Indecent Proposal (1993) [R] ***

A film review by James Berardinelli for reelviews.net 

David and Diana Murphy (Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore) are the ideal young couple. They have everything -- love, affection, companionship -- except money. Their combined meager income is just enough to keep them afloat, but when the recession hits and David loses his job, they go under. Needing fifty thousand dollars to satisfy their creditors, but possessing only five, they go to Las Vegas to get the rest at the tables. There they meet John Gage (Robert Redford), a billionaire businessman who throws around millions like pocket change. Gage is instantly attracted to Diana, and, in an attempt to lure her away from her husband, makes a proposal: he will give them one million dollars for one night with her.

Director Adrian Lyne, best known for bringing Fatal Attraction to the screen, is at the helm for Indecent Proposal. One of the key elements of the 1987 Glenn Close/Michael Douglas thriller -- obsession -- is also present here, albeit without the tension and violence that gave Fatal Attraction its spark. Here, a similar situation is examined from another perspective. Gage goes after Diana not with knives and threats, but with kind words, generous gifts, and moving tales of his youth.

The story is divided into three parts: the setup, the act, and the aftermath. Despite a somewhat confused sense of time early in the film, aspects of the first part work. We get a real sense of character, and the relationship between Diana and David comes across as genuine. Once the setup is over, however, Indecent Proposal starts to fall apart, with the implausibilities and contrivances getting worse with every passing minute.

I suppose the theme is that money can't buy love, but that message gets so muddled during the second half of the film that we're not sure what to believe by the end. Indecent Proposal ends with an audible thud as screenwriter Amy Holden Jones resorts to a hard-to-believe quick fix to conclude things.

From the voice-over narration to the incessant, unnecessary commentary, everything is overexplained. Any time there could be a misinterpretation, someone will say something to clarify matters. For a movie that is supposed to be a thinking romance, this one doesn't have a high opinion of who's supposed to be doing the thinking.

Demi Moore has a certain appeal as the beautiful woman caught between two men, and Robert Redford, no longer the sex symbol he once was, is effective the jaded, lonely billionaire striving for love -- the one thing that has eluded him for his entire life. However, while these two hold their own, Woody Harrelson has trouble once his role requires more than smiles, kisses, and tender stroking. He goes through all the motions, but the force of emotion necessary for us to empathize with David is absent.

The need to mold Indecent Proposal into a recognizable Hollywood type hurts its chances of saying, or being, anything meaningful. There are undercurrents of an intriguing story in Indecent Proposal, but they never reach the surface. Director Adrian Lyne may not be remaking Fatal Attraction, but the same audience-pleasing mentality is evident in this stagnant motion picture. [Berardinelli's rating: 2 stars out of 4]


From Celebrity News on Facebook:

When Robert Redford agreed to play billionaire John Gage in Indecent Proposal (1993), it caught many by surprise. Throughout his career, Redford had built a legacy portraying idealists and heroes — Sundance, Roy Hobbs, Johnny Hooker. Here, he was stepping into morally gray territory: a powerful man offering a struggling couple one million dollars for a night with the wife.

What many don’t know is that Redford was initially reluctant to take the part. He feared that Gage would come off as a sleazy villain, lacking depth or humanity. To ease his concerns, director Adrian Lyne revised the script with Redford’s input. Redford didn’t want Gage to be a caricature of wealth and manipulation — he wanted him to be charming, intelligent, even alluring. The story, he believed, would resonate more if audiences found themselves truly conflicted. The real power, he said, is in making people ask: Would I take the deal?

One memorable moment during the Las Vegas shoot underscored Redford’s quiet charisma. Between takes in a real casino, extras and even hotel staff began approaching him — not as an actor, but as if he really were a billionaire. Photos, autographs, flirtations — Redford’s aura blurred the line between fiction and reality. Demi Moore later joked, If Robert Redford asked you to dance, you wouldn’t say no — million dollars or not.

The film stirred cultural debate upon release, with many divided over its central premise. Redford, however, defended it as a story not about money or lust, but about the fragility of love, the boundaries of trust, and the ethical discomfort of choices no one wants to make. For him, John Gage wasn’t the villain — he was the question. And Redford, ever the thoughtful performer, made sure we didn’t walk away with easy answers.

Labels: drama, Robert Redford, romance
IMDb 6.0/10
MetaCritic (critics=45, viewers=56)
RottenTomatoes (critics=34, viewers=47)
Blu-ray
Suite from Indecent Proposal by John Barry

Jay Kelly (2025) [R] ****

A film review by Brian Tallerico for RogerEbert.com on Dec. 4, 2025.

Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly is a study of a man in the middle of a personality crisis who worries that he doesn’t have one, only the personalities which fictional characters and the glory of celebrity have granted him. It’s a deeply meta film, a movie that uses as its foundation what we know of its star, George Clooney, one of the few leading men who can coexist in the same frame with images of legends like Paul Newman and Marcello Mastroianni and we don’t immediately reject the idea. Clooney knows a thing or two about not being able to walk through public spaces without being mobbed and, one presumes, about how much the life of an actor pulls people away from other things in their lives, like friends and family.

For a story of a guy who’s willing to get messy for the first time in years, it’s an overly clean piece of screenwriting, one that too often lets its A-list star play ideas instead of a character. But there’s enough to like here to forgive a film whose ambition exceeds its reach, both in some of those ideas and a flawless supporting cast, especially another fantastic turn from Adam Sandler.

Jay Kelly opens with its titular character (Clooney) finishing his latest production, as Baumbach and his co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also has a small role) wonderfully sketch their two male leads through their work. Kelly seems to be tapping into something true as he films the emotional death scene of his character. Still, there’s a common actorly insecurity underneath, especially as he asks his director for reassurance about whether they should try again. Meanwhile, Jay’s manager Ron (Sandler) uses the same tone to comfort Jay that we just heard him using with his daughter on the phone. For Ron, Jay is almost like another child, someone whose needs are prioritized over his own, and whose insecurities need to be assuaged. He might even be Ron’s favorite child. He’s the one who pays the bills.

A series of events rocks Jay Kelly’s pattern of movie shoots and red carpets (and, by extension, Ron’s). First, Jay discovers that his daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), is leaving for the summer, the one he thought they would spend together. She’s off to Northern Italy, where, coincidentally, an arts festival is being held at which Jay was supposed to receive a tribute. Jay will be on his own, and we discover later that he has a borderline-estranged relationship with his older daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough, so phenomenal in just a few scenes). He’s going to be alone, although, in a funny repeated bit in which Jay is handed drinks by silent assistants after insisting he’s always alone, the celebrity alone is different than yours or mine.

A bigger shift in Jay’s personality starts to quake when he learns that the director who gave him his break, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), has died. Jay remembers a Schneider at his home not long ago, practically begging to put his favorite actor’s name on his project to get funding. Jay declined. He never gave the man he owes much of his life his last shot.

Finally, Jay runs into an old friend at Peter’s funeral named Timothy (Billy Crudup, excellent as always in just one extended scene). The two go out for a drink, and what starts as playful memories of their twenties and what might have been gets dark when Timothy admits that he hates Jay. After all, Jay took his life. If Timothy hadn’t brought Jay to an audition in front of Peter Schneider, he might have gotten the job. The night ends in a flurry of bad, half-drunk choices that really send Jay spiraling. He’s not doing the next movie, he’s going to Italy to find his daughter and accept the tribute, and Ron and his publicist Liz (Laura Dern) are just going to have to keep up with him. If they can.

