American Gigolo

Many people look back at the 1980s through the soft focus lens of nostalgia. They think fondly of John Hughes’ teen movies or the music of The Police or television shows like Miami Vice or the novels of Stephen King. The people who grew up in that decade have attempted to pay tribute to that time in recent years with movies like the remake of It (2017), T.V. shows like Stranger Things and music by likes of Bruno Mars that invoke the era.

Nostalgia for the ‘80s has reached its saturation point and people tend to forget that there was a lot of awful stuff, too, like Reaganomics, the omnipresent threat of nuclear war, the explosion of Japanese fashion, T.V. shows like Alf, the proliferation of mindless synth pop, and the dominance of producer-driven Hollywood blockbusters.

One of the films that best encapsulated the superficial consumerism of the era was Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980). With its icy Eurotrash score by Giorgo Moroder, its expensive clothes by Giorgio Armani and luxurious cars like Mercedes and BMW, it established the stylistic template for popular culture that would be cemented by the equally influential Miami Vice show a few years later for the rest of the decade. Schrader’s film is often dismissed as a shallow exercise in style while failing to realize that its style is its substance. It is all surface, reflecting its materialistic protagonist.

Julian Kay (Richard Gere) is a high-end male escort specializing in wealthy women. He wears only the best suits and drives expensive cars. Schrader immediately immerses us in his world with a montage of him buying suits, driving his Mercedes and dropping off one of his clients all to the strains of Blondie’s “Call Me” while giving us a tour of boutique shops, expensive beachfront condos and affluent hotels – the playground of California’s rich elite.

His world is turned upside down when he meets a mysterious and lonely woman named Michelle (Lauren Hutton), the wife of a California state senator. They meet by chance and she becomes obsessed with him and he finds himself falling in love with her. His life gets even more complicated when he finds out that a woman he had a kinky one-off gig with in Palm Springs has been murdered. Julian soon becomes the prime suspect and begins to lose control of his life that he works so hard to maintain. He must figure out who set him up and why.

Schrader takes us through Julian’s process on getting ready for a job. He lays out his suits, opens his drawer of ties, then dress shirts and so on. It’s a ritual he’s done countless times and Richard Gere skillfully sells it, showing how all these clothes inform his character. In this case, the clothes truly make the man. For Julian it’s all about control. He prides himself in knowing what women want, providing them with a fantasy that plays into their desires. They both get something out of their transactions. They feel wanted and desired and he gets paid.

The impossibly handsome Gere is perfectly cast as the narcissistic Julian. He pays close attention to how he looks and dresses as they are integral aspects of his job. He has to look good for his clients. The actor certainly knows how to wear an Armani suit and has an engaging smile that exudes charm. Julian has his whole act down cold – a tilt of the head, a sly smile, the way he looks at someone, and the silky smooth voice are all parts of his arsenal of seductive techniques.

Gere had a terrific run of films starting in the late 1970s with a small but memorable part in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Days of Heaven (1978), and then into the 1980s with American Gigolo and Breathless (1983), playing fascinating, complex characters that weren’t always likable but always interesting to watch thanks to his incredible charisma.

Lauren Hutton is excellent as the rather enigmatic woman that takes a shine to Julian. One imagines her being an unhappy trophy wife who is expected to accompany her husband to all kinds of political functions with an interested expression plastered on her face. The actor conveys an impressive vulnerability like when Michelle seeks out Julian and asks for a date with him. She is frank with what she wants and Hutton is very good in this scene.

The intimacy between Julian and Michelle is more than just being physical with each other. It is the conversation they have after making love for the second time that is interesting as she tries to get him to reveal personal details. When she asks him where he’s from he says, “I’m not from anywhere…Anything worth knowing about me, you can learn by letting me make love to you.” Julian is a blank slate and this allows women to project their fantasies on him. He can be anything they want, which is why he’s so good at what he does. He does tell her why he only prefers older women, which is revealing in and of itself. He cares about pleasuring women. He puts their needs before his own, often to the detriment of his own pleasure.

It is also interesting how Schrader objectifies both men and women in American Gigolo. Initially, as we see Julian ply his trade as it were and it is the women that are shown naked but when he and Michelle make love the second time the camera lingers on their respective body parts equally and, in fact, afterwards we see more of his naked body than hers in one of the earliest examples of full frontal male nudity in a Hollywood film. As he demonstrated in this film and a few years later in Breathless, Gere is a fearless actor very comfortable with his own body.

This translates to the character as evident in a scene that occurs halfway through the film between Julian and Detective Sunday (Hector Elizondo) who is investigating the murder when the latter asks the former, “Doesn’t it ever bother you, Julian? What you do?” He replies, “Giving pleasure to women? I’m supposed to feel guilty about that?” When Sunday argues that what he does isn’t legal Julian says, “Legal is not always right.” He arrogantly says that some people are above the law and at this point he loses Sunday who sees things in simpler terms.

In 1977, Paul Schrader sold his screenplay for American Gigolo to Paramount Pictures. The next year John Travolta agreed to star and the filmmaker felt that the character of Julian Kay was a natural progression for the actor after his role in Saturday Night Fever (1977). Schrader had seen Travolta in a photo shoot for Variety where he was unshaven and in a white suit and felt that he was right for the part. The actor’s participation set the wheels in motion and the film was given a $10 million budget. The director auditioned four or five actors for the role of Michelle and liked Mia Farrow the best but when he tested her with Travolta, “she blew John off the screen. She made him look like an amateur, like a kid, not like the seducer.” As a result, he had to go with someone else and cast Lauren Hutton who had tested well with Travolta. Unfortunately, several things prompted the actor to drop out of the production: his mother had died, recent movie Moment by Moment (1978) was a commercial and critical failure, and he was anxious about the homosexual elements in the script. His departure left Schrader with two days to cast someone else.

