review for Carried Away on AllMovie

From the start of Carried Away, it's clear that the two lead characters are locked in a slow dance of waiting. Joseph and Rosalee are teacher colleagues caring for ailing, aging mothers, which circumstance has extended their engagement to such a length (six years) that a kind of stale familiarity has set in. Enter Catherine Wheeler, a transfer student with an overactive libido; she sees Joseph not just as another lover, but as an instrument of revenge against her hard-line military father (played by Gary Busey) and alcoholic mother (Gail Cronauer). (It's implied that Catherine's instability, not her father's profession, has been the reason the family has moved so many times.) Director Bruno Barreto choreographs these dance steps with subtlety, allowing us to understand fully the motives of every character, no matter how selfish they are. It's his most powerful film, which he followed with the well-received political drama Four Days in September. Dennis Hopper tamps down his usual flamboyance to play a man with limited options and even less willpower; Amy Irving is persuasive as a woman desperate for real happiness and watching her one chance starting to slip away. When the two characters take off their clothes to make love, it's not an erotic scene, because you sense that they are stripping away something more than pieces of fabric to get to the truth of their relationship.