I found myself stuck in Manila last week, with a bit of time to kill to wait out traffic, so I caught a film that I would not normally watch, the biopic Lovelace, directed by Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein and starring Amanda Seyfried, about the young woman who made the legendary pornographic film Deep Throat.
I'm just going to be frank here; given that I had about two hours to kill, a movie about people who made a porno seemed like a good idea, for obvious reasons. What I got was basically a bit of a diatribe on exploitation and domestic abuse, and, unfortunately, not a very good one.
Linda Boreman (Seyfried) is a 21-year-old Catholic girl living with her parents John and Dorothy (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) in Florida. While somewhat conservative herself, she is friends with a somewhat more adventurous young woman, Patsy (Juno Temple) who, one night at a roller skating rink, convinces Linda to be a go-go dancer for the band playing at the rink. This gets the attention of Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard) with whom Linda eventually gets involved and whom she eventually marries. Chuck is apparently into some shady business, and eventually gets himself and Linda into a spot of financial trouble. Thus begins the series of events that leads Linda to starring in Deep Throat, which, overall turns out to be an extremely unpleasant experience for Linda, who reveals everything in her scathing autobiography years after she has left that life behind.
I get that this movie was not in any way meant to titillate (and just to make absolutely sure, the producers chopped out one or two scenes involving oral sex in order to secure an "R-16" rating from our local classification board), and it certainly doesn't, but as a narrative tapestry it falls short on multiple levels.
The first half of the movie is meant to depict Linda and Chuck as a loving couple, fighting the odds, and even managing to have a good time amid trying times, even when Linda is sucking another guy's cock in front of a camera just to make ends meet for the two of them. The second half is the "grim" portion in which Linda tells the truth behind what happened, replete with Chuck's abuse and Linda's suffering until it all comes to a head.
However, this transition in contrasts is not done nearly as well as it should have been, and I for one could not help but wonder if it was a good idea to attempt it in the first place.
The problem with the narrative flow is that the filmmakers show their hand very early on in the film and make it hard to feel "shock" at what follows. I had no idea what kind of life Goreman lived, but the movie telegraphed its beats very early on.
Probably the worst part of the film was Sarsgaard, who, from the moment his Chuck Traynor appeared onscreen, was never able to convince me that he was anything other than a complete sleazebag, and this failure basically taints the entire film, which supposedly spends its first half depicting a young couple in love, only to peel the veneer of seeming happiness away and reveal the ugly truth just underneath the surface. Thanks to Sarsgaard's projection of Traynor's inner wife-beater early on in the film, it was basically easy to see where things were going, even though I hadn't had the faintest idea of what had really happened to her going into the theater. To be fair to Sarsgaard, the muddled script and direction had a lot to do with the narrative basically going all over the place. It's a pity, because Seyfried turns in a really earnest performance, and for anyone even vaguely interested in seeing her "bits," she goes topless once or twice in the film, though I guarantee that only a genuine sicko could be aroused at one or two of the scenes in which it happens.
Another wasted performance is that of Sharon Stone, who was virtually unrecognizable as Dorothy Boreman and who I didn't even realize was in the movie until I saw the end credits. I loved what she did here, and if she turns in more performances like this could give her career a bit of a second wind. This movie will most likely be forgotten, though.
The film's advocacy, which is basically to condemn exploitation of women and domestic violence, is certainly admirable, but the telling of the story, unfortunately, is not.
1.5/5
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