After strong performances in high profile films that weren’t very profitable, Schrader wanted to cast Richard Gere in American Gigolo. Then head of Paramount Barry Diller didn’t want him, preferring Christopher Reeve instead. Schrader didn’t think Reeve was right for the part, as he was “too all-American, didn’t have that reptile mysteriousness.” Unbeknownst to the studio, Schrader offered the part to Gere on a Sunday, giving him only a few hours to decide. Once Gere agreed, Schrader left a note on Diller’s gate at his home. The executive was understandably upset as the director wasn’t authorized to do that. Schrader argued that Travolta was better for Urban Cowboy (1980), which the studio wanted to make and Diller allowed Gere to be American Gigolo.

Schrader said of Gere’s commitment to the role as opposed to Travolta: “In one day, Richard Gere asked all the questions that Travolta hadn’t asked in six months.” Gere was drawn to the project by Schrader’s approach to how it would be shot, “with very European techniques – the concept opened up: less a slice-of-life character study and something much more textured, stylistic.”

When Travolta dropped out, Schrader was tempted to go back to Farrow, however, he didn’t want to push his luck with the studio after they let him cast Gere but regrets not sticking with the actor: “Obviously I did everything I could and Lauren did everything she could to be as good as she could, but Mia just had stronger chops.”

When it came to putting Los Angeles on film, Schrader realized that it had been photographed countless times and wanted to bring a fresh perspective. He hired production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who had worked on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Giorgio Armani for the clothes, and Giorgio Moroder, who had scored Midnight Express (1978), to compose the film’s score. Scarfiotti, in particular, was an important collaborator as Schrader admired his visual style and the “idea that you can have a poetry of images rather than a poetry of words.” He put Scarfiotti in charge of the look of the film, which included production design, wardrobe, props, and cinematography.

Schrader picked Moroder to compose the film’s score as he liked the “alienated quality” of his music and “how propulsive it was, how sexual yet antiseptic. A sound for a new Los Angeles.” Moroder had originally wanted Steve Nick to sing the film’s theme song but she turned him down. He sent a demo to Blondie with the music and lyrics already written. Their album Parallel Lines was a massive hit but they had not been approached to contribute to a film. They admired both Moroder and Schrader’s work and agreed to do it. Debbie Harry didn’t like the lyrics and asked if she could write her own. She saw a rough cut of the film and the opening scene was in her mind along with Moroder’s music when the first lines came to her.

Clothes were also an important aspect of the production. According to Schrader, when it came to Julian, “the clothes and the character were one and the same. Remember, this is a guy who has to do a line of coke just so he can get dressed.” Armani had gotten involved at the suggestion of Travolta’s manager back when the actor was still attached to the project. The fashion designer was getting ready to go into an international non-couture line and the timing was right. When Gere came on board they kept all the clothes and tailored them for the actor.

To prepare for the role Schrader had Gere study actor Alain Delon in Purple Noon (1960), telling him, “Look at this guy, Alain Delon. He knows that the moment he enters a room, the room has become a better place.” According to the actor, the nudity wasn’t in the script, rather “it was just the natural process of making the movie.” He also didn’t know the character or his subculture very well: “I wanted to immerse myself in all of that and I had literally two weeks. So I just dove in.”

In retrospect, Schrader regrets that the homosexual aspects of the script were toned down to get studio backing: “At the time, we thought we were being brave, promoting this androgynous male entitlement. Now I look back, and we were being cowardly. It should’ve been much more gay. Then again, I probably got it made because Julian pretends not to be gay.”

At the time, American Gigolo received mostly negative reviews by several mainstream critics. In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Julian Kay is someone of absolutely no visible charm or interest, and though Mr. Gere is a handsome, able, low-key actor, he brings no charm or interest to the role. Then, too, the camera is not kind to him. It's not that he doesn't look fine, but that the camera seems unable to find any personality, like Dracula, whose image is unreflected by a mirror.” The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold wrote, “By the time it sputters to a fade out, Gigolo pays a heavy price for such sustained pretentiousness in tawdry circumstances. This movie invites a sort of sarcasm that destroyed Moment By Moment without ever generating as much naive entertainment value.” Roger Ebert, however, gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “The whole movie has a winning sadness about it; take away the story's sensational aspects and what you have is a study in loneliness. Richard Gere's performance is central to that effect, and some of his scenes – reading the morning paper, rearranging some paintings, selecting a wardrobe – underline the emptiness of his life.”

If the thriller genre elements don’t work as well as they should in American Gigolo it’s because the aspects of Julian’s profession and his developing relationship with Michelle are infinitely more interesting. It feels like Schrader was still trying things out and would be more successful at marrying these aspects in the film’s spiritual sequel The Walker (2007) decades later. American Gigolo is a fascinating fusion of the commercial sensibilities of slick movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Schrader’s art house inclinations (in particular, the films of Robert Bresson), establishing a stylistic template whose influence would be felt throughout the rest of the decade. Gone was the gritty, looseness of the 1970s, replaced by a slick sheen with style and spectacle over character development as epitomized by Bruckheimer produced blockbusters like Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986). American Gigolo has aged better than many of these films thanks to Schrader’s thematic preoccupations, most significantly a self-destructive protagonist that finds redemption, and Gere’s strong performance that anchors the film. It may seem like a happy ending inconsistent with the rest of the film but Julian has survived at a great cost to his reputation. Everything he is has been torn down and now he must find some way to rebuild his life.

NOTES

Anolik, Lili. “Call Me!” Airmail News Weekly. February 8, 2020.

Jones, Chris. “Richard Gere: On Guard.” BBC News. December 27, 2002.

Krager, Dave. “Richard Gere on Gere.” Entertainment Weekly. August 31, 2012.

Perry, Kevin EG. “The Style of American Gigolo.” GQ. March 2012.

Segell, Michael. “Richard Gere: Heart-Breaker.” Rolling Stone. March 6, 1980.

