Lovelace

Linda Boreman’s trajectory seems pathetically familiar at this distance; a strict Catholic upbringing produced a shy and perhaps prudish high school student who rebelled in her early 20s, married the wrong kind of man and - via a Mob-financed 61-minute film in which she displayed a freakish talent for fellatio - became, as “Linda Lovelace,” the first porn star to achieve mainstream celebrity. Later she renounced that life, wrote a tell-all book that alleged she was physically and psychologically abused by a husband who was pimp and Svengali, and was embraced on the talk show circuit as a new kind of feminist icon. That she died in a car crash a dozen years ago is convenient for storytellers looking to use her for cautionary or inspiring purposes - the dead cannot be libeled; ghosts have no legal standing and are helpless before the characters given their names.

I remember Lovelace, and Deep Throat, the tawdry 61-minute sex comedy that made her suddenly famous in 1972 and announced the commercialization of the so-called sexual revolution. People did get up to things in the 1970s; there were key parties like the one depicted in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, and some of us even wore fringed leather jackets like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. It was in the summer of 1972 that Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich decided to trade wives (actually wives, children and dogs). It was a ridiculous and faintly desperate time, in which it was easy to believe that everyone else was having more fun.

And, for a little while, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (best known for their documentary projects The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads) manage to capture a little of that hurtling-through-the-zeitgeist feeling, complete with a thumpy (if somewhat obvious) soul power soundtrack and costuming choices that seem over-the-top but really aren’t. The cinematography is period-correct, if ugly, with harsh white sunlight alternating with dim club grain. All the surfaces are right, and if you’re susceptible to nostalgia you might feel yourself pulled into the creepy, kinky world the film re-imagines.

Unfortunately, the film is all surface, despite some hard work from an overqualified cast that unfortunately seems not to have been given a key note to tune to. As the title character, Amanda Seyfried is composed and canny, and not nearly as loony and lost as the real Lovelace seemed to be. Sharon Stone plays her mother with a delicious camp edge, while Robert Patrick delivers an effectively quiet - and unnervingly touching - performance as her bewildered father. Chris Noth, Bobby Cannavale and Hank Azaria champ hard on the scenery as, respectively, the sleazy producers and director behind Deep Throat, while Peter Sarsgaard tries to locate something genuinely human in the apparently monstrous Chuck Traynor, the evil husband who echoes the murderous Paul Snider (played by Eric Roberts, who shows up here as a polygraph operator, in Star 80). But while Sarsgaard works hard, AndyBellin’s flat script just doesn’t provide him enough material. And if it seems that the rest of the ensemble is made up of expert musicians playing in different modes, all we can say for James Franco’s Hugh Hefner is that it’s a genuinely sour note.

The structure of the script seems like an attempt to camouflage a woefully shallow script, as a bouncing, hot fun in the ’70s story pivots on a polygraph test administered by Lovelace’s prospective publisher as a condition of accepting her manuscript. Then we see the same sets of events again, as they really happened, and are meant to realize the depth of Lovelace’s victimization. The poor woman spent a total of 17 days in the adult film industry, made $1,250 for her role in a movie that eventually grossed more than $600 million worldwide (a sum that was immediately confiscated by her fiscally irresponsible, physically abusive, drug dependent husband) and became a national punchline. And I don’t doubt for a moment it was really sad.

But we already know that story, and Lovelace irritatingly refuses to engage the deeper issues of what made Deep Throat so palatable to mainstream audiences in the first place, or to even consider the ever-present American tension between puritanism and libertinism. Not even the persecution of Harry Reems (a very good Adam Brody) gets more than a cursory mention. Granted, it’s not his story, but it’s not really Boerstein/Lovelace’s story either - it’s a riff on the way we were. Or at least the way we used to dress.

Lovelace 83 Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Chris Noth, Bobby Cannavale, Juno Temple, Adam Brody, Hank Azaria, Robert Patrick, James Franco Director: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman Rating: R, for strong sexual content, nudity, language, drug use and some domestic violence Running time: 92 minutes