The first act of Jay Kelly, in which these emotional figures from Jay’s past descend on him like Scrooge’s ghosts, hints at a darker movie than the midsection, one in which Kelly travels across Italy by train to reunite with his daughter and the common people. Clooney captures the joy of an actor fascinated by those who celebrity has cordoned off from him. But the writing here dips into some odd valleys regarding his fellow travelers, including an aside about a purse theft that exists solely as a plot crutch later in the film. It’s a bit of a problem when a movie about a celebrity trying to meet real people and discover the true core inside him starts to feel calculated and manufactured. And that tone starts to infiltrate other aspects of the screenwriting, including characters played by Stacy Keach (Jay’s dad) and Patrick Wilson (Ron’s #2 client), who seem to exist solely as signposts for Jay’s journey of the soul.

The sense that too few of the supporting characters have been fleshed out is part of what makes Jay Kelly often feel a little too neat. It’s a film that works in part because it’s an actor we know looking at the traps of celebrity and the difficulty of playing yourself instead of a scripted character, but it also feels remarkably calculated. Part of that is intentional to make the undeniably powerful final lines hit with more force, but a lot of Jay Kelly feels as rehearsed as a celebrity’s sound bites at a junket. Even Nicholas Brittell’s lovely score and Linus Sandgren’s fluid cinematography add to the film’s often sterile tone when it should be a movie that’s rougher around the edges.

Thank the Celebrity God, then, for Adam Sandler, who steals the movie by feeling the most truthful. I would never purport to know Sandler’s complex emotional relationship with fame or with people in his life, but he understands, either through observation or experience, what it means to devote your life to someone in a power imbalance. Are Ron and Jay friends? They’ve been through it all together. But Jay pays Ron, and he’s not afraid to remind him of that. Doesn’t that automatically throw it off? Sandler perfectly embodies a guy who’s been hit by Jay’s emotional shrapnel over and over again. Every time Jay missed a school concert for a project, Ron probably did too. Rons don’t get tributes. It’s just another example of how good Sandler can be in the right material, his best performance since Uncut Gems (and a reminder of how good he was in Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories).

There are several lines about the transparency of fame that pepper Jay Kelly. Peter’s son says at his funeral, My dad was never there. It’s something Jay’s daughters would say too, especially his older one. In one of the film’s most powerful emotional chapters, Jessica speaks of the pain of seeing her dad playing a loving parent on screen despite never feeling that at home. So does Jay find himself? Luckily, Baumbach, Mortimer, and Clooney refuse to give Jay Kelly too much of a redemption arc, ending on a note that feels more emotionally true than manipulative. It lands with a powerful sentiment that so many of us will feel when the end is near. If we’re as lucky as Jay Kelly. (Tallerico's rating: 3 out of 4 stars)

Labels: comedy, drama, filmmaking
IMDb 66/100
MetaCritic (critics=67, viewers=55)
RottenTomatoes (critics=76, viewers=87)
Netflix
Tallerico's original review

If you enjoy the film Jay Kelly I invite you to watch the 51-minute Netflix documentary The Making of Jay Kelly. Writer / director Noah Baumbach, George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, co-writer Emily Mortimer and others share behind-the-scenes insights from the first shot through the final line.

As you watch it, you will appreciate that there were no special effects used in the film; everything was physical, constructed on movie sets: Jay Kelly's home, the private jet, the railroad car, all of it was physical. And the music was recorded on analog tape. None of it is digital.

But the most remarkable thing is to appreciate that while this is Jay Kelly's reality, it is also George Clooney's reality, and the viewer gains a new appreciation for what it means to be a movie star - the rewards and also the sacrifices.

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) [PG] ****

A film review by Jeffrey Kauffman for blu-ray.com on July 17, 2013

The recent verdict in the George Zimmerman – Trayvon Martin case has ignited a whole new round in the seemingly never ending debate about race relations in our country, but here's the thing: race relations are not exclusive to the United States nor are they they solely focused on interactions between blacks and whites. Americans sometimes tend to forget this since so much of our history is wrapped up in the horrible legacy of slavery and the resultant ripples which resulted from that abhorrent practice, ripples which continue to inform our own time. And the Civil Rights Era, roughly from the mid 1950s on, only continued to make many Americans think of their country as the lone nation dealing with issues, issues almost exclusively thought to be about African Americans and Caucasians. Any number of other ethnic minorities can no doubt point to their own less than welcoming experiences in attempting to assimilate and join the so-called American melting pot, but unfortunately prejudice seems to be a universal trait in Mankind, one certainly not limited to those living in the United States. Love is a Many-Splendored Thing was released in 1955, just a few months before Rosa Parks made her famous stand (or perhaps more appropriately, sit) aboard a Montgomery, Alabama bus. The film is set in Hong Kong in 1949, a time and place swirling with the after-effects of both World War II and the roiling atmosphere of the long simmering Chinese Civil War, but it is not ostensibly a politically-centered piece. Instead this lovely, heartbreaking outing is an intimate portrayal of two would-be lovers whose brief grasp at happiness is interrupted by prejudices brought to bear by several different groups due to the fact that the male is an American and the female is a mixed race foreigner. (Rather interestingly, the film's time frame of 1949 is itself the year that Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific first debuted on Broadway. Though many seem not to realize it any longer, this musical actually was rather prescient in its day for dealing with much the same kinds of prejudice as this film does in its depictions of two star-crossed love affairs. In fact, the children of lead character Emile DeBeque would have probably been defined as Eurasian, the same category that Love is a Many-Splendored Thing's main feminine character is stuffed into, whether or not she wants to be.)






Eurasian, for those not familiar with this now kind of unused term, used to refer to those of mixed parentage, with one Asian parent and one European (meaning Caucasian) parent. Dr. Han Suyin was a real-life Eurasian who on top of being a well-regarded physician also had a rather successful writing career, penning a number of novels as well as autobiographical pieces, many of which contained fascinating nuggets of information about China in the first several decades of the twentieth century. A Many-Splendoured Thing (Han used British spelling tropes) was a 1952 novel which nonetheless was only a slightly fictionalized account of her own romantic interlude with a British journalist. The book was a best seller and Fox soon scooped up the film rights, rights that Han sold in order to facilitate health care for her sickly adopted daughter (a supporting character in the film version). Since Fox obviously wanted a domestic American connection for the film, the male character had his nationality changed, and William Holden was cast to play American reporter Mark Elliott. The oddly exotic looking Jennifer Jones required little if any make-up to inhabit the role of Han Suyin herself (Han is her surname and Suyin is her given name).

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing is at its throbbing heart nothing other than a star-crossed romance, but it's infused with a rather tart subtext of prejudice and class structure. Mark and Suyin know they're in for trouble from the get-go, and not just due to race differences. Mark is married, albeit separated, something that also makes eyes roll in the upper-crust British-Chinese society in which the two find themselves in post-World War II Hong Kong (remember, Hong Kong was still a British crown colony of sorts in that era). But it's not just the British who cast disparaging glances toward the couple. The Chinese themselves are conflicted, not just about the relationship between the two, but also about Suyin's mixed race background. The fact that this springs out of what was then the fairly recent epoch of a global battle which had a racial purity aspect from both the Germans and the Japanese makes Love is a Many- Splendored Thing's points unusually relevant, albeit not necessarily pointed directly at the geopolitical issues that informed World War II.

