On Screen

...Given the characters' lack of inner substance, Hiller concentrates on their externals, thus occasioning some suspense of another sort Will Zack and Claire really be able to afford what looks like a half-million-dollar house on her salary and his earnings as a physician'' And if they are, who will get custody of it after the divorce'' Will Bart's books ever make the best-sellers' list...

...Personal Best handles lesbianism with sweaty palms Most of the perspiration comes from lengthy, lyrical montages of nude female athletes in steam rooms Various commentators (mostly women, it should be noted—Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, Veronica Geng in the New York Review of Books and Laurie Stone in the Village Voice) have vaporized about how these leeringly graphic sequences are "celebrations" of female physicahty and not male-oriented softcore pornography Tellthat totheread-ers ot Plavbov, where stills irom the film were recently exposed to millions of male celebrants Towne's athletes, moreover, talk incessantly about sex w hile they're sweating awav, something I find hard to believe, though I have toconless to limited know ledge of ladies' steam rooms Nor can I help wondering why all those sauna scenes were required in the first place Rocky didn't contain frontal nude glimpses of Sylvester Stallone In fact, unnecessary shots abound, from the endless slow-motion closeups of straining buttocks and thighs to a sequence where the camera is aimed at eye level near the high-jump pit so that, one by one in rapid succession, several women land on their backs after clearing the bar, legs spread wide and barely concealed crotches forthnghtly shoved to the center of the screen in Technicolor Granted, Personal Best is about athletes, for whom physical effort is supposed to be the name of the game One of them, Chris Cahill (Manel Hemingway), is an ambitious and rather naive teenage pentathlete who falls under the sway of first her charismatic college coach, Terry Tingloff (Scott Glenn), and then an older teammate, Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnell)—her lover and later competitor Since the story revolves around Chris' growth as both a woman and an athlete, it is natural for Towne to pay attention to her physical development Yet that is no excuse for his skimping on her psychological dimensions Like Zack in Making Love, Chris transfers her affections arbitrarily, although in her case the switch is to heter-osexuality (a water polo player named Denny, played by Kenny Moore), and in other instances she also seems motivated by nothing other than the filmmaker's will Indeed, her guiltless, primitive, polymorphous pursuit of sex strikes us as the fantasy of someone viewing adolescence through a fog of middle-aged nostalgia I suspect Towne's mind was clouded by all those steamy shots When his eye is on something besides women's bodies, Towne remains pretty confused The script is so elliptical that it is difficult to figure out what is happening Chris' father (her original coach) briefly haunts her in a voiceover, for example, but the sound track is so bad and their relationship is so sketchy that nothing makes any sense to us or any difference to her Chris' love-hate involvement with Tingloff also threatens at one point to become sexual and subsequently is simply abandoned In one confrontation, furious at how he has to be a "mother" as well as a coach to his charges, Tingloff says "Chuck Noll never has to worry that Franco Harris' feelings are hurt because Terry Bradshaw won't talk to him " That line exemplifies what is wrong with Towne's perspective on women in Personal Best—and it indicates as well how odd it is that female critics should be praising this film One would expect them to find it patronizing for a movie about women in sports to dwell on the athletes' personal woes instead of their achievements, not to mention the way these melodramas pat-ly determine their athletic performance TOWNE SEEMS unconsciously racist as well as sexist Anyone who has ever attended a track and field meet in the United States knows that especially in the pentathlon events (high and long jumps, shot put, hurdles and 800 meters), a great many of the competitors, male and female, are black In Towne's skewed vision, the women are almost all white The few blacks on the team are mostly objects of dension, an overweight shotputter in particular is singled out for cheap laughs whenever she waddles across the training field The sole exception is a character nicknamed Pooch (there are, significantly, no diminutives for the whites), who materializes like a black dea ex machma to provide some competition for Tory and Chris in the climactic pentathlon The acting in Personal Best rivals Making Love for feebleness Donnelly has a certain ferret-faced charm, but she has the body of a marathon runner, not a pentathlete With her sinewy scarecrow arms, she looks ridiculous throwing the shotput Hemingway is as wooden as ever, her affectlessness and dead eyes are wearying five minutes into the film That doesn't prevent the screenplay from improbably referring to the mousy Tory and the bovine Chris as "the two best-looking women in San Luis Obispo " It was a dreadful mistake as well to cast Moore, a former Olympian, as Chris' male heartthrob As do Hamlin and Ontkean, Hemingway and Moore look and act alike, he shares her insecure smile and weak voice and asexual frame Their courtship, consequently, has a narcissistic air Glenn, however, is again a pleasure to watch After Nashville and Urban Cowboy, his career derailed, his brief appearance in the unfairly neglected Cattle Annie and Little Britches went virtually unnoticed In Personal Best he does his best with a part that is woefully underwritten The scene where he complains about the burdens of being a women's track coach is a masterly comic monologue And another moment, when he spurs Chris on in a workout by taunting a male runner on the same track, reveals the hidden complexities of coach Tingloff—a male chauvinist who in spite of himself is proud of the women he has trained But this characterization must be credited to Glenn, not Towne If only this film about women were as good as its male lead...

