Love Story seemed to open up the
romantic floodgates for the Me generation; even when they were sarcastically
declaiming love in movies like Heartburn, they were by now more often than not
also supporting films like “Somewhere in Time”, a time-travel drama featuring
Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve, and watching movies like The Thorn Birds on
tv. In short, they had begun tumbling
into the bourgeois trap they swore they’d avoid years ago en masses. Though many would go on to divorce multiple
times, they seemed to realize that romance was an inescapable steamroller –
they might as well embrace it.
That’s where Barbra Joan Streisand
entered the picture. After breaking
through in the 60’s with popular screwball comedies and musicals, Streisand
entered the mid-70s and managed to repopularize a long-dead romantic genre –
the weeper – with The Way We Were and a remake of A Star Is Born. If Love Story’s idea of marriage was
stereotyped but acted and shot with enough truth that it plucked a million
heartstrings, The Way We Were managed to become an emotional touchstone for
baby boomers who weren’t even old enough to vote during the McCarthy era it was
set in. But it, much more importantly,
managed to do what Love Story could not by lending the genre a touch of
sincerity.
The movie itself is a battle of
values. Set first on a college campus,
then in the postwar Hollywood years of the blacklist, the film focuses on Katie
Morosky, an idealistic anti-war protester and activist. As a college senior she meets fellow student Hubbell
Gardiner, and there is a mutually frustrating spark between them. Hubbell is everything Katie is not – facile
and easy, filled with a love for shallow things and easy jokes. They each admire in the other what they do
not have: Katie Hubbell’s skill as a writer, and Hubbell Katie’s completely unbent
sense of self and her total commitment to her beliefs. But before they can fully figure out their
feelings they are torn apart by the outbreak of World War II.
When they meet years later, Katie
is working in radio and trying to advance her agenda between news breaks and
Hubbell is a veteran but no less feckless.
They are mutually unchanged and yet they fall right back in love, in
spite of her stridency, in spite of his inability to grow a spine and his
insensitivity to her passion. Deciding
to make a fresh start out in California, they marry and Hubbell breaks through
as a successful screenwriter. But
shallow Hollywood is no place for Katie to further her causes, and watching
Hubbell waste his talents aggravates her.
The Gardiner marriage seems to
stand in for hundreds of marriages that lived and died in the seventies for
similar reasons. As much as they adore
each other, they’re fundamentally different people; Hubbell yearns for shallow
comfort, Katie wants to rock the boat.
She yearns to make a difference in a world she sees as messed up but
lacks the couth to deliver her message; he lacks the courage to peruse anything
beyond the simplest, most formulaic story ideas because he thinks he deserves
nothing more than mediocrity and comfort.
They could help each other if they didn’t harbor illusions about each
other, and it makes it all the more pitiful when they can’t fix things.
On the other hand in that
reworking of the silent-era fame and consequences chestnut ‘A Star is Born’,
Esther Hoffman, renamed from Esther Blodgett and turned into a permed, blue-eyed
soul singer, is completely aware that John Norman Howard (Maines in all
previous versions) is an alcoholic substance abuser who’s on the road to ruin
but manages to come alive and pull it together onstage. They meet by chance one night in a club; he’s
a millionaire selling out arenas, she’s the night’s entertainment. She’s not too dazzled by his genius to see the
faults and he sees a huge amount of potential in her; there are a thousand
fault lines hidden in their union but they marry, and then make love and music
in tandem. As Norman deteriorates,
Esther is called upon to take his place onstage; feeling emasculated, he declines
further and starts feeling like a kept man.
Esther, meanwhile, tries to keep Norman alive while fostering her
career; as he contemplates death, she starts winning awards. All the while they dream about moving out to
the desert with horses and living in an adobe lodge, away from the world
tearing them apart. But nothing in that
world or this can stop Norman’s downward spiral, and he is gradually consumed
by his addiction, infidelity and jealousy, unable to accept the fact that it’s
not Esther’s fame that’s killing him, it’s his own stubbornness. Their
marriage is begun with hope, lived as a war and dies ambiguously, with Norman
in a scene that could be seen as a self-sacrificial suicide or an expression of
the death drive manifest to action.
Nor can anything stop the movie
from seeming a paler version than the vehicle that nearly won Judy Garland an Oscar
dressed up in 70s bohemia, though the central romance feels believable, Kristofferson
and Streisand seemingly at home embodying the clichés they’re given. The film itself does a good job of capturing
the messy, wooly world of 70’s arena rock; not as good as The Rose but not as
bad as Can’t Stop the Music, but it sinks uncomfortably whenever it’s forced to
focus on something that’s not a sweeping shot of a desert plain.
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