The film is a beautifully heartfelt piece which is perhaps surprisingly frank about the racial issues it explores. Part of what makes the film so extraordinary is its exotic setting, something that is used rather artfully with lots of second unit location photography by a sadly uncredited Charles G. Clarke, combined with the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Leon Shamroy in the studio sequences. Jones and Holden, who evidently disliked each other intensely, bring wonderfully nuanced interpretations to their roles and both deliver underplayed, very winning, performances. The supporting cast is filled to the brim with the sort of expert character actors and actresses who seem to be a dying breed nowadays. And supporting it all is the gorgeously evocative Academy Award winning music of Alfred Newman, masterfully interweaving the Oscar winning theme song (by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster) with his own original compositions. This is mid-fifties' film craft of the highest order. (Kauffman's rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars)

Labels: biography, drama, romance, war, WWII, tragedy

IMDb 64/100
RottenTomatoes (critics=53, viewers=56)
Blu-ray
Kauffman's original review

Blogger's comment: Her birthname was Rosalie Mathilda Kuanghu Chou and she was also known as Elizabeth Comber, after her second husband. Han Suyin was the pen name she chose for her acclaimed autobiography, A Many-Splendoured Thing, upon which the film is based. She chose Han to honor the majority Han Chinese people. Suyin means plain-sounding.

Champagne Problems (2025) [TV-14] ***/****

A film review by Brian Orndorf for blu-ray.com on Nov. 19, 2025.

Once the director of Daredevil and Ghost Rider, Mark Steven Johnson is on a different career path these days. He’s in the business of making romantic comedies for streaming services, trying his luck with Hallmark Channel-style offerings of mild drama and feels that provide viewers with a sense of escapism as beautiful performers work with a screenplay of no particular emotional emphasis. It’s vanilla stuff, but Johnson locates a degree of charm in Champagne Problems, hitting all the highlights of fantasy as the main character faces a crisis of the heart and business ties during a holiday work trip to France. Johnson (who is also the writer) has no love for originality, but he finds some help from the actors, who maintain mild warmth and a sense of humor while the feature strives to conjure as much coziness as possible.

Sydney (Minka Kelly) is an employee at The Roth Group, working on acquisitions for the corporation, often competing with colleague Ryan (Xavier Samuel). Impressing her boss with her diligence, Sydney is sent to Paris to help negotiate a deal with Chateau Cassell, a champagne house looking to sell to a prepared buyer. Only in the country for a few days, Sydney is encouraged by her sister (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) to experience a little French magic, inspiring her to visit a bookstore, where she meets Henri (Tom Wozniczka), who’s happy to show the American a different side of Paris. Flirtations turn into a night of passion, but Sydney has a job to do, meeting Chateau Cassell owner Hugo (Thibault De Montalembert), and facing competition from business rivals Roberto (Sean Amsing), Otto (Flula Borg), and Brigitte (Astrid Whettnall). Prepared to make her best impression, endeavoring to win over Hugo and his demands for his business, Sydney is hit with a dose of reality when she learns Henri is actually Hugo’s son, and he has no patience for corporate predators.

Sydney isn’t an office terminator. She’s attempting to impress her boss and carefully handle acquisitions for the company, keeping her an approachable character. She’s also a supportive sister and continues to mourn the loss of her mother, who had her share of unrealized dreams. Kelly is particularly good at projecting warmth, and offers steady, reasonably sensitive work in Champagne Problems, which soon sends Sydney to France to prove her negotiation abilities, though she’s entering a country where she doesn’t even speak the language. The central meet cute in Champagne Problems occurs in a quaint bookstore, finding Sydney and Henri sparking immediate attraction, which turns into a night on the town, fueled by cups of hot wine and bonding over deceased mothers. Talk evolves into sex, but Johnson is sticking with his rom-com playbook, quickly disrupting post-coital bliss with business reality, sending Sydney to the glorious Chateau Cassell, where she’s forced to figure out what’s coming for her in terms of competition.

Comedic support is provided by other business reps, finding Roberto a fun-loving, flamboyant man who loves to drink and connect with others. Brigitte is serious about the mission, locating a bond with Hugo she tries to turn into a deal. And Otto is a nervous German sharing tales from his dark childhood, which gives Borg, a gifted comedian, chances to shine, especially when the character shares the legend of Krampus with the group. Champagne Problems sets up conflict between Sydney and Henri, who can’t trust the American once he learns who she is, and a challenge is supplied in presentations, putting the buyers in pitch positions that bring great stress to them. High jinks are minimal, extending to Brigitte pushing a cheese dinner on Sydney, who’s lactose intolerant. Winery challenges are more enjoyable, watching the gang compete in games of vine pruning and riddling, and there’s a debate about Die Hard to really sell the holiday spirit of the picture.

There’s a romance to sell in Champagne Problems, and Kelly and Wozniczka have decent chemistry, generating tenderness that’s challenged by outside interests. Johnson also works in father and son issues between Henri and Hugo, which helps to expand gentleness and concern. There’s seasonal immersion as well, following the characters as they visit Christmas markets and devour treats. Champagne Problems is easy on the senses and nicely acted, but Johnson can’t resist formulaic happenings, dragging the feature to a close with the same old moves seen in hundreds, if not thousands of these pictures. He goes for plasticized fantasy instead of trusting the moderate intimacy and light humor that’s worked for the first two acts of the movie. [Orndorf's rating: 6 stars out of 10]

Blogger's comment: A "champagne problem" describes a minor, trivial issue arising from affluence, privilege, or good fortune, like choosing between luxury cars or too many vacation options, contrasting with significant "real world problems". It's a problem where all choices are positive or desirable, often an annoyance of abundance rather than a genuine hardship, though sometimes these problems can feel more significant to the person experiencing them, as highlighted in Taylor Swift's song 'Champagne Problems'.

Labels: Christmas, comedy, Paris, romance
IMDb 60/100
MetaCritic (critics=50, viewers=tbd) 
RottenTomatoes (critics=72, viewers=65)
Orndorf's original review with pictures

A Walk in the Woods (2015) [R] ***

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on Sept. 4, 2015.

A couple of old guys taking a walk on the Appalachian Trail - it doesn't sound like a winning motion picture formula and, as it turns out, it isn't. Like all road trip movies, the success (or lack thereof) of A Walk in the Woods relies heavily on the chemistry between the two leads, in this case Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. And, although both men do a reasonable job inhabiting their characters, as an odd couple, they don't click. There's something missing. Maybe if this had been made 20 years ago by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Or even 10 years ago, as originally planned, with Redford and Paul Newman…

A Walk in the Woods is surprisingly funny at times but, like many comedies, it runs out of steam about halfway through. Some of the humor is unexpectedly lowbrow, at least insofar as anything with Redford could be considered lowbrow. The iconic actor generally takes the high road, leaving the crass comments and physical slapstick to Nolte. There are some clever, witty one-liners. I found myself laughing more than once or twice but the jokes, like the movie as a whole, lack staying power. The first half is significantly more enjoyable than the second.



