The story of Linda Lovelace unfashionably links blue movies with domestic violence, and owes a lot to Boogie Nights – but it raises a deeper issue, too
It's sometimes said that in the smiling face of every Hollywood star something awful can be glimpsed if you look hard enough. Something in the glaze of the eyes, or the set of the teeth – the suppressed memory of that entry fee paid at the beginning of a movie career: the casting-couch humiliation or nauseating debasement long ago, when the star was a powerless youth. That came back to me watching this interesting, heartfelt if flawed study of Linda Boreman, who as "Linda Lovelace" was the star of the smash hit 1972 porn film Deep Throat; she was briefly in the celebrity vanguard of that porno chic which famously failed to impress Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976) and whose cheesy and transient counter-cultural daring made the film's title the ideal ironic moniker for the Watergate mole.
Later, as Linda Marchiano, she rejected porn, and in 1980 published a memoir entitled Ordeal, which revealed that she was beaten, raped and abused by the film's co-producer, her slimeball husband Chuck Traynor, together with his various porn associates and investors, and that Traynor was a violent misogynist financially dependent upon and yet outraged by the aura of sexual availability he himself had imposed on Linda.
The film is based on this book, but its publicity material states more broadly that it is taken from her life story as well as that of Catherine MacKinnon, one of the feminist writers with whom Linda came to be associated in the 1980s. Oddly, however, the film does not dramatise Linda Marchiano's association with the feminist movement, or her later complaint that feminists had themselves used her name and her personal pain for their own career purposes. It also refrains from explicitly mentioning the alleged mafia involvement in the film's distribution, a key part of the recent documentary Inside Deep Throat.
What this movie does is argue that shame and fear lay beneath the industry's specious non-glamour, and perhaps beneath all showbiz exploitation; robustly (and unfashionably) it links porn and domestic violence. To some degree, Lovelace reverses the lenient ironisation of porn, and restates the female perspective as opposed to the male pornstar testimony that underpinned Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) – though it is naturally very much influenced by Anderson's sense of period and style.
Amanda Seyfried is a strong and sympathetic Linda (though with a more open, uncomplicated prettiness than the real woman herself), still living at home at 21 years old after a troubled adolescence with her fiercely Catholic mum and dad, played by Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick. Spotted dancing at a roller disco, she is picked up by the superficially charming entrepreneur Chuck Traynor – a persuasive and intimidating performance from Peter Sarsgaard. Traynor bullies and chivvies his new bride Linda into porn; they meet the exuberant director Gerry Damiano (Hank Azaria) and sinister money-man Anthony Romano (Chris Noth), and at the height of their success, they hang out inevitably with Hugh Hefner, played in cameo by James Franco. But a narrative trick by screenwriter Andy Bellin indicates that porn was not the wacky lark we have been led to believe, but an ugly and violent business.
There are quite a few 1970s cliches and easy visual markers, such as the bland "suburban driveway" shot popularised by Goodfellas (1990) and used recently in Ariel Vromen's The Iceman (2012). We see a highly fetishised gleaming 70s automobile; it looks as if it has been lovingly maintained and preserved by the kind of company that leases out period cars to movie shoots, not the casually battered vehicle that existed at the time. And there is incidentally a PhD thesis to be written, or at least an MA dissertation, on the easy deployment of cocaine as an instant "bad guy" symbol.
Where I think Lovelace has real potency is raising a related issue: this isn't just about porn. There is a resonance with Julian Jarrold's recent TV movie The Girl (2012), which tactlessly showed Alfred Hitchcock's campaign of intimidation and harassment against Tippi Hedren: not as culpable as what is shown here, but not so very far away from the culture of evasion and silence that enable abuse. And there is of course the grim personal story of Marilyn Monroe, abused and assaulted by her husband Joe DiMaggio, who was excited and enraged by his wife's sexy celebrity in precisely the same way as Traynor. Lovelace may be a little contrived and unoriginal as drama, but it's a useful exercise in de-sentimentalisation.
