REVIEW: Lovelace (2013)

In 2010, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman directed Howl, a biopic/documentary/animation about Allen Ginsberg and his controversial poem “Howl.” Lovelace is a similar attempt to look at the history of America’s sexual liberation, focusing on another controversial figure and another work that was tried for obscenity.

The common conception of Deep Throat, probably still the highest grossing pornographic film ever made, was that it ushered in a certain respectability for the porno and made it’s lead, Linda Lovelace (played here by Amanda Seyfried) the first porn star to make it as a star. It struck a blow for the sexual revolution and was exhibited far beyond the dank fleapits that usually played pornography. However, the reputation of the film has been subsequently tarnished. Lovelace spoke out against the film, claiming she was coerced into making the film by her violent then husband Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard). She has said that to watch Deep Throat is to commit rape. Epstein and Friedman’s film takes an interesting approach to showing this dual conception of Lovelace and Deep Throat.

The first half of the film is a primarily rosy-eyed look at the making of Deep Throat and Lovelace’s subsequent stardom. It is a typical tale of a girl leaving home and growing up, the porn angle only adding to the transgressions. It feels like an Apatow film, filled with jokes about blowjobs and even James Franco as Hugh Hefner. It is uncomfortably light, almost offensively so, especially if you know about Lovelace’s later comments. However, halfway through, when Lovelace’s star is at its highest, the film rewinds back to the beginning and repeats some of the same scenes but this time makes their sinister side clear. Traynor moves from being a happy-go-lucky charmer who can get a bit angry to being an unrepentant psychopath, constantly beating Lovelace up and forcing her into worse and worse situations. Oftentimes, scenes that were played for laughs earlier become much more ominous. This strategy reveals the two sides to the Lovelace story, but it is somewhat diminishing, where a scene that should be horrible is less so since it plays out as part of a temporal trick. The other odd thing about it is that while certain moments within the film’s first half are corrected by the second half, its overall feel is allowed to stand.

Lovelace would later campaign against pornography as well as for women’s rights, but Lovelace seems to let the pornography industry off the hook. Instead of viewing what happens to Lovelace as an inevitable product of this highly exploitative industry, the film instead offers up two simple hate figures. Chuck Traynor is portrayed as a full-on psychopath and is clearly the villain of the piece, but by emphasising his evilness the film allows the pornography industry to dodge any culpability. ‘The pornography industry has its psychopaths, just like anywhere else. Let’s just leave it at that,’ the film seems to be suggesting. The pornographers are presented as misogynistic, but only in the sense that they are out of time – as if misogyny is, like the carefully chosen costumes and the big hair, a thing of the past. Misogyny isn’t shown to be endemic within this industry, more a by-product of the ‘70s than of pornography. Similarly, the pornographers are allowed to remain innocent. Although they all profit massively from Lovelace’s exploitation, they are allowed a degree of deniability as if Lovelace’s life off the set is no concern of theirs. And while the second half of the film delves back into the first half, unpicking sinister undertones that you might have missed, it never shows us the dark side of the makers of Deep Throat, that they knew about what was happening but didn’t care to disrupt their production. Hence, the film is not as radical a critique of those that Lovelace herself has made, giving it the feel of a film that shows horrible things but then tries to make excuses for them.

So the film suggests that Lovelace’s ordeal has something to do with shacking up with a psychopath and nothing to do with the pornography industry. The second hate figure is Lovelace’s mother, Dorothy Boreman (Sharon Stone), who is represented as disproportionately abusive and uncaring. She actively keeps Lovelace and Traynor together, refusing to give her daughter her room back so that she can get away from her violent husband. Meanwhile, Lovelace’s father (Robert Patrick) is presented as very caring and given a very touching moment during a phone call with Lovelace. He is gifted with a degree of deniability and, much like the pornographers, is let off the hook.

Lovelace is well made and very well acted, particularly by Seyfried, Sarsgaard and Patrick but it is a slightly uncomfortable film. It is not clear quite why the film avoids targeting the pornography industry or patriarchy or just misogyny, instead inoffensively stopping at the two most recognisable villains in American cinema – the psychopath and the middle-aged woman. No matter what the facts were, and the facts are unclear enough, it is clear that Lovelace was brutally abused and that the pornography industry and the society’s sexism were responsible for allowing it to happen. That the film feels the need to pull its punches here after such damning representations of individual villains Traynor and Dorothy Boreman seems to suggest that today’s view of pornography and misogyny remains stuck in the rose-tinted view of the ‘70s, and this film’s first half.

When you consider the film’s silence on this point together with Lovelace’s view that to watch Deep Throat is to commit rape or that Deep Throat itself is nothing more than a filmed rape, it seems to suggest only that the film is somewhat cowardly. It could have taken a stand – and it has the perfect horror story with which to do so – but it would rather play it safe. Pornography isn’t frowned on to the extent that it used to be and it still hasn’t lost that sexual liberation tag but does that mean that we should be blind to its very real faults?

See also:

Howl

REVIEW: Howl (2011)

  Howl is the fictional feature debut of documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The film tackles the life of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, centring on the writing of his four-part poem “Howl”, a recitation of the same poem and its eventual trial on a charge of obscenity. Interspersed between these sequences are faux interviews with Ginsberg, as played by James Franco, and animations that visualize the poem itself.

