Breaking Away (1979)

          An Oscar winner for Best Screenplay and a nominee for Best Picture, Breaking Away is one of the true gems of the late ’70s. While the film is inarguably a feel-good sports tale with a big race for a climax—which is to say that the story traffics in formulaic elements—Breaking Away explodes with so much in the way of memorable acting, characterization, and dialogue that the handicap of a preordained ending isn’t crippling. From start to finish, screenwriter Steve Tesich and director Peter Yates ground the story in specificity, separating Breaking Away from the pack of routine inspirational athletic pictures. Tesich, a Yugoslavian native whose family relocated to Indiana when he was a teenager, brings a unique outsider/insider viewpoint to this perspective on American culture; he captures the colorful textures of American idiom while evincing a sharp consciousness of class divisions. Further, the credible qualities of Tesich’s script enable the film’s four principal actors to sculpt distinct (and distinctly likable) personalities.

          Breaking Away’s protagonist is Dave (Dennis Christopher), a recent graduate from an Indiana high school who’s obsessed with a celebrated group of Italian bicyclists. Accordingly, even though Dave’s a corn-fed townie who spends his afternoons at a swimming hole with fellow high-school grads Cyril (Daniel Stern), Mike (Dennis Quaid), and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley)—none of whom have clear plans for the future—Dave emulates Italian culture by singing along to opera and speaking Italian at every opportunity. This causes great consternation for Dave’s working-class dad, Ray (Paul Dooley); Ray’s befuddled rants about his kid’s abandonment of U.S. culture are endlessly entertaining. As the story progresses, Dave gets romantically involved—under false pretenses—with a pretty Indiana University coed, Katherine (Robyn Douglass), and he also decides to enter an annual bike race called the “Little 500.” Dave’s nervy encroachment into the rarified collegiate world exacerbates tensions between upper-crust students and blue-collar locals. (The college kids pejoratively refer to locals as “cutters” because limestone mining is a venerable local industry.)

          You can pretty much guess where things go from here, and, indeed, the story features lots of oppressor-vs.-underdog standoffs. Yet the joy of Breaking Away is the journey, not the destination. For instance, the ensemble scenes involving Dave’s friends feature crisp dialogue, naturalistic acting, and a warm sense of camaraderie. On a deeper level, the sense of anxiety these young men express speaks volumes about the fraught lives of people restricted by limited choices. Christopher, Haley, Quaid, and Stern function as a cohesive unit, even though Christopher has more scenes than anyone else, and their enchanting work is complemented by great supporting turns from Dooley and Barbara Barrie (who plays Ray’s wife). The actors playing IU snobs don’t fare quite as well, since their roles lack equal measures of complexity, but everyone is effective in his or her way. Director Yates, who often made thrillers such as Bullitt (1968) and The Deep (1977), captures Tesich’s humanistic storyline in an unvarnished style that suits the material, and his filmmaking soars during the climactic bike race.

Breaking Away: OUTTA SIGHT

The Bell Jar (1979)

          A perennial favorite of adolescent women suffering fraught emotional lives, poetess Sylvia Plath’s sole novel, The Bell Jar, is a thinly veiled account of Plath’s real-life experiences as a young woman who fell from the heights of academic overachievement to the depths of electroshock therapy after emotional problems led to a series of suicide attempts. In the right hands, this book could be adapted into a bold and honest drama, providing a sensitive exploration into the mysteries of mental illness. In the wrong hands, as is the case here, The Bell Jar becomes fodder for cheap manipulation.

          Director Larry Peerce and his on- and offscreen muse, actress Marilyn Hassett, reteamed for this project after their success with The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) and The Other Side of the Mountain Part 2 (1978), which were about a real-life skier who became a paraplegic. Nothing in those trite films suggested Peerce or Hassett were predisposed toward investigating the intricacies of the human mind—and, sure enough, their take on The Bell Jar is sincere but numbingly superficial.

          Furthermore, the script, by Marjorie Kellogg, departs in significant ways from the source material, conjuring a gruesome climax that’s absent from the book; Kellogg also streamlines Plath’s narrative in a way that makes the lead character’s trip down the rabbit hole seem like a brief detour on the way to wellness. In short, the filmmakers blew a powerful opportunity to depict what it’s like to feel trapped in one’s own mind, instead focusing on the garish sensationalism of a beautiful young woman experimenting with sex before succumbing to personal demons.

          As in the book, Esther Greenwood (Hassett) is a gifted student who wins a summer internship at a ladies’ magazine, where she’s challenged by a tough editor (Barbara Barrie) to explore new literary frontiers. Meanwhile, Esther and her summer roommate, Southern party girl Doreen (Mary Louise Weller), fall into steamy situations like a threesome with an overbearing disc jockey (Robert Klein). Esther’s emotional troubles manifest suddenly, since the filmmakers fail to convey the textures of Esther’s inner life, so it’s hard to grasp why she’s so unhappy about a summer filled with excitement and opportunities.

          Eventually, Esther returns home to her needy mother (Julie Harris), and Esther’s anguish over falling off the fast track to success drives her to attempt self-destruction. This implied cause-and-effect relationship insults the source material and the subject matter, and the dubious interpretation is exacerbated by Hassett’s weak performance. Though Hassett clearly gave this project her all, she simply can’t summon the darkness needed to bring this character to life. Having said all that, The Bell Jar is quite compelling if one overlooks the gulf between what the movie should have been and what the movie actually is, simply because the underlying story is arresting and lurid. And, to the filmmakers’ credit, their contrived finale, which involves a disturbing reunion between Esther and her college pal Joan (Donna Mitchell), has a painful poetry the rest of the picture lacks.

The Bell Jar: FUNKY