The narrative is more concerned with the predictable mismatched buddies interaction between Redford's Bill Bryson and Nolte's Stephen Katz than it is with the terrain they're crossing. Last year's Wild, with Reese Witherspoon, did a better job illustrating the perils of traveling the more than 2100-mile wilderness path from Georgia to Maine. Here, things like bears, slips and falls, and bad weather serve as punchlines. Following the road movie formula, A Walk in the Woods is divided into clearly delineated episodes: being trapped in the company of the most annoying hiker to walk the earth, flirting with an attractive motel owner, etc. The film also has a message Yoda would disagree with: trying is what really matters.

Bryson, a renowned travelogue author, decides to walk the Appalachian Trail on a whim - perhaps it's a delayed mid-life crisis or maybe he's thinking of a bucket list. His wife, Catharine (Emma Thompson), won't let him make the hike alone. After sending out feelers to most of his old friends and striking out, he is forced to invite the only one with interest - a man he hasn't seen in decades and with whom he didn't part on the best of terms. By his own admission, Katz hasn't done much with his life, and is so out-of-shape, it looks like he might have trouble hiking for a mile, let alone 2100+ of them. Together, the codgers hop on a plane to Georgia and the odyssey begins.



The screenplay was loosely adapted from Bill Bryson's nonfiction book and is directed by Ken Kwapis, who has an extensive TV resume to go along with a few big screen titles (for example, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). There are times when one gets the sense Kwapis wants to capture the majesty of the trail but, even though there are some spectacular mountain shots, the postcard moments don't last long enough to inspire awe. Added to that, there's an instance in which shoddy production design undermines a scene. With ceramic rocks and an awful matte painting in the background, this key sequence is so obviously studio-bound that it becomes a distraction.

Decades removed from being considered a heartthrob, Redford is still able to command the camera's attention with his innate charisma and likability. He's a good foil for Nolte's oafishness; it's surprising the two don't mesh better in an oil-and-water fashion. The lighthearted tone keeps A Walk in the Woods from becoming too dour and, in contrast with other wilderness adventure movies (like the aforementioned Wild and the similarly-titled Into the Wild), there's never a sense that Nature is more than a cantankerous prankster. The message about mortality is underplayed - older people may be spry of mind but their bodies often don't cooperate. Any bittersweet element this might have injected into the proceedings is quickly washed away by a jokey turn. The film adamantly rejects being serious for more than a passing moment. A Walk in the Woods is pleasant but inconsequential, a passing diversion rather than a worthy cinematic destination. (Berardinelli's rating: 2.5 stars out of 4)

Labels: adventure, biography, comedy, drama, Robert Redford
IMDb: 64/100
MetaCritic (critics=51, viewers=57) 
RottenTomatoes (critics=46, viewers=48) 
Blu-ray
Berardinelli's original review

The Swimmer (1968) [PG] *****

A film review by Roger Ebert on July 2, 1968

The Swimmer is the story of a man who begins at the dawn of a new day to swim in the backyard pool of some friends. The water is cool and fresh, and the day is beautiful.

As he has a drink with his friends, it occurs to him that a string of other backyard pools reaches all the way across the valley to his own home. Why not swim every one — swim all the way home, as it were? This sounds like a glorious adventure, and indeed it starts but that way. He even meets a lovely girl who agrees to come along on the journey.

Some of the pool owners are happy to see him. Others hate him. One is a bitter young woman who loved him once. We learn something about this man’s life at every poolside, until finally we are able to piece together a story of his disgrace and failure.

The Swimmer begins as a perfectly realistic film. But somewhere along the way we realize it is an allegory, and the ending makes that clear. It is also a very stylized film. As the swimmer (Burt Lancaster) pauses beside each pool, his conversations with the owners sound real enough, and yet somehow they are very stiff, very correct, as if everybody were reading lines or this were a dream.

The photography contributes to this feeling. It is beautiful, but not joyful. It has the same nostalgia as Elvira Madigan or the snapshots in an old photo album. At every moment, we have the feeling that something tragic has already happened to these people we see smiling. And, of course, something has.

The Swimmer is based on a John Cheever story from the New Yorker, and it’s the sort of allegory the New Yorker favors. Like assorted characters by John Updike and J.D. Salinger, Cheever’s swimmer is a tragic hero disguised as an upper-class suburbanite. There are a lot of tragic heroes hidden in suburbia, I guess, perhaps because so many of them subscribe to the New Yorker. You are what you read.

One interesting thing about The Swimmer is that it manages so successfully to reproduce the feeling of a short story in the medium of film. It is a very literary movie, and by that I don’t mean the characters stand around talking to each other a lot. The film episodes are put together in a rather formal way, like a well-made short story, and there is none of the fluid movement between scenes that you usually expect in movies.

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer’s experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man’s life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever’s swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.

Burt Lancaster is superb in his finest performance. In addition to being a fine actor, he is a plausible hero of the Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas type. And a hero is needed here. We must believe in the swimmer’s greatness if we are to find his fate tragic.

There are also fine performances by Janice Rule (previously buried in Matt Helms and Westerns) as the mistress, by Janet Landgard, as the young girl, and by a host of character actors. The screenplay and direction are by Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry, respectively, and they are the same couple who made David and Lisa. Like that film, The Swimmer, is a strange, stylized work, a brilliant and disturbing one. (Roger Ebert's rating: 4 stars out of 4)

Trivia: Burt Lancaster always insisted this was his best and his favorite film of his career.

Although Frank Perry is credited as the director because of contractual reasons, he was fired by prducer Sam Spiegel over creative differences, after the first rough cut. Sydney Pollack took over and reshot a number of scenes, which contributed to the delay between filming in June, 1966 and the May, 1968 New York premiere.

Filming locations. The film was shot at a number of private homes in Fairfield, Stamford, Weston, Westport, and Wilton Connecticut. 

Labels: drama
IMDb 76/100
RottenTomatoes (critics=100, viewers=83)
Blu-ray (2014 release)
Blu-ray (2021 deluxe editon)
Blu-ray review by Brian Orndorf, March 24, 2014
Roger Ebert's original review

Inside Daisy Clover (1965) [PG] ***

A film review by Randy Miller III for blu-ray.com on July 4, 2020.

Movies about Hollywood's dark underbelly were nothing new by 1965, but Inside Daisy Clover explores the subject through a young woman who's quite literally pulled off the streets to be the next big thing. Former child star Natalie Wood portrays Daisy Clover, who lives with her mom near the Santa Monica Pier and may just be the least convincing 15-year-old ever portrayed on film. She ekes out a living selling fake autographs but loves singing, and is surprised to learn that the head of a major studio, Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer), is interested in a demo record she sent. After a limo ride to Swan Studios, the young tomboy is caught off guard by his cold and uncaring demeanor: Raymond tears her down while promising to deliver Hollywood's new rising star to the unsuspecting masses. She's charmed by fellow studio actor Wade Lewis (Robert Redford) and they develop a whirlwind romance, which ends up doubling as a microcosm of her brief time in the spotlight: it's very exciting, a little scary, and doesn't end well.