Breathless

When Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983), a fast and loose remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave Classic A bout de soufflé (1960), was released in theaters, it infuriated cineastes and film critics who couldn’t believe that the filmmaker had the audacity to remake such a highly regarded film with the likes of hunky actor Richard Gere and then-unknown actress Valerie Kaprisky, making her American debut. They couldn’t wrap their collective heads around McBride’s stylish reimaging of Godard’s film, updating it for the 1980s complete with ample nudity, numerous comic book references, and a rockabilly-heavy soundtrack that is as bold a cinematic statement today as it was back then.

Breathless adheres to A bout de soufflé’s basic premise as it chronicles the volatile love affair between a small-time crook and his foreigner girlfriend. Jesse (Gere) is a car thief who wants to scrape together enough money to take his French girlfriend Monica (Kaprisky) to Mexico. His life gets complicated after accidentally killing a police officer and the ensuing manhunt puts a considerable strain on his relationship with her.

We first meet Jesse emerging from a casino in Las Vegas bristling with smarm and charm in equal measure. He’s decked out in a powder blue suite and red ruffled tuxedo dress shirt, which establishes Breathless’ saturated, comic book color scheme. As Godard did with handheld camerawork and jump cuts in his version, McBride makes bold stylistic choices with his version as evident in the scene where Jesse drives back to Los Angeles in a stolen Porsche with Jerry Lee Lewis blasting away on the stereo. The entire scene is saturated with a red filter and utilizes the old school rear projection technique of a desert background. By doing this, the filmmaker is drawing attention to the artifice of the film itself. It’s almost as if the entire film is taking place in Jesse’s mind or, rather, we are seeing the world through his distinctive point-of-view.

Richard Gere plays Jesse as a grinning opportunist always looking for an angle to play, always hustling for money and treating the world as a playground to exploit. The actor fully commits to the role using his trademark charm to make an essentially unlikable character appealing through sheer force of will. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this is Gere at the apex of his physical beauty, which McBride shows off at every opportunity, including a startling amount of nudity at the time (Gere bares it all). What makes his performance so captivating is all the choices he makes, like the little dance move Jesse does while trying to hitch a ride. The actor wisely doesn’t try to ape Jean-Paul Belmondo’s brooding, Marlon Brando-esque performance in the original, opting for an energetic take that is so interesting to watch as, at times, Jesse is practically jumping out of his skin with vitality.

The actor does his best to instill some substance into a simple character that is comprised entirely of attitude and cocky swagger. The Silver Surfer interludes serve this purpose. Jesse is obsessed with the comic book, relating to the eponymous protagonist’s ruminations while roaming through the universe alone. There’s a crucial exchange partway through the film between Jesse and some kid at a newsstand about the Surfer with the former arguing, “You know why he stays? He stays because he likes it here on Earth. He wants to help the people out.” To which, the latter counters, “The Surfer’s nuts to hang around. He knows that life on Earth has no meaning – it’s chaos, it’s out of control! But he’s got a chance to break way. I mean, he’s plugged into the galaxy. He’s got the power cosmic! Only a jerk would stay when he could go.” Jesse clearly identifies with the Surfer and these words, coupled with a sobering reminder in the newspaper of the cop he killed has him reconsidering his decision to stick around but he does because of his love for Monica.

Valerie Kaprisky, with her stunning, fresh-faced sexiness, certainly looks the part of a beautiful UCLA student majoring in architecture, but her lack of English-speaking prowess is distracting. It looks like she’s concentrating too much on speaking correctly and not enough on acting or emoting. That being said, she has undeniable chemistry with Gere and they look great together.

Like A bout de soufflé showed off 1960s Paris, Breathless takes us on a tour through ‘80s L.A., including memorable stops at the murals in Venice Beach, Westwood Beach, the Pines, and, of course, downtown. McBride does a fantastic job conveying a sense of place – so much so that the city is practically another character.

McBride has a keen understanding of the power of cinema in sequences like the one where Jesse and Monica make out in a 1957 Thunderbird convertible to Link Wray’s “Jack the Ripper” on the soundtrack. The filmmaker understands that this is what makes cinema so exciting – the marriage of attractive actors, American iconography and the right song to go with it. He’s not afraid to mix things up, sliding in a few choice contemporary cuts, like a chase sequence scored to the fantastic song, “Message of Love” by the Pretenders.

Jim McBride was an independent filmmaker that struggled to find work after making Glen and Randa (1971). To make ends meet, he drove a taxicab and taught film at New York University grad school. After writing several screenplays that were never made, he moved to L.A. in the mid-1970s and “finally decided that the best approach for me was to present the studios with something that already existed.” He had been obsessed with Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé for 20 years and credited it with inspiring him to be a filmmaker.

As luck would have it, actor/screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, who had worked with McBride on David Holzman’s Diary (1967), knew Godard and met with him in L.A. while he was meeting with studios about backing a film. He asked Carson and McBride to drive him around the city for a week. At the end of it they told him about their idea to remake A bout de soufflé in L.A. Carson remembered, “A day later, when we went to pick him up, he picked up a paper napkin, and wrote on it, ‘You have the rights to Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard,’ and handed it to us.” With producer Martin Erlichman, McBride made a deal with Universal Pictures in 1978 with Gary Busey set to star. The deal fell through and McBride spent two years trying to get actors like Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Al Pacino interested. They weren’t because McBride wasn’t well-known enough and he found that “movie stars are terrified that if they make one wrong movie, it will destroy their careers. So it takes them forever to make a decision.”

McBride found a copy of the original film’s screenplay in a French magazine and translated it into English. Then, he and Carson worked from it, dropping and adding things, making it their own, and “by the end it was something very different from the original, for better or worse.” McBride has said that he wanted to make his version “more passionate and emotional, though the emotions are exaggerated in the way that Hollywood movies used to be.”

Universal dropped the project and Orion Pictures took it over. McBride approached Richard Gere who was also apprehensive about working with an unknown director until the former agreed to give the latter say in rewriting the script and casting actors and hiring the crew. While figuring out the approach to Jesse, Gere realized that the “root of him is music – music manifested by his moods. He uses the energy and emotions of the things around him to his own purposes.”

