Romancefest 3: Love Story

The first time I became aware of LOVE STORY was when I found the soundtrack LP in my parents' record collection. My friends' parents' collections consisted of The Beatles, the Stones, The Who and Zeppelin. My parents had the LOVE STORY soundtrack.

I guess the movie's famous enough that over the years I gathered by osmosis that it was incredibly sad and that the female lead ends up dead by the end. That's not really giving anything away, because the movie's first line of dialogue reveals that the female lead ends up dead at 25.

Ryan O'Neal stars as Oliver Barrett, a Harvard student who has the burden of a millionaire father and a building on campus named after his family. I know, it's pretty rough. He falls in love with Jenny Cavalleri (Ali McGraw) who we're continuously told is from the wrong side of the tracks and comes from more humble origins than Oliver, but if you ask me they both just look like a couple of twenty-something white kids. From their very first meeting, Jenny is busting Oliver's chops by referring to their class differences, calling him preppy, etc. How she can even tell just by looking at Oliver is beyond me, but maybe race relations between Ivy League white people were different back in 1970 than they are today. Then again, I suppose I've never really hung out among the Ivy League elites, so I suppose there's a possibility they really do care about each others' last names.

Anyway, I digress. The point is, they fall in love, Oliver's dad (Ray Milland from THE LOST WEEKEND) isn't happy and doesn't bless the union, and Oliver, already brimming with daddy issues, disowns his family to make his way in the world with Jenny. First they struggle, then Oliver lands a dream job, and finally Jenny gets sick and dies. The end.

Okay, you might sense I wasn't a big fan of this flick. But why? It kind of plays like ANNIE HALL, only without any of the laughs. I know what you're thinking -- why should there be laughs? It sounds tragic. Well, the entire first half of the movie rests on the hope that the audience comes to like (or even love) the main characters and believes in their romance. The film attempts to accomplish this mostly through quiet dialogue scenes, showing the progression of the relationship, and a lot of them are played for laughs. But, the writing just isn't there -- what's meant to be clever dialogue just comes off as a series of arguments and insults without much personality. To be fair, Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw do their damnedest with the material. What little likeability the characters have comes from the actors' reading of the characters, without much help from the screenwriter and novelist, Erich Segal.

One key relationship that is muddied by the screenplay is the one between Oliver and his father. Sure, Oliver's dad says one or two unforgivable things, but for the most part he comes off as fairly reasonable, and Oliver is built up to be such a whiny little bitch that the audience ends up unsure of what the movie is trying to say. The same could be said for the characterization of Jenny -- the screenplay loves to showcase her use of four letter words and her detached, brutally honest, often alienating approach to things. But, all that goes away the second the plot requires it to, only to return in the very next scene. So, which is it? Is Jenny an in-your-face bitch, or is it all an act? Do we care?

Probably the most likable character in the film is Jenny's father, played by John Marley, who you'll recognize from roughly ten billion movies. He comes off as likable because he's the only guy to cast a somewhat critical eye towards anything the sacred Oliver/Jenny couple does while still supporting them. He lets them have their dumb self-guided ceremony with the embarrassing vows, but he rolls his eyes the whole way through. The audience can relate, which is refreshing, because we can't relate to our leads.

Which leads me to an interesting observation: I'm three films into February, and all three feature a main couple who isn't very relatable and doesn't have great chemistry. The first two were good in spite of this, this third one -- not so much. Still, they're all known as great romance films. The other thing they all have in common? Death and tragedy.

Maybe at the time the film came out this material was refreshing. I don't know. When the movie ended, I thought I recalled a negative Roger Ebert review, so I pulled my 1987 movie guide down from the shelf and cracked it open to check it out. Sometimes it's more fun to look up Ebert reviews the old fashioned way even though they're all readily available at the Sun Times website. I was surprised to find a 4 star review. The review did trash the novel that was written around the same time as the screenplay, so I guess maybe that's why I remember it as negative.

Now, even though I didn't particularly like it, the movie still does its job. It's a tearjerker, and it jerks tears. I didn't cry, but despite the movie's flaws, you can't deny the power of the tragedy. Oliver's last visit to Jenny in the hospital is heart breaking not just because of the looming death, but because of Oliver's misplaced (but understandable) guilt and Jenny's accepting forgiveness. It's a dramatic example of the kind of compromises couples have to make all the time in order to remain a couple.

Aside from the tragic ending and the popular Francis Lai score, the movie is best known for the line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

My favorite line appears early in the story and seems more true to me than most of the rest of the movie:

"How can you see me and still love me?"

It's funny -- the people we have the deepest relationships with usually know us the best. That means they know all the bad parts and the good parts, the parts most other people don't see. And, even with the deep dark secrets, they love us anyway, and we love them. You'd think it would be the other way around, but it's not.