Product: Endless Love [VHS] (1981)
Rating: 3.0
the love every parent fears
Although much maligned, this movie isn't that bad. At least I was able to sit all the way through it, which I can't say for a lot of more heralded titles. Based on Scott Spencer's novel about teenage love, as Pauline Kael has observed it's like the male version of Splendor in the Grass. In Splendor Natalie Wood was so nuts about Warren Beatty that she was packed off to a loony bin. Here Martin Hewett is just as obsessive about Brooke Shields, and he's the one who ends up institutionalised. Director Franco Zeffirelli is more interested in presenting the teenagers as modern day Romeo and Juliet and he pulls back on the sex that was rampant in the book. Hewitt and Shields still have sex but it's staged so unerotically that the fact that Shields needs sleeping pills becomes a joke. It can't be that her recreation makes her too hyped to sleep, and considering how often they are seen to engage in activity, it's a wonder she can stay awake at all. Zefferilli probably equals Spencer's purple-ness in a climactic brawl, and with the hysterical performances of Don Murray as Shield's father and Beatrice Straight at Hewitt's mother. As Hewitt's father, Richard Kiley is quietly assuming, and as Shield's mother Shirley Knight is warm and tender, this being one of her last films before she began to gain weight. The "liberal" household that Knight and Murray share, which is meant to be a catalyst for the love that the teenagers are just "too young to handle", also has odd indications of incest, and this prepares us for a later scene where Knight makes a pass at Hewitt. That Hewitt is using Knight to get to her daughter still doesn't seem to shift the shame of an older woman/younger man seduction off Knight, and the fact that he had been sleeping with her daughter makes things even more queazy. Thankfully Knight manages to retain her dignity, but the point that she is still an attractive woman seems beside the point of Hewitt's rejection. When Hewitt is banned from visiting Shields at her home, we wonder why that means he cannot speak to her at school. And when Shields' family have a party, we also wonder why Hewitt is not invited. From the glimpses we get of Shields at the party, she hardly seems pining for her "endless love" partner, so we are apt to believe the information Hewitt has overheard - that the couple have broken up, and the implication being that Shields is again a free agent. These mixed messages culminate in Hewitt confronting Shields and nearly raping her to make her admit she still loves him. Hewitt is required to act more than Shields, since his character has more at stake than hers in the narrative, and though he falls back on boyish head-lowering and makeup provides him with a masculinising stubble, he is convicing when he cries in the rain. Shields however is used like a model. Cinematographer David Watkin captures her at what may be the height of her beauty, a standard Shields has been unable to rise above in her adult years. This film also features James Spader in one of his early snooty roles as Shields' brother, and a beefy Tom Cruise in one scene.