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Grade: C-

Verdict: The good actors are overwhelmed by the self-conscious, smothered-in-Spanish-moss script.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

"A Love Song for Bobby Long" is one of those movies in which people quote poetry and drink a lot, read paperback editions of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" in the bus terminal, and mix vodka with pickle juice if there's nothing else around.

In other words, it's a self-conscious Southern Gothic, awash in literate eccentrics with stories to tell and songs to sing.

The man most likely to do the telling or the singing is Bobby Long, played by John Travolta with snow-white hair, three-day stubble and the leading-with-his-paunch walk he used as the earthbound angel in "Michael."

Bobby's a former literature professor who swapped academia for alcohol decades ago. He lives in New Orleans in a falling-down house he shares with his acolyte, Lawson Pines (Gabriel Macht), who's supposedly writing Bobby's biography, but mostly is a drinking buddy.

Meanwhile, over in a Panama City trailer park, Purslane Hominy Will (Scarlett Johansson) has just learned of her estranged mother's death. When she travels west to claim her childhood home, she finds it's already occupied by Bobby and Lawson, who say her mom left the house to the three of them.

Part of the movie concerns how these unlikely roomies bond and become -- what else? -- a kind of family. The other part is the education of Pursy, who's a high-school drop-out. Insisting she get her GED, Bobby home-schools her, Bobby-style. Meaning, forget your usual geography lesson about learning the names of all the state capitals. Which famous writer came from what state is much more important.

Oh, and there's a secret. There's always a secret in a Southern Gothic.

Everything else is pretty much atmosphere, from the down-by-the-river sing-alongs to the cicadas who helpfully pump up the volume when something important is happening. There's also Lawson's drawled narration, which is full of overripe clunkers like, "Time was never a friend to Bobby Long."

Oddly enough, once you give up on "Bobby Long," the movie kind of grows on you. You appreciate how the camera loves Johansson's coloring. How Macht has Jeff Daniels' eyes. How Travolta speaks with the same catch-in-his-voice drawl he used in "Primary Colors."

That movie, however, gave him a chance to cut loose, to be shameless and rascally, something Travolta is enormously good at. There are hints of that persona here, but "Bobby Long" doesn't want to commit to that kind of energy. It wants us and its talented cast to stay smothered in Spanish moss.