Film
Seitz, Michael H.
^^^/Michael H. Seitz Making Mush Hollywood has stolen an occasional look at homosexuality since the 1940s, but the results have not been anything that sounded in reality. The studios have...
...Of all recent Italian imports this is, oddly, the least firmly set in the current socio-political situation...
...This technique has been used with telling effect by Jean-Luc Go-dard, but in Making Love it merely signals a failure of imagination...
...And as a major studio production according gays all the attributes of traditional romantic leads—and in a movie romance with a happy ending—it is, indeed, something of a breakthrough...
...He becomes attracted to Bart McGuire (Harry Hamlin), a conventionally handsome and reportedly "talented" novelist, who has long since accepted his homosexuality, but is fearful of emotional commitment...
...The film has been realized by Arthur Hiller {Love Story), a director better known for the surface gloss of his works than for any personal vision...
...But now, in the wake of a decade-long gay liberation movement, of legal and political struggles for sexual freedom, and an outpouring of forthright gay literature, there are some signs that mainline filmmakers are finally prepared to treat the homosexual as a member of the human race...
...What little we are given to see of the acts of making love, accordingly, is more puppyish than carnal...
...But Zack begins staring at leather-garbed gay bikers, cruising gay street hangouts in his car, and furtively stopping off at gay bars...
...Written and directed by Robert Towne (scripts for The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo), and beautifully filmed by Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull...
...There's nothing to talk about," he replies...
...We see nothing but nice young men, all passably straight and seemingly on the lookout for companionship and only companionship...
...Are you sure you don't want to talk about it...
...Weak scripting is now commonplace in American cinema...
...This is especially true of the works of young film school graduates, who are often more knowledgeable about film history than they are experienced in life...
...And as nothing in the dramatized narrative suggests that these remarkably shallow characters are capable of the insight and self-knowledge these inserts reveal, the credibility of the film is undermined...
...Detached close-ups of Claire and Zack are periodically inserted into the story, as each directly addresses the viewer, explaining himself or herself and commenting on the action...
...In an epilogue, set a few years after their separation, Zack is living prosperously and happily in New York, in what appears to be a monogamous relationship with another attractive young man...
...After graduating from UCLA film school in 1970, Sandler got his first studio assignment as an uncredited writer on The Other Side of Midnight, based on the Sidney Sheldon novel...
...Barry Sandler's screenplay for Making Love is pressed essence of pre-sex-and-violence soap operas...
...The recent release of Making Love has been heralded by both its producers and the gay press as a significant breakthrough...
...Just a bad day, that's all...
...Her notion of quality is never clearly spelled out, but one suspects that it would be something on the order of Making Love...
...If we give them quality, we can teach them to like something better...
...Although we don't have the vaguest idea what sort of "stuff" he produces, we know that he's talented because Zack says he is ("You know, you're a hell of a writer...
...If Making Love is a commercial success, it may give other mainline filmmakers the courage to break away from the homophobia of the past and deal honestly with such themes and characters...
...They seem fulfilled in their personal lives and careers, and as a result are quite the least interesting young marrieds I've ever seen in the movies...
...The casting, as well, seems to have been guided more by the performers' looks than by any known ability to project a range of emotion...
...Bart had been frightened off by Zack's declaration of love...
...Wasn't That A Time Wonderfully engaging historical docu-portrait of the Weavers (Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman), built around the renowned folk group's 1980 reunion concerts in Carnegie Hall...
...Contemporary U.S...
...Claire is upset, but her love for Zack, the only man she has ever wanted, is such that she seeks only whatever will make him happy, and lets him go without apparent trauma...
...Claire is a successful network television executive, and Zack is a sensitive, caring, and prospering physician...
...Marvelous music, much interesting material on the politics of show business in the 1950s, and endearing mementos of some extraordinary people (especially Hays, one of the country's great ironic wits, and Gilbert, whose vibrant voice, soaring over those of the three males, gave the group its unique tonality...
...The anesthetizing character of Making Love, however, is not just the result of poor writing, but a product of harmonious collaboration...
...But if it flops at the box office (and it certainly deserves to) gay subjects may again be untouchable, and we'll probably never know whether this film was rejected because of its theme or simply because it was a lousy piece of filmmaking...
...she asks her bosses...
...We thus learn something of their fantasized self-images, while Sandler, a renowned film buff, pays homage to the master of mawkishness and, indirectly, to his own initial efforts as a Hollywood scriptwriter...