It sounds compelling enough on paper, but Inside Daisy Clover is a clear case of a film whose execution doesn't quite measure up to its ambition. Very little seems wrong at first glance: Wood acquits herself nicely (except for that age discrepancy -- though still youthful, she was close to thirty during production), there are a number of genuine twists and turns, and the supporting performances by Plummer and Redford are great. Other small parts, such as Raymond's wife Melora (Katharine Bard) and Daisy's soon-to-be-estranged mother Lucile (Ruth Gordon) are filled out nicely too. The biggest problems lie with Inside Daisy Clover's structure and a lack of ability to sell its own material: Wood's character is never all that convincing as the next big thing, nor is her rise to fame ever shown from a public perspective. The extremely insular nature of her journey ends up working against it, keeping outsiders at arm's length while never making a believable sales pitch. Even Daisy's trademark song, which is repeated ad nauseum, is forgettable... and to make matters worse, all of Wood's original vocals were re-recorded by singer Jackie Robin Ward.

Of course, that's not to say that Inside Daisy Clover is without merit... even aside from a few highlights mentioned above, most of which are related to the lead and supporting performances. Any and all scenes between Wood and Redford are easily among the film's best, as they seem to best capture that perfect balance of excitement mixed with a little bit of uneasiness. André Previn's original score and Charles Lang's cinematography are both excellent, often working double duty to capture the atmosphere of 1930s Santa Monica and the surrounding area. For these reasons, the film also serves as an invaluable time capsule: even though many parts are made up to reflect that earlier decade in which Inside Daisy Clover takes place, there's an undeniable charm to the signage, store fronts, and much quieter atmosphere that seem to evoke the 1960s as well. Those with Californian roots may enjoy the film for that reason alone. But aside from die-hard fans of the cast and setting, this one's tough to recommend sight unseen.

Labels: drama, music, Robert Redford, romance
IMDb 61/100
RottenTomatoes (critics=31, viewers=50)
Blu-ray

Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995) [R] ***/****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net.

With a style that's a cross between Vanya on 42nd St. and a home movie, Henry Jaglom's Last Summer in the Hamptons pulls the viewer in. This intimate look at a dysfunctional family uses a perspective so seemingly-real that it would be easy to mistake parts of this film for a documentary rather than a work of fiction. Hanania Baer's straightforward cinematography contributes to the illusion, as does a script with frank dialogue that often concentrates on minutiae.

The story, which is really just an excuse for monologues on assorted profundities, dialogue about almost anything, and quirky character interaction, is set in East Hampton, Long Island. There, three generations of a theater family are spending the final weekend of their last summer at a home that has served as their vacation retreat and acting school for decades. Because of their declining economic fortunes, they can no longer afford the place, so the family matriarch, Helena Mora (Viveca Lindfors), has been forced to put it up for sale.

Gathered for this weekend are an odd assortment of people, including pupils of the acting school, friends, and relatives. The honored visitor is actress Oona Hart (Victoria Foyt), a Hollywood star who has just hit it big with a blockbuster movie. However, she's less interested in headlining the inevitable sequel than in exploring meaningful work, such as taking the lead role in a play written by Helena's grandson, Jake (Jon Robin Baitz).

Screen life mirrors real life in Last Summer in the Hamptons. Helena's career reflects that of Lindfors, the actress who plays her (this was Lindfors' final performance before her death in October, 1995). Both have spent long, rewarding careers on screen and on stage, and have little cause to regret their choices. Real-life playwright Baitz plays the author of a production that everyone wants to be a part of. Renowned director Andre Gregory plays a director, and numerous members of New York's acting community take up roles they should be at home in.

At the crux of Last Summer in the Hamptons lies the age-old question of commercial viability versus artistic honesty. Can something that makes money also be artistically pure? Oona is wondering this when she comes to the Hamptons, since her career aspirations are divided between making money and doing real acting. This issue is mulled over during a number of the film's seemingly-endless conversations, with all sorts of interesting viewpoints coming to light. There is, of course, no resolution.

The melodrama illustrating the emotional fractures within the family is less successful. In Jake's words, his relatives are like a barrel of theatrical eels electrocuting and poisoning one another over and over. According to him, none of them can do anything without turning it into a performance. He apparently includes himself in that sweeping generalization, since one of the most unpleasant revelations concerns his relationship with his sister. Jaglom occasionally goes overboard trying to get us to care about the characters. The well-honed dialogue and intimate camerawork would have been enough without the soap-opera-like interludes.

As might be expected, the best performance is turned in by Viveca Lindfors, who, like Jean Moreau, could boast screen presence even at an advanced age. She heads a cast that doesn't have many weak participants. When the screenplay grows thin, the wealth of acting ability pushes Last Summer in the Hamptons through the rough spots. Whether tightly-scripted or not, many scenes have an improvised feel.

Last Summer in the Hamptons is tailor-made for those who enjoy talky, somewhat pretentious, dialogue-rich motion pictures. While the character interaction isn't as sharp as in an Eric Rohmer picture, it is deft enough to involve an interested audience. Last Summer in the Hamptons isn't a landmark film, and it doesn't broach any new issues, but the unconventional style makes it worthwhile for those who appreciate offbeat fare. (James Berardinelli's rating: 3 stars out of 4)

Blogger's comment: Some of the cast I recognized include: Holland Taylor, Roddy McDowall, Martha Plimpton, and Ron Rifkin.

Labels: comedy, drama
IMDb 58/100 
RottenTomatoes (critics=64, viewers=39)
DVD
Berardinelli's original review 

A Man and a Woman ( Un homme et une femme) (1966) [NR] ****/*****

On the 2003 DVD release of A Man and a Woman, there is an interview with writer / director Claude Lelouch 37 Years Later with Claude Lelouch, in which he looks back and talks about how the film came to be.

He had just finished making Les Grands Moments and could not show the film because he did not have a distributor. He was broke and his film company was close to bankruptcy. So he did what he often did, which was to get in his car and drive to the beach - from Paris to Deauville on the Normandy coast. He arrived around 2 am, slept in his car and awoke around 6:30 am to see a woman walking on the beach with a child and a dog.

In that moment he had the inspiration for the film A Man and a Woman. Over the next four weeks he wrote the screenplay, having in mind Jean-Louis Trintignant to play Jean-Louis Duroc. When he showed the screenplay to Jean-Louis, he said yes immediately. Then Lelouch said that he had both Romy Schneider and Anouk Aimee (Anouk Aimée) in mind to play Anne Gauthier, and he asked Jean-Louis who his dream woman would be. Jean-Louis said he knew Anouk very well and Claude should just call her up. At first there was a little difficulty because Anouk did not like boats, so she did not want to do the boat scenes, but she finally gave in.

Lelouch shot the film over a period of four weeks, using a rented hand-held camera, and edited it in three weeks. He had intended to shoot it all in black and white because he could not afford color, but an American distributor bought the rights in the U.S. so Lelouch was able to shoot the exteriors in color and the interiors in black and white.

There are some interesting aspects to Lelouch's filmmaking style, particularly A Man and a Woman. He had a screenplay but did not let the actors read the dialogue. He described the scene beforehand, and if there was a particular sentence he wanted said, he would mention that, but, other than that, he let the actors improvise. Also, what he told Jean-Louis was not the same thing he told Anouk. He never rehearsed because he believed that after the first or second take, the spontaneity would be gone. Also, Lelouch did all the filming himself because it eliminated the natural time delay in telling the cinematographer what he wanted.