  Howl is a film with many strands running through it, with leaps backwards and forwards in time throughout. Ginsberg’s past before “Howl” is played out in black and white in order to help the audience distinguish between this timeframe and the post-obscenity trail colour sequences in which an apparent documentary crew are interviewing Ginsberg. In many ways, the film is both a conventional biopic and a documentary, similar to last year’s The Arbor, in which the real person is not being interviewed but rather an interpretation of the real person. It also has links with Cronenberg’s The Naked Lunch, an adaptation of Burroughs’ unfilmable Beat novel, which used the author’s life as much as the novel as its source. At the beginning, the film informs us that the interview scenes are based on things that Ginsberg actually said in real discussions, and that the animations are based on those devised by Ginsberg himself. In this sense, the film takes on a variety of forms, which is underpinned in the courtroom discussions of the form of literature. It is also this experimentalism that keeps the film afloat.

  The film has a lot packed into it for its 84 minute running time. It constantly feels like it needs to rush to fit everything in. Its opening credits speed around in all directions, barely masking its need for speed under the pretence that it is emulating the uncaring joviality of the ‘angel-headed hipsters’ it depicts. The courtroom scenes are interesting as courtroom scenes always are, but the problems are more evident in the scenes in which Ginsberg actually writes his poem. Unfortunately, the film seems all too aware that people writing does not make for cinematic gold, straining itself to address this with several seemingly impromptu animations. These sequences are literal adaptations of the poem itself but feel forced and too self-consciously ‘offensive.’

  The film’s speed and fear of being dull hampers the performances, which are never given the time and the space to become convincing. In the end, Franco is as chopped about as he is in 127 Hours and Jon Hamm does another Mad Men-like monologue without the benefit of any emotional involvement on the part of the audience. We don’t really get to feel like we have gotten inside the heads of any of the characters. The recitation sequences in which Franco reads “Howl” with vitriolic yells and the audience cheer and applaud acts neither as a celebration of artistic integrity or freedom of speech, but as a reminder of similar scenes in Roger Corman’s schlocky masterpiece A Bucket of Blood, in which Julian Barton hilariously parodies the Beats, wearing a tuxedo and sandals.

  This is not to say that the film does not have its moments, over and beyond the formal experimentation. The courtroom scenes are very entertaining and easily the best parts of the film. The faux interviews are heavily edited, but every once in a while something genuinely intriguing is said. The film works best in its simple moments of courtroom suspense, but can also, almost accidentally, inspire the viewer to read a challenging book or to be creative themselves, just for the hell of it.

  Howl is a hard film to dislike but as something of a debut it has its problems. An interesting though flawed work. 

REVIEW: 127 Hours (2011)

  127 Hours is the new film by Danny Boyle, made of the back of the success of Slumdog Millionaire, starring James Franco as Aron Ralston, an extreme sports obsessive, who gets his arm trapped under a boulder for 127 hours. Having gone alone and without having told anyone where he was going, he is stranded. Facing a lack of rations and severe weather conditions, Ralston muses on his relationships with his family and friends, realising that he has foolishly kept everyone at a distance. In the end, he resorts to desperate measures in order to survive.

  Nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, as well as numerous other accolades, 127 Hours has become something of a surprise hit. However, it has a good many flaws, particularly from a directorial standpoint. Danny Boyle looks and sounds like an absolute chancer. His previous work has been varied at best, with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting being very uneven films that don’t work the way they should and Sunshine degenerating from a film with a lot of potential into a stupid and crass slasher film. To put it simply, Danny Boyle’s films would be good if someone else made them.

  127 Hours sees Boyle back to his old tricks. The opening ten minutes employ all sorts of flashy editing tricks, from split-screens to jump cuts. This is done presumably to show how vacuous Ralston’s adrenaline fuelled lifestyle is, a form of extroverted misanthropic loneliness. But Boyle doesn’t quit. Even when Ralston is trapped to the canyon and largely immobile, the camera jumps all over the place, shooting in and out of the canyon and filming him from inside a water bottle (more of which later). An attempt at creating a mood of isolation and helplessness is constantly undercut by Boyle’s prancing and dancing camera. For a proper film about a character stuck alone in a small space see Buried.

  What’s worse is that Boyle’s apparent showboating tarnishes everything else in the film. James Franco is very impressive, delivering a performance that is entirely convincing and a genuine step up for the actor. However, Boyle’s impatient and jittery film cannot hold a shot long enough for us to feel properly introduced to Franco’s character. We rarely even get to have a good view of him, as the shots used prioritise extreme close-ups and shots from behind Franco. We are never given the chance to watch a performance and by the end it doesn’t even seem like he has changed all that much. A case in point, the previously mentioned shot from inside Ralston’s water bottle. At this point in the film, Ralston decides to just finish his water and be done with it. Here, what is of interest is Franco’s performance, playing a man completely at the end of his tether. Instead, Boyle shows us what a water bottle would see when someone is drinking out of it. The shot does not look good and it does not further the drama, it is just ridiculous. And, as such, it is incredibly annoying.

  Because the final sequence fails to be life affirming and joyous, largely due to the fact that Boyle shoots it like a typically terrible “X Factor” human-interest montage (as well as this, the apparently vacuous split-screen sequence returns, destroying any sense that Ralston has been changed for the better by his experience), the end result is a film that feels like it has been sabotaged by a director desperate to be noticed. Every good thing about the film, from its performances to its cinematography to its general theme, is undermined by a camera in constant search of a cool, new angle to shoot from and frenetic editing that won’t let you get a good look at anything. A real pity.