...Sleeping Dogs The first motion picture from New Zealand to be released in the United States—a political action-thriller in which the alienated protagonist finds himself caught between an increasingly repressive government and an underground terrorist resistance movement...
...The Meadow (II Prato) First film by Italy's Taviana brothers since their highly acclaimed Padre Padrone (1977...
...It is Dream Wife, a 1952 weepy directed by Sidney Sheldon, known so well to the protagonists that they recite the dialogue to the film's climactic scene by heart, along with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr...
...Making Love lacks distinction and originality in every respect...
...The studios have portrayed homosexuals variously as perverts, seducers, psychopaths, neurotics, or the objects of ridicule...
...Don't you have any respect for the public mentality...
...I don't think that such a shallow, lifeless movie can do much to further the cause of gay liberation, and it certainly does nothing for American cinema...
...In a remarkably unmodulated performance, Kate Jackson actually manages to show less here than she did in her long-time role as one of "Charlie's Angels," the very stuff of prime-time "quality...
...Making Love, as producer Daniel Melnick insists, "does take risks," but the risks are commercial rather than artistic in nature...
...About coming of age, athletics (track and field), love and competition, sex (lesbian and straight), and the poetry of the body...
...It is joined on the nation's screens by two other productions uncommonly accepting in their representation of homosexual relationships: Personal Best and Deathtrap (see Hits and Misses...
...It begins with Claire and Zack (Kate Jackson and Michael Ontkean), an attractive couple entering the eighth year of an apparently happy though childless marriage...
...In one of the film's most revealing segues, Claire and Zack are curled up before the television set, watching a late-night movie...
...An image for our time of strong, independent young women...
...Claire asks a troubled, brooding Zack...
...Claire is happily married to a handsome architect, and has a seven-year-old son who's been named Rupert (for Rupert Brooke, the English poet who was one of Claire and Zack's infatuations, and after whom they'd planned to name their never-conceived child...
...It wasn't easy to do what he had to do, but I know that he had to...
...Despite the title, this is one of the least erotic of movies—the sort of thing that Anita Bryant might come up with, were she to oversee the making of a film on the subject...
...He has given the film a squeaky-clean look throughout, even in the gay bar scenes...
...If I dwell on the script, that's because it's one of the film's most glaring deficiencies...
...And we are meant to see Zack as a young man of fine sensibility—not just an ignorant medical grind who went through college ignoring the humanities—because of his attachment to Gilbert and Sullivan and Rupert Brooke...
...Gorgeous shots of San Gimignana and the surrounding countryside, some rather stunning individual scenes, and a narrative which I found almost totally incoherent (I think it has something to do with thwarted hopes...
...Although this is one of several current works treating of gay life, the homosexuality here is more a function of the plot than a significant theme...
...Superbly acted (especially by Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve), and masterfully directed by Sidney Lumet, who preserves the work's theatrical essence while bringing to bear the resources of the cinema...
...Personal Best The surprise of the season: the best made and most engaging American movie to be released so far this year...
...Interesting premise and top-quality production values, but it suffers from mediocre scripting and acting...
...The two men make love, and Zack (as the promotional material so nicely puts it) "finally summons the will to defy his conventional upbringing and acknowledges his sexual identity to himself and to his wife...
...The dialogue throughout Making Love is equally insipid and cliche-ridden...
...Instead of developing character through dramatic action, Sandler drapes sandwich boards on the principal figures...
...Making Love is an old-fashioned movie romance—with a twist...
...motion picture craftsmanship—cinematography, production and costume design, editing, sound recording and mixing, special effects—is usually of a high order, but there are distressingly few films being made these days eager to say anything except what has already been said repeatedly in beloved old movies...
...We are meant to regard Bart as a worthy lover for Zack because he writes "all kinds of stuff," and is a novelist of talent...
...An apparent inability to embody the finer points of character and motivation in dramatic situations has led to the use of a spurious sort of cinema verite...
...There is, of course, no inkling of what their works mean to him, or why his attachments are so removed from his 1960s upbringing...
...Hits and Misses Deathtrap Lively, self-reflective, ingeniously plotted mystery-thriller, with more twists than a bag of pretzels...
...But the filmmakers have taken such pains to minimize the risks and thereby make a controversial subject acceptable to the broadest possible public that they have fashioned a work of stultifying mediocrity...
...We are meant to sympathize with Claire because she's not just another philistine television executive preoccupied with ratings and shares but a crusader for quality...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