Erlichman spotted topless photographs of Valerie Kaprisky in French magazine Parish Match in June 1982 and asked her to read for the film even though she had only done some modeling with a few parts in French films. She felt that it went terribly but was called back the next day. Two days later, she was flown to L.A. for a screen test. It was a five-minute test that required her to be naked. To make her feel more comfortable, Gere also performed in the nude even though it wasn’t required. Kaprisky won the role and was told that Gere wanted her cast because she was someone he would like to make love to: “I think it shows in the movie. If you don’t really feel like doing it, it shows,” she said. Furthermore, the actress said of the film’s explicit love scenes, “We were not acting the love scenes. They were half real.”

The day after he finished shooting Breathless, Gere left to make Beyond the Limit (1983) in Mexico. During that time, Orion wanted to rush the release of Breathless, forcing McBride and his editor to make “very quick choices which weren’t necessarily the right choices,” Gere said. When the actor returned, he and McBride “sort of forced the situation,” and convinced the studio not to release the film, thereby allowing them to shoot new scenes and take more time on the editing.

Erlichman knew going in that Breathless would be a tough film to sell: “It was against the form of what has been accepted. There hasn’t been a major motion picture hit in years with a star who dies in the end. Also, anti-heroes aren’t big with your basic movie-going crowd, the 14-to 24-year olds.” The film made $4.4 million on its opening weekend. After two months, it grossed just over $22 million from an $8 million budget.

Breathless received negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “The result is a stylistic exercise without any genuine human concerns we can identify with – and yet, an exercise that does have a command of its style, is good-looking, fun to watch, and develops a certain morbid humor.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “I still don’t understand why Mr. McBride and Mr. Carson elected to do the film but, considering the more obvious possible pitfalls, they could have done a lot worse. That is meant to be praise.” The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold wrote, “Presumably, McBride and Carson convinced themselves that they were being true to the spirit of the original, but their notion of a star-crossed romance played out between lovers attracted to criminal extremes is fundamentally devoted to pandering to a certain star image—Richard Gere as hunky jailbait.” Finally, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr wrote, “McBride’s presentation of Richard Gere is frankly pornographic, perhaps the only way to handle this Victor Mature of the 80s; Valerie Kaprisky costars—meekly.”

Breathless is about being young and in love, not caring what anyone else thinks. Jesse lives for and in the moment. The problem is that no one else thinks that way, including Monica. He lives in another era, listening to 1950s music and stealing cars from that era while also reading ‘60s era Silver Surfer comic books. He doesn’t fit into the materialistic ‘80s and this is represented by the push and pull of the film’s style, utilizing Classic Hollywood techniques like rear projection with music video-like moments.

Breathless is an ode to impulsive, passionate young love but tempered with its fleeting nature. Monica and Jesse have a telling exchange partway through the film where she says, “I’d love to know what’s behind that face of yours. I stare at you and stare at you and can’t see anything,” to which replies, “What do you want to know? I’m from Earth, I’m a person, I love you.” For her, that’s not enough. As she tells him earlier, “You roll the dice too much,” and she’s right. She wants something more meaningful but he doesn’t let anyone get past the brash façade because his instinct is to mistrust everyone. This ultimately dooms their relationship.

  

SOURCES

Adams, Sam. “Interview: L.M. Kit Carson.” A.V. Club. August 19, 2011.

Farber, Stephen. “A Maverick and a Star Remake the Classic Breathless.” The New York Times. November 21, 1982.

Lovell, Glen. “McBride Bankable with Success of Breathless.” Boca Raton News. July 22, 1983.

Lubow, Arthur. “The Film is Over, but Valerie Kaprisky is Still Breathless Over Richard Gere.” People. May 30, 1983.

Moynihan, Maura and Andy Warhol. “Richard Gere: Beyond the Limit with the Star of The Cotton Club.” Interview. October 1983.

Stewart, Justin. “Interview: Jim McBride.” Film Comment. January 31, 2013.

Power

The rise of media consultants in the 1970s and 1980s changed the way political campaigns were run and how politicians were sold to the public. Make no mistake; this is an expensive practice with costs to run a successful campaign increasing every year. It is the job of the media consultant to create the most attractive image of their client to present to potential voters while creating a negative image of their opponent. This is nothing new, but back in 1986 when Sidney Lumet directed Power from a screenplay by David Himmelstein, the notion of a media consultant wielding influence was a novel concept. So novel that the film received mixed reviews by critics and was virtually ignored by audiences (it failed to recoup its modest $16 million budget). With hindsight one can see that the film was ahead of its time with a slick, charismatic protagonist that anticipated real-life counterparts like James Carville. Power asks some fascinating questions about the nature of power and influence and its effects. It also remains one of Lumet’s sorely under-appreciated films.


The consultant’s job is to create a positive image of the client and this is evident in the film’s opening scene where a South American political leader is making a speech to hundreds of people in a crowded town square. A bomb goes off and the man springs into action, rushing to the aid of a woman injured in the blast. He cradles her head in his arms, making him look like an instant hero until we see a camera crew documenting the entire event. Successful media consultant Pete St. John (Richard Gere) coaches the leader once he hustles him into a waiting van, telling him to wear his now bloody shirt for the rest of the campaign. Pete proceeds to tell the man what to say, how to act, and so on. We’re left wondering if the whole thing was staged or did he brilliantly capitalize on the moment?

Pete arrives back at his offices in the United States and they are a sleek, sterile chrome and metal affair with artificial lighting everywhere. He’s briefed on his upcoming meetings by Sydney Betterman (Kate Capshaw), his assistant and lover. We see Pete at work, juggling several clients at once. In New Mexico, he tries to coax a good performance out of a man by the name of Wallace Furman (Fritz Weaver) who’s running for governor. The clearly nervous man comes across as weak and hesitant on camera and so Pete gives him a brutally honest pep talk, laying it all out: “No offense but right now you look too soft to change a tire much less a state.” He tells Furman, “You’ve got align the perception with the reality.” Pete then proceeds to tell the man to go on a diet, start working out, change how he dresses, and get a tan.

