For a brief period in the mid-1970s the name Linda Lovelace lived at the very center of popular culture, particularly if the alphabetical listings in your movie collection weighed heavily toward the XXX.
We first meet Linda Boreman (Amanda Seyfried) as a naïve twenty-year old, living at home with her strict parents (Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick). Her ticket out of the oppressive household is Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), a strip club owner who sweeps her off her feet, marrying her just six months after they first met at the Moonlight Rollerway.
He’s a charmer until an IRS audit for tax fraud throws his life into a downward spiral. To crawl out from under the weight of debt he sells Linda into pornography, accepting $1250 to showcase her special sexual skills in a film called “Deep Throat.”
The ploy worked. The film became a sensation with everyone from Walter Cronkite to Johnny Carson and Bob Hope commenting on about it on television. Called the “Gone with the Wind” of pornography, the movie grossed an estimated $600 million and made Linda, now renamed Lovelace, the “postergirl for the sexual revolution.”
With success, however, came humiliation, physical and sexual abuse and a loss of personal identity.
Based on Linda’s tell-all “Ordeal,” “Lovelace” should be a cautionary tale, warning of the dangers of controlling spouses among others things, but plays more like a semi-raunchy Movie of the Week.
There are some good performances. Seyfried hits a career high, playing Lovelace as a vulnerable, innocent and fragile woman swept away by an obsessive man who tries to pass off sexual violence as passion.
Sarsgaard hams it up as Traynor, the wild-eyed psycho who, in one scene takes out his anger on a blow up effigy of Linda. He’s a bad man, but too broadly played to be truly convincing.
Solid supporting work from a who’s-who of indie film—Juno Temple, Chris Noth and Hank Azaria, among others—impresses, but Sharon Stone, unrecognizable as Linda’s cruel mother, is a stand out.
The film’s period details grab the look of the time—Crushed velvet jackets! Flares! Shirts open to the navel!—and archival news footage sets a tone, but it’s all veneer. The script, which features not one but two “6 Years Later” title cards, is relatively linear in its telling of the tale, but relies on big moments rather than insight to get its point across. With so many damaged people on display, it would have been interesting to explore how a man like Chuck can come to dominate those around him.
Documentary filmmakers turned feature directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman also invert the First Rule of Cinema, “show me, don’t tell me,” loading up scene after scene with unnecessary exposition. In one superfluous scene a radio announcer begins an interview with the words, “This film has become a phenomenon,” seconds after a montage visually showed us the movie’s success.
“Lovelace” attempts to tell an edgy personal story, but squanders good performances from Seyfried, Stone and supporting cast, in a movie that is too, simplistic, too tame and too timid to do justice to Lovelace’s horror story.
There are a couple of lines necessary for the success of every Creepy Kid movie. Chief among them: “I have a surprise for you, Mommy!” Why is the line so successful? Because the surprise is never good. A close second is the old, “I don’t think Mommy likes me very much” gag. These lines work because of the juxtaposition of innocence against a malevolent backdrop. In other words, evil children are scary. Orphan, starring Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard is the latest Creepy Kid movie to hit the big screen, but is it as disturbing as the classics of the genre like The Omen or Village of the Damned?
The story begins with a heartbreaking loss. John and Kate Coleman (Sarsgaard and Farmiga) are reeling after a miscarriage. The loss has taken a toll on their marriage, which seems about as stable as the bond between that other Jon and Kate we’ve been hearing so much about lately. In an attempt to right their awful situation they decide to adopt a child from a local orphanage. Finding themselves drawn to Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) they welcome the young girl into their home, but as soon as they do strange things start happening. Certain that something is wrong—really, really wrong—with her new daughter Kate tries to convince John that Esther isn’t the little bundle of joy they bargained for. He doesn’t heed her warnings until it is too late.
Orphan has echoes of many creepy kid movies but sets itself apart with (a probably unintentional) sense of camp that permeates its later scenes. It’s the kind of over-the-top dramatics that turned Mommy Dearest from bio pic into giggle fest. Its sense of hysterical fun makes it a good Friday night late show kind of movie with the right audience.
Orphan bills itself as a horror film, and it starts with a bang—well, more of a spurt or a gush, really—but many of the scares aren’t so much scares as they are jolts caused by loud audio cues and red herrings. I call them “booyas,” little unexpected shocks that snap you to attention. It’s a cheap way to get a rise out of people but it does create a bit of tension.
Modigliani beauty Vera Farmiga is effective as the woman on the edge of a breakdown. Peter Sarsguard wins the Least. Supportive. Husband. Ever. Award and has one insane, cringe worthy scene near the end of the movie that I assume he didn’t read before he agreed to take the part. It’s a ridiculous but of overacting but fits the camp feel established by director Jaume Collet-Serra.
The parents are the foundation that holds everything together but the kids are the stars. As younger sister Max Aryana Engineer has mastered the art of the terrified face and Jimmy Bennett as brother Danny has bored teenage boy down to a science but it is Isabelle Fuhrman as evil Esther who steals the show.
She’s a particularly good Creepy Kid, just other-worldly looking enough to be freaky but able to turn on the charm when she needs to. Her facility with Hieronymus Bosch-style paintings and claw hammers are definite signs that something’s not right with the little girl John and Kate invite into their home, but what can you expect when you spend less time deciding to adopt Esther than most people spend deciding on which kind of ice cream to buy.
Esther is a stern mistress who I could see inspiring a drinking game. How about a shot of Jäger every time she gives someone the creepy kid stink eye? You’d be on your butt before the forty minute mark.
Orphan isn’t great but it does provide a few campy laughs and a couple of squirmy scenes.
Rendition is a political thriller about the use of torture to obtain information that may, in the long run, save innocent lives. Starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard and Alan Arkin it is an even handed look at a sticky ideological question from Tsotsi director Gavin Hood.
American sweetheart Witherspoon plays Isabella El-Ibrahimi, the pregnant wife of an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who disappears while on a flight from South Africa, where he has been at a conference, to Washington, where he lives. Unbeknownst to Isabella her husband is suspected of involvement with an extremist group responsible for a Middle-Eastern suicide bombing and has been the subject of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ whereby suspected terrorists in the US can be sent, without the legal consent of their parent nations, to third country prisons to be clandestinely questioned and detained.
As she desperately tries to track her husband down with the help of her old friend Alan (Peter Sarsgaard), an aid of Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin), on the other side of the world a sad-eyed CIA analyst (Gyllenhaal) is developing moral questions as he becomes personally involved in El-Ibrahimi’s torture. In the middle of this mess is Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), the powerful intelligence agent who ordered the rendition.
There are a few moments in Rendition when a lesser director may have allowed the material to go off the deep end, but Hood keeps everything on track. It is a well balanced film that does something that most Hollywood films don’t do—it allows the audience to make up its own mind. When Streep’s character argues that information obtained by torture has saved thousands of lives it acts as a counterbalance to Witherspoon’s anguish. Imagine Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart arguing the point and you get the idea of the divide between these two characters.
Unlike the recent terrorism movie The Kingdom, Rendition isn’t as interested in pointing fingers, but seems to be determined to present a story that will entertain, but also stimulate conversation.
