This is a short review of a film I haven't seen in a long time, and would like to see on DVD as soon as possible. It's 1979's Voices, the only big-screen effort from television producer/director Robert Markowitz and TV writer John Herzfeld. Now that I think about it, given this pedigree, I suppose the film is a little tv-movie in quality--the visuals don't pop out at me much as strong memories.
But I do recall being touched deeply by this love story between an aspiring musician (Michael Ontkean) and a deaf dancer (Amy Irving). I know, I know--the possibility for cliches are endless here. But I stand by my memories of Voices being a legitimatly-earned-tear-inducer. To boot, it also has a memorable score by Jimmy Webb, the songwriter behind "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "MacArthur Park," and "Wicita Lineman." His song "When Will I Touch You Again?" is one of the film's highlights (but I won't tell you anything else). More music is provided by Willie Nelson, Burton Cummings, Tom Petty and the Atlanta Rhythm Section. 
It's Ontkean and Irving together that set this movie sailing. Both are lovable and real, end of story. There is definite emotion laid into this film on their parts. Barry Miller, Alex Rocco, and Herbert Bergof play the three generations of men at home who build up and tear down Ontkean's dreams of becoming a professional musician. They're good, but their parts are overwritten. Voices, which I have not seen since I caught it on cable in the mid-1980s, works best when its two attractive leads are snuggling together on-screen. If you ever see Voices langishing in some box of VHS tapes, or on Ebay, get it. You won't be sorry.
One of the strangest and most forgotten anomalies of late 1970's mainstream cinema, "Voices" was a strictly-by-the-numbers assembly line love story, made by a rapidly dying MGM studios, and was the very last of the "handicapped female/male savior" films that flooded American cinemas at the tail end of Jimmy Carter's America, an acute product of an early shift away from the more darker, socially and politically critical Hollywood films produced in the wake of Watergate and economic recession. Suffused with treacly sentimentalism and unyielding "happy-endism", this deservedly short-lived genre was an almost translucent and prescient weathervane of where the country was headed, directly into the heart of soon-to-be Reagan-era conservatism. In this regard, "Voices" is an especially surreal and bizarre curio of this early rightward drift, insofar that it had an extraordinarily prestigious cast (Amy Irving, legendary acting teacher Herbert Berghof,
ReplyDeleteAlex Rocco of "The Godfather", Viveca Lindfors, and most interestingly, an unknown young actor, Barry Miller, who had just previously made a huge and powerful impact in the now iconic and epochal "Saturday Night Fever" as the doomed teenager Bobby C. which was still playing in theaters at the time of "Voices" 1979 release, almost a full year after it's initial blockbuster 1977 premiere) as well as a stellar pedigree behind the scenes (Joe Wizan was producing "And Justice For All" with Al Pacino and Lee Strasberg and Robert Markowitz had just directed an unknown Meryl Streep on television). This was a grouping whose status was far beyond the casts and crews of "Ice Castles" and "The Promise", dismal failures at the box office. So what fated such a promising film to the cinematic graveyard? Putting 14 karat gold actors on a fool's gold script, written by a notorious hack (Jon Herzfeld) and directed by an untalented journeyman who had no feel for complexity, depth, or ambiguity. This was, in fact, so much the case, that despite all of it's shallowness, insipidity, and overwhelming triviality, it received reviews that basically implied that it was "a film that was far better than it had any right to be". Hence, it's almost mystical invisibility and deep-end obscurity, a movie too respectable to be camp, and too awful to be recalled with any potential for contemporary appreciation. As an aside, young Miller would be retained by MGM, and go on a year later to give an explosive and star-making performance as a troubled and gifted stand-up comedian in Alan Parker's "Fame", which was nominated for six Academy Awards, and won two for it's soundtrack, confirming he was a new and exciting young talent to be reckoned with.
Having such an extremely mediocre actor in the lead (Micheal Ontkean) didn't help matters, either. It's also fascinating to see how in the the immediate aftermath of "Saturday Night Fever", there was a spurt of proletariat/urban working class dramas (Bloodbrothers and Nunzio being the most representative examples) that also reflected this shift exemplified by the "incapacitated heroine/male rescuer" genre, namely where any sense of tragedy, social critique, or questioning of patriarchal, religious, or family values is erased in a sentimental reaffirmation of class mobility, escape, or triumph over adversity.