This shocks the wealthy businessman who complains that Pete seems to be running his entire life, to which the consultant replies, “That means framing the overall strategy as well as deciding all the specifics.” And this includes the look of the campaign, what the bumper stickers will be, creating advertisements for print, radio and television, and analyzing polling numbers. Furman weakly counters that he wants to address some of his long-term plans, which Pete interrupts and tells him, “They’re not important. My job is to get you in. Once you’re there you do whatever your conscience tells you.” Richard Gere delivers this last line with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as this scene tells us everything we need to know about his character. Pete exudes the charisma and confidence of a man at the top of his profession and Gere nails it with a polished delivery that is one part used car salesman and one part gregarious con man.

Meanwhile, an unidentified Middle Eastern businessman is impressed with Pete’s work with the South American politician and how it undid a lot of work that his boss spent significant money on. He asks Arnold Billing (Denzel Washington), a rival public relations expert, to hire Pete for a job. He wants him to manage the campaign of a rich but little-known Ohio businessman Jerome Cade (J.T. Walsh) so that he’ll win a Senate seat. However, it is a spot that has been vacated by Pete’s friend Sam Hastings (E.G. Marshall) due to an unidentified illness so there is a possible conflict on interest. However, we’re never sure why Pete is so close to Hastings and why his decision to drop out affects him so much. Was he Pete’s mentor? Are they related? Pete seems to respect Hastings integrity but this seems rather odd for a man who is loyal only to money. We learn that Hastings may not be ill at all so why is he dropping out all of the sudden? It seems like Billing might have had something to do with it. He’s a young, up and comer who clearly has set his sights on taking down Pete.

And why not? Pete is one of those guys that travels in his own private jet. He wears expensive suits, has sex with his attractive assistant and has a roster of only the wealthiest clients. He’s arrogant and confident but Hastings is his lone weak spot, which Billing seeks to exploit. Pete also crosses paths with his boozy ex-mentor Wilfred Buckley (Gene Hackman) who has a memorable scene embarrassing himself with a drunken tirade on an airport runway. Yet he still shows glimmers of brilliance in a nice scene where he tells a grassroots underdog candidate (Matt Salinger) what he needs to do to make a difference.

J.T. Walsh is at his reptilian best as an ambitious wannabe politician with money to burn and ruthless ambition to spare. He seems like an ideal client for Pete – he’s filthy rich – however something doesn’t feel right. Billing works for him but in some kind of vague capacity. Cade appears to be simpatico with Hastings’ policies except for one: his pet project, which was solar energy. Is that the real reason the senator suddenly vacated his seat? When Pete attempts to dig deeper into Cade’s past, Billing comes after him, setting up an intriguing game of cat and mouse. Denzel Washington is impressive in an early role as an icy, amoral media consultant. With limited screen-time, he creates an imposing figure because Billing is such an enigma with a secret agenda. In some scenes, Washington sports a dead-eye look that is quite unnerving and in others he is all smiles but it isn’t meant to be reassuring, just creepy.

Power is a little long and a subplot involving Pete’s ex-wife (Julie Christie) feels like unnecessary padding and could have easily been removed. The film also skirts the edges of cutesy idealism, especially when a character at the film’s climax delivers an inspirational speech a la Network (1976), but fortunately Lumet pulls back to show that the political landscape hasn’t changed all that much.

In the 1980s, Gere was an A-list sex symbol thanks to An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) but he parlayed that clout to tackle a diverse roster of roles in films like American Gigolo (1980), Breathless (1983) and, of course, Power, which may be the best of the bunch. He plays a slick media spin-doctor that begins to grow a conscience and how one ruthless competitor starts to chip away at his confidence. Gere is able to get under Pete’s skin, past the surface details to reveal someone that questions what he’s doing. Over the course of the film Pete finds that he no longer delights in crushing his opponents. If anything, he experiences a crisis in confidence and Gere is quite excellent at conveying this dilemma. The actor is also good at turning his trademark boyish charm on and off while conveying just what a master manipulator Pete is. Yet, it is his relationship with Hastings that humanizes the character. Interestingly, Gere was not Lumet’s first choice to play Pete St. John. In fact, he had been unimpressed with the actor’s performances at the time. However, the two men met and talked over two days. Lumet said, “He was so intelligent, with such a strong sense of self, and he showed such a real desire to act again—to get back to real acting.”

They say knowledge is power and that is certainly true when it comes politics. Insider knowledge and the ability to get it and then use it is everything. That is what makes Pete so successful. However, when someone else can get it faster and use it just as ruthlessly then this creates a conflict. Power takes a fascinating look at media manipulation, like how a goofed take for a political ad can be tweaked in editing to actually make the subject look good. It’s all about perception and in that sense it is a lot like filmmaking. The film is more than just being about politics. Lumet also gradually incorporates elements of a thriller as Pete’s dealings with Billing and Cade begin to affect his personal and professional life.

Power originated from newspaper reporter David Himmelstein. He had previously worked as a speechwriter for former Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. He got the idea while attending Harvard as a Neiman Fellow. During election night in 1982, he saw a continuous loop of T.V. spots from candidates across the United States that a fellow student had assembled. Himmelstein found it fascinating because it made him realize that “the candidates were all basically interchangeable.” Furthermore, he realized that “the guys who had put together the spots were at least as significant, if not more significant, in the process.”

As early as 1984, Himmelstein began dabbling in screenwriting and when one of his scripts won a prize, he was noticed by Hollywood. His second script, entitled Power, was picked by Lumet as his next directing project but only after it underwent five rewrites. The veteran filmmaker was drawn to the project because he saw it as a commentary on “the mechanization of our lives, the loss of contact,” and how it was about our “terminally compromised political process.” He felt that “a candidate doesn’t talk to us anymore. They talk to us through someone else. These people are not corrupt. It’s much more frightening than that because we are not talking about evil people, we are talking about a system that is slowly evolving.”

Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out four and wrote, “But the movie itself seems to sense that it's going nowhere. The climax is a pointless, frustrating montage of images. It's a good montage, but it belongs somewhere in the middle of the movie; it states the problem, but not the solution or even the lack of a solution.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, Power is a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that – if it does anything at all, and I'm not sure it does – anesthetizes legitimate outrage at some of the things going on in our society.” The Toronto Star’s Ron Base wrote, “When everyone is in place, and such matters as conflict and plot begin to emerge, the movie groans into the sort of tiresome, preachy dialectic that Lumet is always being accused of making. This time his accusers are right.” In his review for the Washington Post, Paul Attanasio wrote, “What's genuinely odd about Power is how stale it gets whenever it tries to get at an emotion – everything human is alien to it. The movie only works when it's immersed in the very world it professes to despise.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson criticized Himmelstein’s script: “In writing his didactic melodrama of manipulation and image-making on a global scale, Himmelstein apparently felt his news—that today's political candidates are created not only equal but interchangeable—could stand on its own, without the need to beguile us with characterization or suspense.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott criticized the casting of Richard Gere: “Casting Gere as a callow but clever media consultant was a stroke of inspiration, but when Gere is required to find integrity and sincerity, the performance falls apart – integrity and sincerity from Richard Gere are like sweetness and light from Joan Collins.” The rare positive notice came from the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, who gave it three out of four stars, and wrote, “Holding everything together is that the film accurately fixes on our collective guilt about the superficial basis upon which most of us vote. There’s also Richard Gere’s taut portrayal of Pete St. John, a slick imagemaker who shapes his clients into just so much silly political putty … Gere is at his best in this sort of oily role.”

Looked at now, Power was incredibly prescient. At the time, the public knew little about political and media consultants but thanks to the highly acclaimed documentary The War Room (1993) and popular satirical comedy Wag the Dog (1997), people have a better idea of what these people do. In fact, the two successful media consultants that helped get Bill Clinton elected as president, as documented in The War Room, went on to become media darlings in their own right, appearing in T.V. and films. This kind of consultation has become a staple of political campaigning and is big business. With the right kind of spin and a media savvy candidate, the sky’s the limit. Lumet’s film shows the darker side, like how campaigning is all about image and very little about substance. Elections have been reduced to popularity contests. Complicated issues have been reduced to simplistic soundbites. In Power, politics are a dirty business (with an emphasis on business) and it shows in captivating detail just how dirty by taking us behind the scenes to show us the inner workings and the image creators. Lumet’s film is ripe for re-discovering as much of what it examines has not dated at all, making it more relevant than ever before.

SOURCES

Cunningham, Frank R. Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision. University Press of Kentucky. 2001.

Frederick, Arthur. “From Reporter to Screenwriting Success.” United Press International. January 24, 1986.

Friendly, David T. “Selling Power: Trying to Come Closer.” Los Angeles Times. January 26, 1986.

Unfaithful

Sometimes it’s frustrating being a Diane Lane fan. For an actress so talented, she appears in a lot of dreck. For every The Outsiders (1983) or A Walk on the Moon (1999), there are three or four Must Love Dogs (2005) type clunkers. Yet, she gamely plugs along, turning in consistently good performances in even the most routine films (Murder at 1600). With Unfaithful (2002), she finally found material that could challenge her by portraying a fascinatingly flawed character in a provocative film. It was a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1968 film, La femme infidele and was directed by Adrian Lyne, a filmmaker not afraid to court controversy by bringing a European sensibility to sex and sensuality in films like 9½ Weeks (1986), Indecent Proposal (1993), and Lolita (1997). With Unfaithful, he proposed a simple yet intriguing premise: why would a woman with a successful, loving husband and nice child threaten this security with an illicit affair with another man? While his film ultimately conforms to clichéd thriller conventions, Lane transcends the material with a career-best performance that garnered her all kinds of critical accolades and awards, chief among them an Academy Award nomination.

Constance Sumner (Diane Lane) has it all: Edward (Richard Gere), a handsome husband with a successful business in New York City, and Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), an adorable son. They live in a beautiful house on a lake outside of the city. Not to mention Connie has a body most women her age would kill for. The worst you could say about Connie and Edward’s marriage is that it’s gotten routine. They obviously still love each other and have that familiar shorthand that couples do after living together for years. For example, one morning she notices that he’s wearing a sweater inside out and lets him know before he goes off to work. We first see her in the midst of domesticity, doing the dishes and getting Charlie ready for school. She’s loving and supportive towards her husband and child.

Diane Lane and Richard Gere play this sequence well and are quite believable as a married couple by the way they interact with each other. Lyne inserts little details to reinforce their comfortable domesticity, like how Connie stops the dog bowl from moving around as their pet hungrily chows down on his food – it’s a move that looks like she’s done many times over the years. It also didn’t hurt that Lane and Gere were paired up previously in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984) and while they didn’t have much chemistry together on that film, they at least had something to build on.

One particularly windy, blustery day, Connie goes into the city to run some errands and literally runs into a young man (Olivier Martinez) carrying an armful of books. They both go sprawling and she ends up scraping her knees. He invites her up to his apartment so that she can tend to her wounds and call for a taxi. His offer isn’t difficult for her to accept. He’s gorgeous looking and has a sexy French accent. Paul is a book dealer who just happens to look like fashion model – of course he does or how else are the filmmakers going to explain Diane Lane cheating on someone like Richard Gere? Paul is aloof and accommodating but when Connie goes off to use his telephone, he checks her out. The camera adopts his point-of-view, slowly moving up her long legs to her face. No one can quite make a trenchcoat look sexy like Lane does in this scene.