Sometimes he would play Francis Lai's score for the actors before the scene, especially if he couldn't find the right words to say to direct them. Also, after the scene was finished he would play the dialogue back for the actors so they could all get a feeling for how it was going.

Lelouch said that he was fascinated by people, that the human interraction was the important thing, and that was why he tried to shoot the film in real time, without rehearsals and very few takes. At some point the actors were living the story, which made the film as close to the truth as possible.

Interestingly, the rented camera was not soundproofed, so they would wrap it in a blanket for close-ups, but relied a lot on distance shots using a telephoto lens. This is why the film has the look that it does.

So, what about the story? Anne was a film script girl who met and married her husband Pierre (Pierre Barouh) on a project in which he was working as a stunt man. They had a child, a little girl named Françoise, and then Pierre was killed while filming a battlefield scene in a WWII film. To be able to continue working, Anne enrolled her little girl in a boarding school in Deauville.

Jean-Louis was a race car test driver for Ford, testing the new GT40 LeMans car and the Ford Formula 1 car. In a flashback we see him racing at LeMans, being involved in a horrific accident, undergoing a three-hour operation and then having his grief-stricken wife Valerie (Valerie Lagrange) take her own life at the hospital. And so, after that, Jean-Louis put his young son Antoine in the same Deauville boarding school. And Anne and Jean-Louis eventually meet at the boarding school when she misses her train back to Paris and the school headmistress (Simone Paris) introduces them.

It really is a very simple love story, the main complication being that Anne was very much in love with her husband Pierre, and, even though he had died, he was still alive for her. So she could not be present while she and Jean-Louis were making love in their Deauville hotel room, and even at the end of the film, we are not sure if she will be able to move forward.

In an interesting footnote, the film was shot between November, 1965 and January, 1966. Anouk Aimee and Pierre Barouh fell in love during filming, married three months later, on April 20, 1966, and divorced three years later, on March 17, 1969. 

For myself, this is almost a coming-of-age film. I was born in 1942, spent time in Paris in the summer of 1965, just before this was filmed, and appreciate the honesty and integrity with which the film was made.  

Labels: drama, romance, Paris, Sixties
IMDb 75/100
RottenTomatoes (critics=76, viewers=87)
DVD

Christmas in Vienna (2020) [PG] ***

A film review by Esme Mazzeo for telltaletv.co on Nov. 14, 2020.

 

Christmas In Vienna: A Sweet Enough Heart Song

As perhaps is expected, Hallmark’s Christmas In Vienna borrows its basic premise from 1965’s classic film The Sound Of Music, which was also set (and partially filmed) in Austria.

Jess is supposed to be a violinist struggling to find her love for music, and preparing to say goodbye to it, with a visiting performance on Christmas Eve at the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But within the first two minutes of the film, she has a line that tells us that she doesn’t have much of a journey to go on at all. When asked if music is her life she says: It's hard for me to describe what music means to me. It allows me to live in this magical world of my creation that exists beyond my own. Of course, she’s not going to tell anyone at the orchestra that she’s thinking of retiring, but she’s not being facetious when speaking about her passion for the violin.

We know that every holiday movie ever made has a happy ending with minimal angst. However, to capture our hearts the lead character has to go through a significant change. Jess saying she loves music is a signal to us, even unconsciously, that Jess’s journey is not as prominent as Mark (Brennan Elliott) and his kids. It’s a shame because part of the magic of Hallmark Christmas movies is watching a female-focused journey.

That’s not to say that Christmas In Vienna isn’t a female-led film. Sarah Drew is a necessary component in turning mundane moments magical where possible. Jess’s individual connections with each of the three kids she plays nanny to for a week are special in their own way. It’s particularly touching to watch her help Julian find a sense of home.

There is something sad about watching a young man study a language so intently in a desperate attempt to belong somewhere. It’s sweet to watch Jess try to understand Julian and make sure he always has a place to hang his hat. His dad, Mark, definitely doesn’t for most of the movie. Mark may be a good father, but he’s also incredibly self-centered and annoying. It’s fun to watch Jess put him in his place, especially during the passive-aggressive scene at the breakfast table the morning after he explicitly solicits her opinion, and dares get angry when she gives it.

Also, it’s 2020, can we do away with the plot where the white male must consider leaving a very impressive job for an extremely impressive one, and a woman has to remind him that his kids are humans with feelings he should consider?

As a matter of fact, Christmas In Vienna might benefit if the lead roles were gender-swapped. As it stands, Jess would be a good best friend to have. I particularly relate to her line about just living her life and hoping a man will magically appear. Plus, we share an insatiable sweet tooth. Plus, her talent for finding the perfect meaningful gift for everyone is also impressive and endearing.

Opposites might attract, but Jess deserves someone more exciting than Mark. Sarah Drew and Brennan Elliott have just enough chemistry to carry the film, but it’s nothing we can feel through the screen. The scene where Jess and Mark dance to Silent Night in plain clothes at night because Mark gets over his aversion to dancing for her is as close to perfect as Christmas In Vienna gets. I also like that they subtly break the fourth wall a couple of times by telling us, and each other, that they should kiss after a couple of their romantic moments. But gender-swapping would be interesting where their emotional intimacy is concerned, too. Jess would have a richer journey if she were the one who had walls that needed breaking down. Instead, Mark has a more intense promotion drama and emotional journey. (It barely exists but it’s there).

Jess even shares the only big concert moment we see on-screen with the Olson family. It’s very sweet. But even though Jess’s love magically appears in her life and she also magically gets a dream job at the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; the best thing Vienna offers her is the chocolate cake and the Olson kids.

Christmas In Vienna airs throughout the holiday season on Hallmark Channel.

Labels: Christmas, drama, family, Hallmark, romance
IMDb 64/100 
RottenTomatoes (critics=tbd, viewers=25)
Amazon DVD
Esme Mazzeo full review

Now, Voyager (1942) [G] ****

A film review by David Cornelius for DVDTalk.com on Mar. 26, 2010.

Bette Davis earned yet another Oscar nod for her role in Now, Voyager, and it's easy to see why: here is yet another of those movies where the dowdy loner transforms into a radiant beauty, but Davis makes certain that we believe her completely as the ugly duckling. There's some makeup trickery there, to be sure, but it's mostly in her rich performance, a matter of attitude that slowly reveals the looker underneath - and even then, Davis maintains an uncertainty that suggests the new look is merely cosmetic, not deep enough to reach her true personality.

Around this stunning role is built a rather ridiculous story: Davis plays a spinster raised under the heavy thumb of an oppressive mother (Gladys Cooper). With the help of psychiatrist Claude Rains, she manages to escape her mother's grasp and reinvents herself, meeting the charming Paul Henreid on a cruise.

But he is married, and for an ordinary film, this would be enough. In fact, it's already plenty. But the script keeps going and going, and soon Davis becomes something of a nurse to Henreid's dowdy daughter (Janis Wilson), perhaps hoping to rescue the girl before the girl's life turns out like her own - although Henreid doesn't know it.

It's all far more complicated than it needs to be, and at two hours, the story could stand a trim or two. Then again, what would you cut? The soap opera of the opening scenes sets the stage for all that follows, and what follows is lovely enough that we can't stand to lose it. The film is most famous for the scene where Henreid lights two cigarettes at once, but more engaging are the moments between Bette Davis and Janis Wilson, two broken girls coming out of their shells together.