ReplyDelete"Fever" was most pointedly NOT an example of that; there is plenty of cruelty and unresolved tragedy to assuage any sense of closure at the end of the film or to promise it's main character any sense of actual reward for his sudden moral awareness of the social world that he has flourished in. ("There's ways of killing yourself without killing yourself"). In fact, the "handicap" love union as portrayed in the "rescuer" genre was the perfect pretense, under the guise of "compassion" or the "accepting of human difference" with which to reassert the traditional belief system in the nuclear family structure, being one of female domesticity, male dominance, and economic co-dependency. Therefore, it is a compelling argument to make regarding the political "weathervane" that a movie like "Voices" pointed towards, which is certainly the only significant thing that remains to be said about them.
An interesting piece of trivia: "Slow Dancing In The Big City", another "damaged heroine/male rescuer" romance of the late 70's (and another completely forgotten failure) was directed by none other than Oscar winner John Avildsen ("Rocky") who, having gotten into a argument about the "dark" direction that the Norman Wexler screenplay was taking in pre-production for "Saturday Night Fever", was promptly fired off the picture by producer Robert Stigwood, and decided to rebel by making "Slow Dancing", a more "redemptive" story, instead.
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of "strange", one could, if one wanted to, regard the entire career of Barry Miller as "strange", if one contemplates that his talents took him far beyond the juvenile roles that even in the best of circumstances may have landed him firmly in the context of a 70's "teen idol", such as Robby Benson, but had already put him a considerable notch above that plateau, in terms of the early and very strong critical acclaim he received in two of the most culturally seminal films of their era, "Fever" and "Fame", back-to-back. Miller was essentially scoring triumphs throughout his 20's and early 30's that would of put any other actor firmly on the path towards superstardom: winning a Tony Award for his first time out on Broadway, working for a string of legendary directors (Alan Parker, Micheal Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese) in some of their most financially successful, Oscar-nominated and critically acclaimed films (Peggy Sue Got Married, Last Temptation of Christ) and achieving a reputation for extraordinary performances that rivaled (if not exceeded) the likes of his most immediate 1980's peers like Sean Penn and Matthew Broderick. Now essentially gone from the scene, no analysis has ever been forthcoming: not drugs or alcohol, or mental illness, any other go-to explanation that is usually trotted out for easy reference, but a possibly much more disturbing explanation: a concerted effort through publicity and the powers-that-be to place the safe and the mediocre over the far more artistically dangerous and influential.
ReplyDelete1) His first major and important role as a naïve, deer-caught-in-the-headlights adolescent, undermined by Catholic dogma that he can barely find the courage to question, even as you sense that he is wildly desperate to do so, if not for the fear of feeling more isolated and ignored that he already appears to be, and leading directly to an inadvertently suicidal act of conformity, made "Saturday Night Fever" into something much more that just a mere pop-culture touchstone for the history of disco, but certified it as an evergreen and timeless coming-of-age classic on the level of "Rebel Without A Cause" 2) His tremendously acclaimed performance in Alan Parker's Oscar-winning "Fame" should have brought him the 1980 Supporting Actor Oscar that went to Timothy Hutton instead, being that his role was far more complex and emotionally demanding, as a brash and overconfident Puerto Rican high school student, mired in poverty and a violent home life, aspiring to the escapist fantasies of Hollywood celebrity through the medium of stand-up comedy, essentially a cautionary tale based on the real-life meteoric rise and tragic fall of 1970's TV sensation Freddie Prinze 3) Appearing so unrecognizable in a starring role in "The Chosen" that critics stated in print that it would hinder the trajectory of his career 4)In the heart of the conservative Reagan era, making his Broadway debut playing an intellectual soldier who refuses to abide by the Army's rules and protocol, and winning The Tony Award for it 5)starring in Coppola's most successful film of the 1980's as a romantically unrequited mid-40's microchip tycoon who was once in love with Kathleen Turner as a persecuted 17 year old science prodigy 6)appearing in Scorsese's towering and historically controversial masterpiece "The Last Temptation of Christ" as a spiritually yearning monk who elicits a confession of profound doubt and self-loathing from Jesus as they discuss the nature of God's plan for the new Messiah.
ReplyDeleteYes, you could say his career was anything but "safe".....