Little Women
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen LITTLE WOMEN BY ROBERT ASAHINA The big news this fall from Hollywood was the rediscovery of women—as serious subjects for movies, as artistically important stars, and as directors....
...It is immediately apparent, for example, that Deedee is accompanying Emilia to New York as a chaperone merely because Ross and Laurents want to free her from her "doll's house" and especially from her husband (Tom Skerritt...
...Brooks, who made his reputation with action films like The Professionals and In Cold Blood, was probably happiest directing that sequence and the equally bloody conclusion, where Theresa is killed in truly mind-and eye-boggling fashion in the light of a strobe lamp (awkwardly "planted" earlier on...
...Perhaps the saddest thing about The Turning Point is the evidence it provides (as if further confirmation were needed) that Hollywood is incapable of dealing with middle-aged women—fictional characters or real-life actresses...
...To be fair, this abysmal adaptation of Judith Rossner's best-seller is probably more the fault of Richard Brooks, who directed and wrote the screenplay, than of Keaton...
...The plot then proceeds along its predictable path: Emma, literally on her last legs, envies Deedee's family security...
...In fact, Semi-Tough itself is a cheerful antidote to the strained seriousness of the "new woman's pictures...
...The two are not only reunited but forced to confront the consequences of their choices, for the turning point has been reached by Deedee's 19-year-old daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne), who is given the opportunity to leave home and join Emma's company in New York...
...But he is patently out of his element elsewhere, and he has made a pathetic mess out of Looking for Mr...
...At one point Clayburgh even asks Reynolds...
...Moreover, the film's "dramatic" episodes are generated by arbitrary engineered devices, not by genuine conflict...
...Goodbar...
...Throughout, the notion of one momentous decision determining everything else is unconvincing...
...the absolute schism that Ross and Laurents posit between work and family bears little resemblance to the conflicting desires and aspirations that real-life women (and men) must reconcile...
...The nervous apprehension masked by a wide-eyed casualness is pure Keaton...
...She can at least rest assured, though, that she has nowhere to go but up following her latest disaster, Looking for Mr...
...Emma and Deedee are conceived as pitiful and self-pitying parts...
...The turgidity of the movie is more than matched by its clumsy casting...
...Semi-Tough is also the first movie, after a decade of male "buddy" films, to celebrate male-female friendship...
...She plays Theresa as she did Annie Hall— in her familiar, warm and fuzzily insecure manner...
...In all the talk about the reemergence of women on the screen this fall, there seemed to be a concerted effort by a virtual lobby of press agents and critics to proclaim Diane Keaton the leading contemporary American actress...
...This would have been less calamitous had the movie been shot consistently from Theresa's perspective, or not been full of confusing shifts in point of view...
...What is worse, the film unabashedly offers some of the old-time glamor it is presumably reacting against...
...she could easily be listening in her trade-marked, spaced-out fashion to a Woody Allen joke she doesn't quite get...
...It is difficult to resist the suspicion that they were inserted by Ross and Laurents for the sole purpose of attracting the growing audience of balletomanes...
...Browne, a member of American Ballet Theatre, was chosen precisely because she can dance, as the part of Emilia requires...
...Most of the latter-day "woman's pictures" are so similar to their justly maligned predecessors of the '40s and '50s, they merely serve to remind us why Hollywood abandoned women during the '60s and early '70s: It simply couldn't find anything interesting to say about their lives...
...Unfortunately, she can't act...
...Next, he made his Theresa seem much more wholesome and victimized—by sentimentalizing her relationships to her students (who are deaf children, rather than the ghetto kids of the novel), turning the men in her life into freaks (including James, her respectable but sexless lover), and casting Diane Keaton as the lead...
...Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that nothing of the sort is about to be witnessed...
...the eventual murderer first appears in a lengthy and violent scene that bears no discernible relationship to anything that precedes or follows it...
...At the beginning of the film, Emma plays Oklahoma City, the town Deedee settled in to raise her family...
...Publicity departments worked overtime to promote the "new woman's pictures," persuading even normally doubting critics and reviewers of the imminent arrival of a genuine feminist sensibility...
...Brooks clearly did not sympathize with the character of Theresa, Rossner's thinly fictionalized version of the real-life Roseann Quinn, a young woman who taught school by day and cruised the singles' bars by night, and who was murdered a few years ago by one of the men she had picked up...
