you can’t tell if we are listening to a voiceover conversation or if the two people talking are just badly over-dubbed. Words are coming from mouths that are clearly not moving and the awkwardness doesn’t improve much from there.

The marketing of Miami Rhapsody back in 1995 also didn’t help matters, misleading you as to what the movie was about. The film was marketed as a romantic comedy between Sarah Jessica Parker and Antonio Banderas but that’s not this movie. Instead, Banderas is sleeping with Mia Farrow who is playing Parker’s mom. Thus, when the film does try to put Banderas and Parker together romantically, the film stumbles over the fact that this guy had just been sleeping with her mom. Eww! Wrong decisions like this weigh down what should be a fleet and frisky rom-com, causing it to get bogged down in creepiness, even as there are intriguing questions and drama to be mined.

Could you get romantically involved with someone who had just come out of a passionate, sexual, relationship with one of your parents? The answer for me is simple, nope, but I can see where someone as handsome and charismatic as Antonio Banderas might, at the very least, complicate the answer to that question. Sadly, this question only arises after we’ve sat through insufferable whining from ugly characters betraying each other left and right while rarely being interesting or charming along the way.

That's a little harsh perhaps, Miami Rhapsody is not absent of charm. The film essentially clones a bit of classic Woody Allen style bantering, and does so quite well in a couple of scenes. Sarah Jessica Parker, in fact, shines a couple of times with her sparkling delivery. Sadly, there is just too much sitcom style coincidence in the story and laziness in the filmmaking for me to say that Miami Rhapsody doesn't deserve its status a forgotten film some 30 years after it was released in theaters.

Miami Rhapsody is the subject of the next I Hate Critics 1995 podcast. Each week, myself and Gen-Z’er M.J and Gen-X’er Amy, talk about a movie that came out 30 years ago that same weekend. The goal is to look at how movies and culture have changed in just the span of three decades. It’s a fun show, even as we’ve come to find out that many of the movies released in the 1990s weren’t very good. You can find the I Hate Critics 1995 Podcast on the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Find my archive of more than 24 years and more than 2000 movie reviews at SeanattheMovies.blogspot.com. Find my modern review archive on my Vocal Profile, linked here. Follow me on Twitter at PodcastSean. Follow the archive blog on Twitter at SeanattheMovies. Also, join me on my new favorite social media site, BlueSky. Listen to me talk about movies on the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast. If you have enjoyed what you have read, consider subscribing to my writing on Vocal. If you’d like to support my writing, you can do so by making a monthly pledge or by leaving a one time tip. Thanks!