Copyright New Republic Jan 20, 1997If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you. Because I'm the worst." Under this blazon The People vs. Larry Flynt (Columbia) advances. Flynt is the publisher of Hustler whose career in the porno-mag business and whose tangles because of it are the subject of Milos Forman's film. It's refreshing in these days of Moral Majorities, of religion as power tool, to see a film that defies those forces. That point is past argument. Now, if you like, let's believe that people will flock to this picture not because of its nudity and sex, but because we're all First Amendment absolutists.
Flynt was born in rural Kentucky and, we see, began in business as a boy, peddling moonshine with his brother. Next, in the early 1970s, in Ohio, he is running strip clubs with his brother while liberally sampling the stock in trade. He starts a newsletter to draw customers. The letter becomes Hustler, and Flynt becomes very rich. He meets, loves and eventually marries Althea Leasure, a bisexual underage stripper. They are devoted to each other, in their errant way, until she dies of AIDs and drugs.
Obscenity charges against Flynt come early and keep coming. With good legal counsel and with personal flamboyance, he wriggles through his troubles. (The real Flynt appears briefly as one of the judges trying the film's Flynt.) But troubles magnify when Hustler publishes raunchy jokes and cartoons about one of Flynt's most vociferous enemies, Jerry Falwell. Falwell sues; Flynt loses. Flynt appeals, and, after the usual judicial ascent, his appeal is heard by the Supreme Court, which in 1988 reverses the judgment, on First Amendment grounds.
Meanwhile, a personal horror has struck. A would-be assassin has shot Flynt and his lawyer, Alan Isaacman. Isaacman recovers completely, but Flynt is left paralyzed from the waist down. He is in agony and starts to hit drugs. (In sympathy Althea joins him.) Neurosurgery eliminates both his pain and any chance of recovery; he quits drugs. (Althea doesn't.) Flynt's assailant is still unknown, the film says. This fact, however, doesn't prevent the screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, from showing him-indeed, showing how he trailed Flynt from courtroom to courtroom. (Why are they so sure it was a man? Mightn't a woman have wanted to murder Flynt for his treatment of her or for his general exploitation of women?)
The film isn't quite as daring as the man it's about. First, in the matter of nudity. Flynt keeps talking about vaginas. In one photo session he parts the legs of a reclining nude model. Hustler will corroborate this candor, but the film is more conservative: no vaginas. Second, the problematic material about Falwell that appeared in Hustler, including a cartoon of him having sex with his mother in an outhouse, does not appear in the film. If the film's reticence is because of the rating systems of the Motion Picture Association of America, this is a sour comment on the relative freedoms of the American press and screen-under the same First Amendment.
The film is further softened by some sentimental devices. When Althea diesin her ornate bath, drugged out and drowned-Thomas Newman's music swells glutinously, with a wordless chorus behind it. (That chorus, soaring wordlessly over emotional peaks, must be the best-employed group in Movieland.) When Flynt returns home after his wife's funeral, he sees, in his mind's eye, flashbacks of their earlier days together, and we hear her voice on the soundtrack. True Romance invades Hustler.
Further, a trouble that couldn't be altered but that affects the climax. As Flynt himself implies in his scumbag aphorism, he is not the hero of his principal struggle. He is a victim, endangered, like the girl tied to the railroad track. The Supreme Court en bloc is the hero that rides to the rescue. It would be a mite difficult to create a climax out of nine justices doing research and conferring, but at the end of the film Flynt, dramatically speaking, is just someone waiting for help.
Forman, a Czech native who came to this country in 1969, has mostly clung to American subjects here: Taking Off, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair, Ragtime. Of these, only Cuckoo's Nest was really interesting, and that was mostly because of Jack Nicholson. Forman then dealt with two European subjects, Valmont and Amadeus, and in the second of these he at least improved that dubious play. But he has not become a director on whom one can rely for stylistic flavor. Larry Flynt included, one can't speak of a Forman film, only of a film by Forman.
Still, he has done well here with his actors. Courtney Love plays Althea with sexual amplitude and moral abandon. Edward Norton, who impressed as the psychopath in Primal Fear and as Mr. Young Love in Everyone Says I Love You, gives Flynt's lawyer quiet strength. Donna Hanover, who is the wife of New York's mayor, is appealing as Ruth Carter Stapleton, the sister of Jimmy Carter. Stapleton is an evangelist who becomes friends with the Flynts before he is shot and who apparently develops a crush on him. At least Althea becomes jealous. James Cromwell strikes the right note as Charles Keating, the supporter of Falwell who later went to prison for involvement in a savings and loan scandal-and has just been released on legal technicalities.
Woody Harrelson plays Flynt viscerally and cleverly. In the shamefully underrated Natural Born Killers, Harrelson seethed and flamed as a young man who soars from the real into the surreal. Here, in a (relatively) more restrained role, he is a man who lives, in person and profession, by exaggerating the real.
Flynt, a postscript tells us, now publishes twenty-nine magazines.
How thoughtful of the people who made One Fine Day (20th Century Fox). They've given us a trip back to the 1930s without our having to leave the 1990s. Nothing more clearly marked the '30s film decade than the romantic farce-comedy, such as Libeled Lady and The Awful Truth, and this new Michelle Pfeiffer-George Clooney picture might, mutatis mutandis (as studio execs constantly say), have been made back then.
What are the three prime requirements of the genre? (1) Predictability. We want to know how the picture is going to end very shortly after it begins. (2) We want to enjoy making the trip from beginning to end; so we have to like, really like, the leading actors. (3) Symmetry. Perfect junctures. Not jigsaw-puzzle pieces but building blocks. And One Fine Day fills the entire bill.
It all takes place on one not-alwaysfine day. The screenplay, by Terrel Seltzer and Ellen Simon, begins by showing us that Pfeiffer, divorced and with a 5-year-old son, lives in the same Manhattan apartment house as Clooney, divorced and with a 5-year-old daughter. Talk about symmetry. Pfeiffer and Clooney don't know each other at the start, but they meet cute, as the genre demands, and because of several mixups are left with the kids on their hands for the whole day.
This is hard on both adults. She is an architect with a major presentation that day. Clooney is-I can hardly believe this as I type it-a newspaper columnist, a madcap, whose editor tough-loves him. How the two adults meet their professional obligations while taking care of their children, who are endearingly exhausting, and how the two adults also develop their own relationship, that's the story. Would you believe that at the beginning they don't like each otherand gradually change their minds?
The picture makes us smile even as we relish its familiar smile-making techniques. The dialogue has some fizz, Clooney combines big-bearishness with some agility, and Pfeiffer has become a star. She has had star billing for some time, but now she is a star. She plays with the confidence that comes from knowing that millions are following her whole career, notjust what happens in this one picture. She's not an actress of stunning talent; but she has developed winning skills.
The director,Michael Hoffman, keeps the souffle nice and fluffy. The tempo never sags. Imagine a domestic romp with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Mutatis, of course, mutandis.
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