** MY LIFE’S IN TURNAROUND
(Worth seeing) Directed and written by Eric Schaeffer and Donal Lardner Ward With Schaeffer, Ward, Lisa Gerstein, Dana Wheeler Nicholson, Debra Clein, Sheila Jaffe, John Sayles, Martha Plimpton, Phoebe Cates, and Casey Siemaszko.
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This state of affairs is partly the result of new definitions of “universality” developed by the studios over the past several years, which generally suppose that the ideal movie viewer has the taste and sensibility of a ten-year-old boy: think of the well-received Speed, Forrest Gump, and True Lies, for instance, none of which betrays a view of the adult world any more developed than those in The Lion King and The Mask. If one compares these films with some of the top-ten money-makers of the mid-50s–a period commonly regarded today as repressed and escapist–one finds plenty of fluff (How to Marry a Millionaire, White Christmas, Cinerama Holiday, Around the World in 80 Days) along with some enduring classics (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Rear Window, A Star Is Born, The Searchers), but within both categories the quotient of adult fare is unmistakably higher.
This impasse may also have something to do with the highly protected and circumscribed (i.e., blinkered) lives led by big-time studio filmmakers. Most of them start out knowing something about life as it’s lived outside the industry, some of which may find its way into their early pictures–Barry Levinson’s Diner is a fair example–but after they exhaust this material they’re likely to produce something like Levinson’s Toys.
Obviously more invented, or at least more caricatured, are the dysfunctional love lives of the two heroes, which provide much of the film’s adolescent flavor. Featherstone habitually importunes strangers in the street and invariably strikes out; Little compulsively courts teenyboppers in the bar where he works, sagely lecturing them about the “shared love” of the 70s, which was “free and nonjudgmental,” meanwhile fleeing hysterically from serious relationships with older women. For dramatic purposes the film also manufactures a not-very-convincing fight and extended rift between the two friends, but otherwise the filmmakers reportedly either restaged or took off from events that actually happened. Pointedly, the real story–how they raised the money to make this picture–is kept mostly offscreen; aspiring filmmakers hoping to educate themselves in this craft are likely to be disappointed.
