Lovelace (Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman, 2013) – Leading off a review with extra-textual information is controversial, I know. Fine. In this case, it explains why this movie stretches so far to avoid surprise. Epstein and Friedman got their starts as documentary filmmakers revealing what life and culture were like from before the sexual revolution through the spread of AIDS. Epstein won an Oscar for “The Times of Harvey Milk,” and had to have noticed when a workmanlike adaptation of that film became an acclaimed biopic. So I can see why “Deep Throat” star Linda Lovelace’s life appealed to him and Friedman — which other before-their-time 70s icons can be rescued from Wikipedia and turned into top drama fodder?
Alas, the directors have smoothed out the kinks in Lovelace’s story. Played by Amanda Seyfried, the fictional Lovelace (nee Linda Boreman) is doomed to be classic, saucer-eyed naif. We first see her in a bathtub, smoking, sad about something or other, as audiences flock to watch “Deep Throat.” We cut back to 1970, when Lovelace was living in Florida under the roof of prudish parents, played by Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick, who are given almost nothing surprising to do, but excel at looking horrified at smut. A sluttier friend (Juno Temple) encourages Lovelace to go-go-dance with her at a roller rink, where they are spotted by Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who comes on in the creepiest possible way. After eyeing the girls from across the rink, he offers them weed and immediately tells them “girls like you can make $300, $400 a night dancing in Vegas.” Lovelace falls for this, which we have to attribute to her oppressive home life and the knowledge that she’s only trapped there because she got knocked up and gave the baby away. “I signed circumcision papers,” she says, mournfully.
From here, it progresses like every tale of an innocent girl and a secretly violent father figure/lover. (Sarsgaard, perfectly cast/typecast, is 14 years older than Seyfried; Traynor was 12 years older than Lovelace.) Traynor forces Lovelace to act in a porno, and she gets the part (looking, as a producer says, “like Raggedy Ann with great tits”), because Traynor has home video of her giving an excellent blow job. Off we go to a movie shoot, complete with ridiculous 1970s fashion and the cliched shot of filmmakers gawking at the sort of star-making X-rated action they’ve never seen before. (Think of the scene in “Boogie Nights” where the crew finally sees Dirk Diggler whip out his footlong member.) Off to a world of fame and parties, where Lovelace is even hit on by Hugh Hefner (a piece of stunt casting that makes no sense but I won’t spoil here).
But wait! The film abruptly cuts forward to Lovelace, dowdy and un-rouged, submitting her story of life with Traynor to a polygraph test. This is the filmmakers’ clever move: They go all Rashomon on the story they just told, extending old scenes to reveal just how brutal Traynor was, pimping his wife out to rich businessmen and throwing her against a wall when she makes a joke at his expense at a party. This actually mirrors Lovelace’s own memoirs, which began with some ghostwritten pro-porn books and ended when she wrote a tell-all denounced by some of her old friends.
Parts of this are well done, but they’re duller than Lovelace’s own story. There’s not enough about the supremely weird period of her stardom — it’s limited to one scene in which Traynor’s dictating the “memoir” and explaining to a producer why he’s licensed a Lovelace blow-up doll. But in the film, Lovelace refuses to do any post-”Deep Throat” movies. “My adult film career lasted 17 days,” she says. In reality, it didn’t — she filmed an R-rated sequel to her hit and a mess called “Linda Lovelace for President.” She grew increasingly strung out, then born again, then both born again and strung out. Her second husband, presented here as mute, sane, and supportive, was abusive to her. The makers of “Lovelace” traded this rich, weird, morally murky tale for a simpler one. Too bad.
Byzantium (Neil Jordan, 2013) – One of those art house directors who’s exceptionally good with shlock, Jordan was the guy who molded a schlocky airport novel called “Interview With A Vampire” into a surprisingly strong and memorable horror story. The best part of that movie was Kirsten Dunst as an increasingly malicious creature, angry that she’d become forever young. You can see why Jordan wanted to adapt this story of a mother-daughter vampire family whose centuries-long run of luck seems to run out as they acclimate to life in a dying seaside town.
Vampires are never merely “vampires” anymore — they have to embody metaphors. Here the dominant metaphor is triumph-over-sexism, as the mother, Clara, played by Gemma Atherton, was a prostitute who became a vampire by seducing and betraying some seamen who intended to become immortal. Her life, told in a series of flashbacks (all introduced by turns in the narrative), is sadness all the way through, up to the moment she rescued her daughter Eleanor (Saorsie Ronan) from an orphanage and went on the lam from the chauvinist society of vampires that was never going to accept her.
The secret society comes off as mean and incompetent, as gatherings of men tend to be. “How do you think two women with no formal education have evaded you this long?” hisses Clara, when two of the enforcers finally track her down. The daughter is less concerned with the chase, having known basically no other life, using the centuries to become a good piano player and lovelorn ingenue. Ronan, whose eerie classical beauty keeps landing her in girl-challenged-by-supernatural-angst roles, is good and sad as she falls for a smart boy (Caleb Jones, who played Banshee in the last X-Men movie) who inspires her to spill her secret.
It’s all quite good, with more memorable cinematography than you’d expect out of a $14 million budget. The vampire myth here is vaguely eastern — souls are transformed on an island where rushing waterfalls suddenly turn to blood. Sunlight and mirrors and crosses have no effect on the undead, and instead of fangs, they grow long thumbnails that allows them to puncture necks to siphon the blood out. There’s almost no camp, though — the focus is on the evil done to Clara and Eleanor’s desire to break free without any knowledge of how to make it happen.