Rating: 3/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 18 hours ago.
It's sometimes said that in the smiling face of every Hollywood star something awful can be glimpsed if you look hard enough. Something in the glaze of the eyes, or the set of the teeth – the suppressed memory of that entry fee paid at the beginning of a movie career: the casting-couch humiliation or nauseating debasement long ago, when the star was a powerless youth. That came back to me watching this interesting, heartfelt if flawed study of Linda Boreman, who as "Linda Lovelace" was the star of the smash hit 1972 porn film Deep Throat; she was briefly in the celebrity vanguard of that porno chic which famously failed to impress Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976) and whose cheesy and transient counter-cultural daring made the film's title the ideal ironic moniker for the Watergate mole.
Later, as Linda Marchiano, she rejected porn, and in 1980 published a memoir entitled Ordeal, which revealed that she was beaten, raped and abused by the film's co-producer, her slimeball husband Chuck Traynor, together with his various porn associates and investors, and that Traynor was a violent misogynist financially dependent upon and yet outraged by the aura of sexual availability he himself had imposed on Linda.
The film is based on this book, but its publicity material states more broadly that it is taken from her life story as well as that of Catherine MacKinnon, one of the feminist writers with whom Linda came to be associated in the 1980s. Oddly, however, the film does not dramatise Linda Marchiano's association with the feminist movement, or her later complaint that feminists had themselves used her name and her personal pain for their own career purposes. It also refrains from explicitly mentioning the alleged mafia involvement in the film's distribution, a key part of the recent documentary Inside Deep Throat.
What this movie does is argue that shame and fear lay beneath the industry's specious non-glamour, and perhaps beneath all showbiz exploitation; robustly (and unfashionably) it links porn and domestic violence. To some degree, Lovelace reverses the lenient ironisation of porn, and restates the female perspective as opposed to the male pornstar testimony that underpinned Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) – though it is naturally very much influenced by Anderson's sense of period and style.
Amanda Seyfried is a strong and sympathetic Linda (though with a more open, uncomplicated prettiness than the real woman herself), still living at home at 21 years old after a troubled adolescence with her fiercely Catholic mum and dad, played by Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick. Spotted dancing at a roller disco, she is picked up by the superficially charming entrepreneur Chuck Traynor – a persuasive and intimidating performance from Peter Sarsgaard. Traynor bullies and chivvies his new bride Linda into porn; they meet the exuberant director Gerry Damiano (Hank Azaria) and sinister money-man Anthony Romano (Chris Noth), and at the height of their success, they hang out inevitably with Hugh Hefner, played in cameo by James Franco. But a narrative trick by screenwriter Andy Bellin indicates that porn was not the wacky lark we have been led to believe, but an ugly and violent business.
There are quite a few 1970s cliches and easy visual markers, such as the bland "suburban driveway" shot popularised by Goodfellas (1990) and used recently in Ariel Vromen's The Iceman (2012). We see a highly fetishised gleaming 70s automobile; it looks as if it has been lovingly maintained and preserved by the kind of company that leases out period cars to movie shoots, not the casually battered vehicle that existed at the time. And there is incidentally a PhD thesis to be written, or at least an MA dissertation, on the easy deployment of cocaine as an instant "bad guy" symbol.
Where I think Lovelace has real potency is raising a related issue: this isn't just about porn. There is a resonance with Julian Jarrold's recent TV movie The Girl (2012), which tactlessly showed Alfred Hitchcock's campaign of intimidation and harassment against Tippi Hedren: not as culpable as what is shown here, but not so very far away from the culture of evasion and silence that enable abuse. And there is of course the grim personal story of Marilyn Monroe, abused and assaulted by her husband Joe DiMaggio, who was excited and enraged by his wife's sexy celebrity in precisely the same way as Traynor. Lovelace may be a little contrived and unoriginal as drama, but it's a useful exercise in de-sentimentalisation.
Rating: 3/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 18 hours ago.