...These and other irrelevant questions kept running through my mind as Hiller's camera strayed around lavish interiors and accessories usually found in coffee-table magazines I also haven't had to ponder the significance of so many casually elegant outfits since American Gigolo The acting similarly permits plenty of free-floating speculation I wondered whether Jackson's raspy speech and rangy, boyish body were factors in casting her for such a unisex role And I bet Ontkean and Hamlin were selected for their parts because they closely resemble each other, with their vacant eyes, toneless voices and stiff gestures Hiller's staging suggests that these considerations did not escape him Nevertheless, the Big Moment when Zack and Bart first kiss takes place in subdued lighting that conceals the actors' inadequacies and discomfort as much as it conveys eroticism Where Making Love is circumspect, Personal Best is blatant The "good taste" of Sandler and Hiller sinks into self-parody, the explicitness of Robert Towne (who wrote, produced and directed Personal Best) is indulged to the point of comedy Making Love treats male homosexuality with kid gloves...

...Although this romance revolves around life, not death, Barry Sandler's screenplay (from A Scott Berg's story) is as sentimental and nonsensical as Eric Segal' s, and Arthur Hiller's direction of both films is unerringly aimed at the softest parts of the audience's hearts and heads The plot centers on an old-fashioned triangle in new-fangled form Zack (Michael Ontkean) must choose between his wife, Claire (Kate Jackson), and his lover, Bart (Harry Hamlin) I won't be giving anything important away by revealing that he ultimately opts for neither, the predictably unpredictable denouement has become no less hollow a Hollywood cliche than the happy endings of yore The movie has, to put it mildly, other flaws...

...On Screen BOY MEETS BOY, GIRL MEETS GIRL BY ROBERT ASAHINA GAY LIBERATION has turned into gay romanticization in Making Love and Personal Best Evidently the film industry now feels free to have homosexuals in love as foolish as their heterosexual counterparts Making Love has already been approvingly called a "gay Love Story " by the homosexual press, and I can think of no better way to criticize it...

...Foremost among them is the absence of any drama or credibility in Zack'sevolution HeandClairearepor-trayed throughout as almost impossibly happy in their marriage Nothing we learn about him—from his enthusiasm for Rupert Brooke and Gilbert and Sullivan to his strained relationship with his father—provides a clue to why he is suddenly interested in men rather than women That Zack's coming to grips with his long suppressed homosexuality might bring some pain and struggle seems not to have occurred to the filmmakers—or perhaps they decided to ignore this in the interest of avoiding the controversy that surrounded Cruising a couple of years ago Part of the dramatic weakness lies in Sandler's failure to distinguish the characters Not only have Bart and Claire had problems with their fathers too, but they are so much alike in practically everything except gender and occupation (he'sa novelist, she's a TV network executive) that Zack's preference for one over the other comes across as frivolous, even arbitrary...