Labels: drama, period, romance
IMDb 78/100 
MetaCritic (critics=70, viewers=67) 
RottenTomatoes (critics=91, viewers=90)
Blu-ray

This Property is Condemned (1966) [NR] ****

A film review by Glenn Erickson for dvdtalk.com.

Adapted from one of his less well-known plays, This Property is Condemned should have been titled Tennessee Williams' Greatest Hits. It's all there, the depression setting with crude men circling like dixie moths around an oversexed child-woman undergoing the spiritual crisis of losing her dignity to 'the kindness of strangers.'

In glorious Technicolor and shaped as a star vehicle for the ultra-glamorous Natalie Wood, the basically trashy little story is bent all out of shape. Interesting casting makes it fun to watch and it stands as a good example of Hollywood trying to push the limits of the production code, but overall the film fails - we've seen it all before, and the fancy trimmings just make it look more fake than it is.

Railroad agent Owen Legate (Robert Redford) comes to the small town of Dodson Mississippi to lay off most of its railroad employees, many of whom live and carouse at the boarding house of Hazel Starr (Kate Reid). Owen grows fond of Hazel's younger daughter Willie (Mary Badham) but falls in love with her older sister Alva (Natalie Wood) a vivacious beauty. But the wicked Hazel exploits Alva for the men she attracts, and Alva's already on the way to being considered a loose woman - at age seventeen.

Depression Mississippi never looked so good. James Wong Howe's color is breathtaking and the grimy depression folk look like glamorous movie stars, well, at least when they're impersonated by Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. Paramount's art department makes sure that every period detail smack us right on the nose, even though hairstyles and costumes go to pot as soon as Alva Starr hits the streets of New Orleans. 

The familiar story and the overall Hollywood glitz are what do in This Property is Condemned, not the acting. Alva Starr needs to be a ravishing young thing like Natalie Wood to raise all the excitement the story demands. If only her makeup and hairstyles were keyed to the story instead of the requirements of her star image.

Robert Redford had about the slowest and least exciting career arcs of any young 60s actor. In both this film and the same year's commercially disastrous The Chase he comes in for some physical punishment. Yet he's still an inexpressive pretty face - whenever he reacts in dumb shock to some real or imagined offense by Alva, we have to wait for his next dialogue to find out how he really feels. Redford only came into his own in later pictures like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where he was permitted to be funny too.

Even the greasy grotesques that surround Redford are Hollywood off-the-shelf types. Charles Bronson is good, but his role as a crude working man uses his physical type in the same way he was shoehorned as an Indian a decade before. Robert Blake is an unappealing crybaby. The fat cat who just wants 'a few weeks of Alva's kindness' is the anonymous-looking but shuddersome John Harding, and is much more successful for being an unfamiliar face.

The best thing in the picture is Kate Reid as Hazel, Alva's manipulative mother who literally tries to prostitute her own daughter. It's an extreme character and it takes a talent like Reid to make it work; once again it's the actress's unfamiliarity that allows us to believe in her.

The production bends over backwards to make everything pretty. The locations may be authentic but the atmosphere is not. In his second film, director Sydney Pollack might not have carried the weight to wrest the film from powerful Paramount craft departments, or perhaps this is producer Ray Stark's idea of how to make a movie. Co-producer John Houseman is associated with great films, many of them commercial failures, but there's little of his dark literary undercurrents on display here.

What we have is a big dose of Hollywood gloss. The effort to be daring within the limits of the production code makes every peek-a-boo glimpse of Natalie's body seem forced and silly. There's a chaste skinny-dipping scene and chaste opportunities for Natalie to get nude for dialogues with Reid and Redford. By the time Redford charges into her shower, it's just ridiculous. The movie is too glamorous and Wood too regal a star to profit from naturalistic touches like partial nudity which only emphasizes what the film cannot show rather than what it could show. Hollywood directors demanded the freedom to have adult material in films, and the MPAA finally gave them Valenti and the ratings system.

This Property is Condemned is a casualty of the transition period when tame racy pictures carried the disclaimer Intended for Mature Audiences. The odd thing is that Ms. Wood wouldn't have done nude scenes anyway. One of the last of the real studio-grown stars, she was no exhibitionist and didn't need the exposure to get attention. Interestingly, after a couple of more films and reasonable success with the dated Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, she stopped showing up on theater screens.

This Property is Condemned is also noted for Francis Ford Coppola's leap into studio writing. He went right from Roger Corman's stable of talent to script doctoring for pictures like this one, and discerning his input isn't easy. Something's off in this picture, for just when it looks like it's over, with a pullback helicopter shot and everything, the locale changes to the big city and the story lumbers on for another twenty minutes of false conclusions. We don't want to see Alva become a prostitute, or Charles Bronson come busting back in for revenge and kill somebody. Even though neither of those things happen, what does happen isn't very satisfying.

Nobody should take credit for the awkward framing device with little sister Mary Badham walking the railroad tracks wearing Natalie's dress and singing her old song. She isn't half as convincing as she was in To Kill a Mockingbird and the construction is an obvious bore: See that old house ... it all happened right there. If This Property is Condemned was more or less ignored by audiences, it was because they'd seen it all before.

---

Paramount's DVD of This Property is Condemned has nothing to be ashamed of - the DVD looks great and sports colors that pop like real Technicolor. James Wong Howe's showoff images, such as the beautiful shot of Alva blowing out her birthday candles, will certainly please Natalie Wood's fans. The Audio is as solid as the picture. There are no extras.

Labels: drama, Robert Redford, romance, tragedy
IMDb 70/100
RottenTomatoes (critics=62, viewers=76)
Blu-ray
Original Glenn Erickson review

 

My Oxford Year (2025) [PG-13] ***

 An edited film review by Courtney Howard for Variety on Aug. 1, 2025.

My Oxford Year review: Sofia Carson learns lessons of the heart in Netflix's disheartening weepie

While studying at Oxford, an ambitious American has her pursuits upended after meeting a charming British cad in a mediocre offering that often defies logic in favor of contrived poignancy.

Seconds after the opening credits of My Oxford Year have discreetly scrolled across the screen, our happy heroine strolls the streets surrounding the titular British institution and is haphazardly doused by a massive puddle thanks to a classic 1960s-era Jaguar E-Type driven by her soon-to-be paramour. This klutzy comedic moment endemic to the rom-com genre unfortunately doubles as a fitting metaphor for the viewing audience, as the ensuing shenanigans make us feel pelted by that same gutter water time and time again. What should be a tender, feminist-minded story centered on a young woman rediscovering her dormant childhood dreamer turns into a middling melodrama about being with a cute guy in desperate need of her rescue.

Anna de la Vega (Sofia Carson) has been fantasizing about attending Oxford University since she was 10 years old, cracking open a dusty old book of poetry for the first time. Even before her face appears on camera and the narration reiterates what’s already been shown, it’s clear that this Type A personality has built her entire world around this milestone adventure (reinforced by meticulously curated context clues, which include dog-eared copies of Austen, Fitzgerald and Brontë’s works, as well as a diploma from Cornell and other framed honors). Anna’s plan is to defer her post-graduate financial analyst gig at Goldman Sachs for a year to study Victorian poetry under the tutelage of her personal hero Professor Styan (Barunka O’Shaughnessy) and then return to the States to make her mom (Romina Cocca) and dad (Yadier Fernández) proud by getting a job in finance.

