The MOW Spectator/Our Divorce Culture
Pleszczynski, Wladyslaw
Our Divorce Culture by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski T here's a certain order to these things that I've come to expect. In San Diego this April, I was lucky enough to see an America's Cup trial in which...
...For years, it seems, Fanny's liberation never rises above chronic humiliation...
...A Tampa Tribune critic applauded an ending "that celebrates love, compassion, and commitment...
...In San Diego this April, I was lucky enough to see an America's Cup trial in which Mighty Mary outraced Young America...
...Tom Shales, the Washington Post's television critic, evidently thinks along similar lines...
...Life is rough all by itself...
...It has dignity...
...Louis Post-Dispatch critic Gail Pennington's feminist reading also led her to confuse Feore with the character he was playing, calling him "an immensely unlikeable Canadian actor" and "repellent throughout...
...Actually, there is a credibility problem there, and it is the score-settling Shales's, who wouldn't have needed the press release sent to reviewers to inform him that the columnist in question is modeled on former Timesman (and current TAS Presswatch columnist) John Corry, on whose memoir the movie is loosely based...
...While Pennington lauded what "major male bashing" the film does, she found herself "betrayed and unsatisfied" by the couple's reconciliation...
...The Boston Celtics at the time were playing their last games in fabled Boston Garden, but all Hill could say by way of commemoration is that a spectator once displayed a banner there that read: "Boston Celtics' fans like to beat their rival teams almost as much as they like to beat their wives...
...An insightful Los Angeles Times reviewer praised it for shedding light on "the nature of our divorce culture...
...Despite the limitations of the MOW genre and the film's reliance on Fanny's point of view, "Friends at Last" has broken through a barrier of sorts, as if to say that no matter how justified feministically, divorce solves nothing, it is destructive, it is inhuman...
...After the breakup, Fanny falls into a such a listless, embittered depression that her daughter runs to the father for shelter, a child by the way who, miracle of miracles, doesn't say a single thing against her father in the entire movie...
...And, the Star added in a parting shot of its own: "You can't say that about many American made-for-TV movies...
...N of all the critics were that dismissive...
...As a reporter, Corry once questioned whether Shales's close ties with a CBS producer explained his then-steady raves for CBS products...
...Up tillthen, we'd fully enjoyed Fanny...
...Though in time she acquires a modicum of balance, there's no way to recover what was thrown away—until she and the journalist shyly, cautiously rediscover each other for the little time left her...
...He took a parting shot at the Cony character, calling him "a louse, and weakly played by Cohn Feore...
...Oddly enough," he complained, it "doesn't state Fanny's case very well," it "almost makes it look as though she should...
...Maybe they'd read the interviews in which Turner said that the movie "is not a diatribe...
...Watch for it in summer reruns...
...11 78 The American Spectator June 1995...
...Other than praising Turner's "very satisfying performance" and lamenting that she's thought to be over the hill next• to still-sexy former male co-star Michael Douglas, Shales clearly didn't like this movie...
...According to a column in the next day's Union-Tribune, however, the victory was somewhat marred by the presence of one Dave Dellenbaugh on board the formerly women-only yacht (and, more hurtful still, as the Mighty's tactician...
...Shales described her as "a bored and ignored wife whose husband is a columnist for the New York Times and also an insufferable pompous Wladyslaw Pleszczynski is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Friends at Last' is ultimately about the value and power of a long-term partnership," the Toronto Star noted...
...It also turned off USA Today's Matt Roush, particularly the film's tearjerker ending...
...It gave the movie a "4," as opposed to the "9" it awarded on the same page to a three-part PBS series on "six noted women scientists...
...Before an overflow audience, according to the Santa Barbara News-Press, "Hill denounced all types of forced subordination—domestic violence, sexual harassment, racism, sexism and international sex slavery...
...ass (no credibility problem there...
...A few weeks ago, I came across his review of a movie of the week (MOW) on CBS...
...Up the coast in Santa Barbara a few days later, I learned about the recent appearance of Anita Hill at my alma mater, UCSB...
...play the submissive spouse," and it "stops miles short of being a feminist manifesto...
...Feore happens to be a distinguished Shakespearean actor with a dozen years' experience at the Stratford festival—one of the many stage actors in the cast hand-picked by Turner, whose performance Newsday called a first-rate portrayal of "a vexing, but not unattractive, combination of arrogance and insecurity"—but no matter...
...She isn't allowed to fully enjoy her independence, which is a shame...
...Called "Friends at Last," it starred Kathleen Turner as Fanny Conlon, who ends her twelve-year marriage for '70s women's movement reasons, but reunites with her ex-husband emotionally a decade later, just before she learns she has cancer...
...TV Guide also disapproved, saying things "get gooey" when the ex-husband reenters Fanny's life...
...With Hill, the personal is above all political, sentiment and proportion be damned...
...this is not some propagandistic piece of work," and "I see it as a kindly telling of the private cost of the women's movement" and "I like stories where life is rough...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