...Emma, now an aging prima ballerina, stuck with her artistic ambitions and sacrificed the chance for marriage and family...
...Thanks in equal part to Brooks' bowdlerized rewriting and Keaton's stylized nonacting, the characterization of Theresa is rendered totally implausible: The psychological transformation from the schoolteacher to the hustler who brings about her own disastrous fate is utterly unbelievable...
...So he completely changed the novel's carefully worked-out portrait...
...As it is, new characters are introduced without the audience (or Theresa) having any idea who they are...
...Goodbar, she is very far from the best Hollywood can offer—as the example of Jill Clay-burgh clearly demonstrates...
...Director Herbert Ross and his coproducer and screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, have resurrected all the tired cliches, hackneyed characterizations and mechanical plots that gave films about females a bad name in the first place...
...The title refers to that moment when a woman must select between love and a career, between children and wordly success...
...Bancroft certainly looks appropriately washed-up, but she clearly cannot dance well enough (or, indeed, at all...
...The humiliating process of growing old on screen may be something that is on Diane Keaton's mind about now: At 31, she is approaching her dotage, by Hollywood standards...
...and costar Burt Reynolds has to be the finest light comedian in contemporary American movies...
...Director Michael Ritchie deserves a great deal of credit for making such a delightful throwback to the screwball comedies of the '30s...
...Sure enough, once she is exposed to the temptations of the big city and all the reminders of her lost past, Deedee succumbs—by having a brief affair with one of her old lovers (Anthony Zerbe...
...Although she is perfectly suited to the pap dished up in Looking for Mr...
...her rather bovine affectlessness scarcely does justice to Emilia's complex mix of innocence and ambition...
...Clay-burgh is the best tough-talking, vulnerable heroine since Joan Blondell...
...How could we have such fun and not wind up in bed together...
...Watch, for instance, the way she views her first dirty movie...
...A lengthy chunk of the running time is devoted to a gala concert, staged for the movie, that features short excerpts of material performed by Marcia Haydee, Fernando Bujones, Antoinette Sibley, Suzanne Farrell, Barysh-nikov, and other well-known dancers...
...As for Baryshnikov, suffice it to say that Nureyev was better in Valentino...
...Deedee worries that Emma is usurping her parental role...
...JL^F rooks is even more incompetent as a director than as a writer, cutting Theresa's daydreams right into the body of the film without any signal that they are fantasy...
...He first eliminated the very elements of Theresa's personality—her ambivalent feelings about her own body and her guilt-ridden sexuality—that provided the link in the book between her diurnal and nocturnal personae, and permitted the kind of identification felt by millions of female readers...
...The Turning Point is a prime instance...
...The best that can be said for Keaton's much-acclaimed performance is that it does not clash with Brooks' warped notion of the character...
...Ross and Laurents would certainly have been wiser to cast MacLaine, a genuine has-been dancer, in the role of Emma...
...The "turning point" for Emma (Anne Bancroft) and Deedee (Shirley Mac-Laine) came 20 years ago in New York City, where the two friends were aspiring young dancers...
...And it still can't...
...Goodbar...
...Emma, still unmarried, wonders if she could have had a daughter like Emilia...
...Watching her fake her performances (and warmup exercises) is embarrassing...
...Clay-burgh has suffered bad luck in casting recently (Gable and Lombard, Silver Streak), yet she does more and better acting in 10 minutes of her latest film, Semi-Tough, than Keaton does in two hours of hers...
...A little sex with a glamorous foreigner, a little adultery, a bit of pathos concerning the road not taken—all of these tiresome-ly familiar elements, in utterly artificial combination, make it difficult to see anything new about The Turning Point...
...Meanwhile, Emilia starts coming of age in more ways than one and is seduced by Yuri (Mikhail Bar-yshnikov), the principal male dancer in Emma's company...
...Bancroft and MacLaine have abased themselves by allowing their own aging to be exploited for the crudest kind of typecasting...
...These sequences, needless to say, are as dramatically irrelevant to The Turning Point as most lavish production numbers are to the "plot" of a musical...
...It should be noted that these new dance fans, with their fondness for familiar 19th-century choreography and "the superstar" policy of companies like the American Ballet Theatre, are only a slightly more sophisticated version of the old musical-comedy crowd...
...Deedee, a frustrated housewife and part-time ballet teacher, envies Emma's stardom...
...Deedee made exactly the opposite decision...
Vol. 60 • December 1977 • No. 24