However, Anna’s plans are quickly dashed upon meeting hunky, wealthy local playboy Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest). Their chance, embarrassingly adorable meet-cute in a fish-and-chips shop leads to fate pushing them together again in the classroom when Jamie takes over teaching duties on the first day. Flirtatious hijinks ensue, such as singing pub karaoke, eating at a kebab food truck and playing unhealthy jealousy games involving leggy redhead Cecelia Knowles (Poppy Gilbert) and oblivious dweeb Ridley (Hugh Coles). They inevitably give in to their lustful feelings. But when the pair begin to realize their casual love affair is far more meaningful than a fling, complications and hard, hidden truths bubble to the surface that affect both of their futures.

The execution by director Iain Morris (The Inbetweeners) and writers Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne (adapting Julia Whelan’s novel) is subpar, both in their character construction and narrative twists and turns. Unless it’s blatantly stated, we rarely get the sense Anna values practicality and financial success over indulging her romantic whimsy. All we see is her swooning over sentimentality. It’s not far-fetched to wonder how she compartmentalizes pragmatism and passion, allowing her ambitious drive to take a back seat to love. The filmmakers had ample opportunity to establish and better integrate Anna’s inner push-pull as a first-generation American daughter of immigrants, searching for a balance between her heart’s desires and her parents’ wishes for success, yet they falter. Instead, they handwave that aspect.

Rather than exploring Anna’s complex conundrums after she acclimates to her new digs (with lame fish-out-of-water gags galore) and starts sleeping with Jamie, they allow his conflicts to take over the film, eclipsing her struggles and dwarfing her significance in her quest. His familial strife dealing with his disapproving father William (Dougray Scott) and denial-riddled mother Antonia (Catherine McCormack) is given priority around the midpoint and doesn’t let up until the finale. There’s a predictable outcome as well, made worse by contrivances where circumstances are problems until they’re magically not, lacking satisfying emotional resolution. Anna puts herself in a subordinate role as a tool used to mend Jamie’s family’s fissures, allowing him to experience a greater arc than her own.

While its story holds much to be desired, the film’s technical craftsmanship earns higher marks. Pacing picks up in tangible energy and vibrancy within editors Victoria Boydell and Kristina Hetherington’s montages. The upbeat effervescence of Anna and Jamie’s trysts are endearingly bubbly in their hands. With its punch of Isabella Summers’ swelling, swirling score and a flurry of sharp cuts, toggling between fantasy and reality, their final montage’s end note is surprisingly effective, radiating beyond the end credits. Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin’s diffuse lighting during enchanting sequences brings a soft warmth, though the film’s overall flat, shallow focus is made a glaring issue at the start when clips from Oxford Blues play, emphasizing how cinematic films looked in the 1980s compared to the current digital era.

A love story only works if audiences care about the couple, and despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Carson and Mylchreest elevate the material. They have great chemistry together, conducting heat and sparks for necessary rootable interest. Both deliver genuinely open-hearted performances. As seen mere months ago in her previous Netflix romantic-dramedy The Life List, Carson is adept at making sarcasm and sorrow resonate, finding nuance and strength in vulnerability. When it comes to the supporting players, Harry Trevaldwyn is a true highlight as Anna’s gay neighbor/ classmate Charlie Butler. His attention-grabbing performance recalls Rhys Ifans in Notting Hill, stealing the show as the comedic relief best exemplified in a scene where he goes on a riff about his elaborate vision of his death.

Everything that Me Before You (2016, Emilia Clarke, Sam Claflin) does right, My Oxford Year manages to do wrong, from its heroine’s journey toward enlightenment to basic fundamentals dealing with character motivations. Our hopes for a thoughtful rumination on the messy bits of life making up the best parts of us deflates into a mess as the filmmakers continually forget their female protagonist should remain at the center of its universe. [Howard's rating: 2 stars out of 5 = 40%]

Labels: college, comedy, drama, romance, tragedy
IMDb 59/100 
MetaCritic (critics=39, viewers=51) 
RottenTomatoes (critics=29, viewers=39) 
Courtney Howard's review

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) [PG] ***/****

A film review by Roger Ebert on January 1, 1975

Waldo Pepper is, as he admits with a shy smile, the second greatest flier in the world. The greatest is Ernst Kessler, the German ace who shot down 70 foes in World War I. But that was more than a decade ago, and now Kessler, as much as Pepper, is reduced to peddling $5 plane rides and doing stunt flying during the last years of barnstorming. The pay isn’t good, but the work is lousy: I’m not selling good flying, explains the proprietor of Dillhoefer’s Air Circus. I’m selling sudden death.

Even so, the air circus at times finds itself performing before groups of half a dozen agape schoolboys. The days when pilots could land on Main Street are over; the airlines and the air mail are established; the government wants to regulate flying and give it an image of greater safety. The world is closing in on Waldo Pepper. And, as played by Robert Redford, he hardly knows it: He’s a simple, brave, boyish soul who is loyal to his friends and who dreams of being the first man to perform the dangerous outside loop.

The Great Waldo Pepper is a film of charm and excitement, a sort of bittersweet farewell to a time when a man with an airplane could make a living taking the citizens of Nebraska on their first five minute flights. It doesn’t have any big notions about the passing of that era, or of the barnstormers, who are seen as overgrown kids with wonderful toys that fly. But it has a good feeling for the period, and director George Roy Hill gives us poignancy and adventure.

The adventures are especially spectacular. Hill doesn’t cheat in the stuntflying sequences, which include unfaked footage of a biplane flying down a village street with a few feet of clearance and a petrified heroine clinging to one wing. This stunt sets up the trickiest scene in the film, when the heroine (Susan Saradon) freezes with fright and the great Waldo flies up in another airplane, climbs out on a wing, transfers to the first plane, walks out to the girl and attempts to pull her to safety.

If Waldo were able to do that five days a week, he might be able to earn a living. For the time has passed, alas, when the good citizens of Nebraska will pay to see ordinary stunts. As a plane flies past the stands with Waldo standing on the wing, a member of the audience observes: “Fellow came through here last week doing that standing on his head. Waldo’s best hope is that his friend and designer, Ezra Stiles (Edward Herrmann), will be able to perfect a monoplane with strong enough wings to do the outside loop. And alarming rumors float westward that the legendary Kessler (Bo Brundin) also hopes to be the first with that trick.

Kessler is successful, after developments I’d better not give away, but then both Kessler and Pepper find themselves in Hollywood doing stunt flying for a living. Kessler’s heroics in a famous World War I dogfight (which have deeply impressed Waldo) are now just the stuff for a potboiler movie, with Kessler flying his own stunts but a fatuous young actor playing him. And then Kessler and Pepper square off in the skies for a recreation of that famous battle, and somehow it becomes real…. [Ebert's rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Blogger's comment: This is a terribly underappreciated film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Discerning viewers will note Redford's brief arcade baseball throwing scene nine years before he does it in The Natural (1984), and, of course, his flying, ten years before Out of Africa (1985).

Labels: action, adventure, drama, Robert Redford
IMDb 67/100 
MetaCritic (critics=60, viewers=tbd) 
RottenTomatoes (critics=60, viewers=59) 
Blu-ray