Romancefest 2011: Picnic

PICNIC sucks.

It’s like a parody of a Tennessee Williams play – a bad parody. A parody that doesn’t even understand what it’s making fun of. Watching PICNIC is frustrating and sad. You can see star William Holden trying his damndest and finding absolutely nothing to work with. It comes off as pathetic, and I love William Holden. You can see Kim Novak sleep walking through the role and you don’t blame her. There’s simply no role to play.

Holden plays an ex-college football star who is aimlessly riding the rails on the bum with no goals in life. He ends up visiting his old fraternity brother (Cliff Robertson) looking for a job in a small Kansas town. His frat brother is dating the hottest chick in town (Kim Novak) who is sick of everyone only looking at her because she is pretty. Her mom (Betty Field) recommends she marry a rich guy. Her sister (Susan Strasberg) is on the verge of going to college, reads books, smokes cigarettes, dresses like a tomboy, and is generally the only person in town with any likable traits.

Holden’s welcomed into the group and goes to the big Labor Day picnic with everyone, ostensibly accompanying the bookworm sister. However, eventually, Novak and Holden are irresistibly drawn to each other and as the booze flows, controversy erupts. That’s right – this is one of those flicks that takes place over the course of one night when everyone gets more and more drunk, like CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF or WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. Only, this movie sucks and those ones are good.

The movie thinks it’s making a point about the frustrations of small town life for Midwestern women in the 1950s, but it’s insultingly shallow. We have a bunch of broads who are bored with their lives, and one, Novak, the hottest chick in town, who finally decides to do something about it, only the thing she does about it isn’t all that ground breaking: she runs off with a dude she likes. When Holden shows up in town, the first thing he does is take his shirt off so his pecs can glisten with sweat, and that knocks all the chicks over. They fall all over themselves welcoming him. Novak keeps bitching about how people only look at her while she’s pretty. Meanwhile she apparently falls in love with Holden because he’s pretty, and he apparently falls in love with her because she’s pretty. They have no chemistry and the script gives us no reason to understand why they’re drawn to each other, beyond lust, which would be fine, if the movie was honest, but it’s not – it hides behind some desperate attempt at a moral that’s not there.

The movie is laughably inept, especially for one that’s apparently held in high regard. The dialogue is either obvious or goes nowhere, the widescreen cinematography is hampered by a flat color palette that looks like Kodachrome at times, the middle of the movie is dragged down by an endless sequence of stupid shots of the dumb picnic everyone seems to be enjoying (looks like hell on Earth to me), and the music is hilariously overblown, never more so than when Rosalind Russell’s desperate aging schoolmarm character tears off William Holden’s shirt during the (apparently) famous dance scene.

Wikipedia claims after being a box office and critical hit in the 50s, PICNIC fell out of favor as attitudes changed with the times, only to come back into favor again when a restored version hit theaters in the 90s. I don’t know, it still seems pretty antiquated to me. Hell, WAY DOWN EAST was made in 1920, and it was definitely antiquated, but I think it might have even been a little more forward thinking than PICNIC. The era is really no excuse – there are plenty of movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s that have a lot more brains than this one.

Look, I don’t doubt the Midwest of the early 50s was a backwards place and being a woman there probably sucked. But the movie is so short-sighted it misses the fact that there’s a perfectly good woman already in it – the Susan Strasberg character. She keeps referring to herself as the ugly sister, and the other characters seem to basically agree. But she’s totally cute! And, she has personality – way more personality than the “hot” sister, Novak. In fact, I’d say Strasberg is at least as hot as Novak, if not more so. So, she’s equal there, has a better personality, and more prospects (college). But the movie is kind of ambivalent about her, and so is Holden. I mean it’s just as well, since it’d be depressing to see a girl like her go off with a clod like the one Holden plays, but still -- why? What’s the point? Why is the robot Novak the one we’re supposed to sympathize with? I don’t get it.

Maybe I read the movie all wrong. Maybe it’s supposed to be a tragedy about the dead end lives of Novak and Holden and how they’re deluding themselves. I think that’s a little too much to hope for, though. When Novak gets on the bus at the end of the flick, I don’t get the ironic “what do we do now?” feeling I get from a movie that’s smart, like THE GRADUATE. Instead, I get the feeling the movie actually believes Novak’s character is going somewhere.