Paul startles Connie by gently placing an ice pack on her knee and first physical contact is made. The look she gives him, a sly smile, makes you wonder if it is at this moment that she first thinks about having an affair with this man. The extremely windy day that starts off this scene is a harbinger, an ominous warning of how turbulent Connie’s life will become once she accepts this man’s invitation. After this alluring encounter, Connie comes home to reality: toys lying around, the dog roaming around and her son watching television. Later, she and Edward try to make love but are interrupted by Charlie – the ultimate mood killer.

Home alone during the day, she checks out the book Paul gave her and inside is his business card. On an impulsive whim, she takes the train into the city and calls him on a pay phone. Paul invites her over and Connie accepts, turned on by the attention she is getting from this mysterious, attractive young man. Once there, he slyly puts the moves on her, taking off her coat so that his fingers brush up against her neck. Lane is excellent in this scene as she conveys the excitement her character feels being with this man, the apprehension of being unsure of what she’s doing, and the inner turmoil as you can tell that she’s trying to decide whether to leave or stay. Ultimately, Connie leaves and visits her husband at work, giving him a present out of the guilt she feels for seeing Paul.

She visits him again and he excites her in the way he looks and touches her. Paul looks at Connie in a very seductive way that makes her feel wanted and desired – something that she doesn’t feel with Edward. She has a moment of conscience where she tells Paul that what they are doing is a mistake, to which he replies, “There’s no such thing as a mistake. There’s what you do and what you don’t do.” Connie leaves and then comes right back to get her coat. Before she can say anything, Paul embraces here and literally sweeps her off her feet. Lyne does an interesting thing here. Instead of just showing their subsequent love scene, he breaks it up by intercutting Connie’s train ride home, juxtaposing her emotional reaction to what she’s done with the act itself. As he demonstrated with 9½ Weeks, Lyne certainly knows how to capture the erotic intimacy of a sex scene.

Lyne shows Paul gently touching Connie’s body which is trembling in fear and excitement. The emotional turmoil that plays across Lane’s face is astounding as she displays a vulnerability that is quite raw. This gentle foreplay segues into something more primal as Connie attempts one more time to stop this and Paul tells her to hit him so that her aggressive passion that he knows lurks under her conflicted surface will take away her fear. It does as she pummels him and this gives way to passionate kisses as she hungrily devours him. This is intercut with Connie’s train ride home as she reflects on what she’s done. The range of emotions that play across her face as she replays it over in her mind is incredible to watch. She smiles to herself and her hand absently runs across her chest. Her mood darkens ever so gradually before lightening again as she smiles and then breaks out into a laugh. Finally, her face takes on a slightly sad expression. In only a few moments, she has run a whole gamut of emotions and pulls it off masterfully.

Edward has been married to Connie long enough to sense when something is off with her. Early on, he doesn’t have any definite indicator that something is amiss except for a possible small lie that she told him. But it’s enough for him to ask her one night if she loves him. Richard Gere asks Lane in such a way that your heart goes out to his character. He’s done nothing wrong while she’s off having an affair with another man.

Lyne orchestrates another fascinating montage that juxtaposes Connie spending time with Edward and her son at their home with her spending time with Paul in the city. She has fun with both men but in different ways. With Edward, she feels safe and secure in domesticity, and with Paul, she feels excited and passionate. Ultimately, she is looking for someone who can make her feel both safe and passionate. Connie’s affair emboldens her to take unnecessary risks, like kissing Paul in a public place and, by chance, one of the men (Chad Lowe) that works with her husband sees them.

As he demonstrated in both 9½ Weeks and Indecent Proposal, Lyne really knows how to photograph women and bring out their beauty. Unfaithful is no different as he does an incredible job of conveying Lane’s beauty, both naked (the scene where she takes a bath) and clothed (she can even make wearing a t-shirt and jeans look sexy). It is the way he lights her and the angles he uses that bring out her natural good looks. Lane has never looked or acted so well.

When Edward suspects that Connie isn’t being truthful with him yet again, he checks up on her excuse and finds out that she lied to him. To add further risk, when she’s in the city to meet Paul for another tryst, Connie runs into a friend of hers with a co-worker. Unable to ditch them, they all go out to lunch. Connie calls Paul and tells him what happened and he shows up. On the spur of the moment, they have sex in a bathroom stall. Lyne shows a playful side during this scene as he cuts between Paul and Connie’s brief but passionate bout of sex and Connie’s friend talking to her co-worker about how good Connie looks, which is rather obvious. As Edward’s suspicions grow, he decides to have Connie followed and what he finds out and how he acts on it, changes the entire complexion of the story and the film.

The longer the affair goes on, the more selfish Connie becomes and she loses sight of what’s important to her – Edward and Charlie. She has become addicted to her rendezvous with Paul as he consumes her thoughts to the point where she even gets jealous when she spots him with another woman. Connie becomes more desperate and her behavior more erratic as the affair continues.

Richard Gere has the thankless role of playing the spurned husband and he does a good job of eliciting sympathy early on. Edward may not be has handsome as Paul but, c’mon, it’s Richard Gere! The man has aged incredibly well and looks handsome no matter how many frumpy sweaters Lyne tries to put him in. Gere’s finest moment in Unfaithful is when his character confronts Paul. Edward starts off angry but Gere doesn’t chew up the scenery – it’s a slow burn as Edward questions Paul and then he gradually becomes unglued. Gere has to convey a wide spectrum of emotions in this scene and does so quite expertly. From that scene on, his character undergoes a very profound change and it is interesting to see how Gere plays it out.

After years of playing heroic roles in films like Judge Dredd (1995), Lane began to seek out projects that gave her the chance to play more flawed characters. In many respects, A Walk on the Moon was a warm-up for her role in Unfaithful. In that film, she played a 1960s housewife who gets caught up in the sexual revolution of the era and cheats on her husband with a good-looking traveling clothes salesman. Whereas her character’s motivation was clearer in that one, it is more ambiguous in Unfaithful. In fact, Lyne cast Lane based on her work in A Walk on the Moon in which he found her to be “very sympathetic and vulnerable.”

During the production, Lyne fought with 20th Century Fox over the source of the affair. Executives felt that there needed to be a reason while the director believed that chance played a large role. Early drafts of the screenplay featured the Sumners with a dysfunctional sexual relationship and the studio wanted them to have a bad marriage with no sex so there would be more sympathy for Connie. Lyne and Gere disagreed and the director had the script rewritten so that the Sumners basically had a good marriage. He said, “the whole point of the movie was the arbitrary nature of infidelity, the fact that you could be the happiest person on Earth and meet somebody over there, and suddenly your life’s changed.”

When it came time to assemble the crew for this film, Lyne asked director of photography Peter Biziou, with whom he had made 9½ Weeks, to shoot Unfaithful. After reading the screenplay, Biziou felt that the story lent itself to the classic 1.85:1 aspect ratio because there was often “two characters working together in frame.” During pre-production, Biziou, Lyne and production designer Brian Morris used a collection of still photographs as style references. These included photos from fashion magazines and shots by prominent photographers.

Initially, the story was set against snowy exteriors but this idea was rejected early on and the film was shot from March 22 to June 1, 2001 with Lyne shooting in sequence whenever possible. Much of the film was shot in Greenwich Village and Lyne ended up incorporating the city’s unpredictable weather. During the windstorm sequence where Connie first meets Paul, it rained and Lyne used the overcast weather conditions for the street scenes.

Lyne also preferred shooting in practical interiors on location so that, according to Biziou, the actors “feel an intimate sense of belonging at locations,” and use natural light as much as possible. A full four weeks of the schedule was dedicated to the scenes in Paul’s loft which was located on the third floor of a six-story building. Biziou often used two cameras for the film’s intimate sex scenes so as to spare the actors as little discomfort as possible. For example, Olivier Martinez wasn’t comfortable with doing nudity. So, to get him and Lane in the proper frame of mind for the sex scenes, Lyne showed them clips from Five Easy Pieces (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Fatal Attraction (1987). The two actors hadn’t met before filming and didn’t get to know each other well during the shoot, a calculated move on Lyne’s part so that their off-camera relationship mirrored the one of their characters.

Lyne tested his cast and crew’s endurance by using smoke in certain scenes to enhance the atmosphere. According to Biziou, “the texture it gives helps differentiate and separate various density levels of darkness farther back in frame.” Lyne used this technique on all of his films; however, on a set where cast and crew were filming 18-20 hour days, it got to be a bit much. Gere remembered, “Our throats were being blown out. We had a special doctor who was there almost all the time who was shooting people up with antibiotics for bronchial infections.” Lane even used an oxygen bottle for doses of fresh air between takes.

By and large Unfaithful received mixed reviews with Lane often getting singled out for praise for her brave, complex performance. Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-" rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Lane for giving, "the most urgent performance of her career, is a revelation. The play of lust, romance, degradation, and guilt on her face is the movie's real story." In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden praised the "taut, economical screenplay" that "digs into its characters' marrow (and into the perfectly selected details of domestic life) without wasting a word. That screenplay helps to ground a film whose visual imagination hovers somewhere between soap opera and a portentous pop surrealism.” USA Today gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and Mike Clark wrote, "Diane Lane also reaches a new career plateau with her best performance since 1979's A Little Romance.” The New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris wrote, "Ultimately Unfaithful is escapism in its purest form, and I am willing to experience it on that level, even though with all the unalloyed joy on display, there's almost no humor," and concluded that it was "one of the very few mainstream movies currently directed exclusively to grown-ups."

However, Roger Ebert wrote, "Instead of pumping up the plot with recycled manufactured thrills, it's content to contemplate two reasonably sane adults who get themselves into an almost insoluble dilemma." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "The only performer who manages to get inside her character is Lane. Whether it's her initial half-distrustful tentativeness, her later sensual abandon or her never-ending ambivalence, Lane's Constance seems to be actually living the role in a way no one else matches, a way we can all connect to." The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter felt that, "In the end, Unfaithful leaves you dispirited and grumpy: All that money spent, all that talent wasted, all that time gone forever, and for what? It's an ill movie that bloweth no man to good." Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, "Unfaithful shows what a powerful, sexy, smart filmmaker Lyne can be. It's a shame he substitutes the mechanics of suspense for the real suspense of what goes on between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.”

The last 25 minutes of Unfaithful slides dangerously into formulaic thriller territory, threatening to derail what had been up to that point an engrossing drama about an illicit affair. Why did Lyne feel the need to go in this direction? Did the studio influence his decision and mandate that he incorporate more commercial elements? Lane and Gere do their best to keep things on track and it’s a credit to their abilities that they keep us interested in what is happening to their characters as they transcend the material. In some respects, Unfaithful is a horror film for married couples or for people in some kind of long-term relationship as it shows the ramifications of cheating on one’s spouse. The tragic thing is that all of this could have been avoided if Connie and Edward just talked to each other openly and honestly about how they felt about things. After all, communication is the key to a successful marriage or any meaningful relationship. As Unfaithful shows, lies only complicate things and drive people apart. It’s a harsh lesson that Connie and Edward learn the hard way.

Also, check out Neil Fulwood's take over at his awesome blog, The Agitation of the Mind. Over at The Cooler, Jason Bellamy did a great job dissecting a pivotal scene from the film.

SOURCES

Bhattacharya, Sanjiv. “Memory Lane.” The Observer. May 26, 2002.

Kobel, Peter. “Smoke to Go with the Steam.” The New York Times. May 5, 2002.

Murray, Rebecca & Fred Topel. “Diane Lane Interview – Unfaithful.” About.com. 2002.

Murray, Rebecca & Fred Topel. “Olivier Martinez Interview – Unfaithful.” About.com. 2002.