OVP: A Little Romance (1979)

Film: A Little Romance (1979)
Stars: Laurence Olivier, Theolonious Bernard, Diane Lane, Arthur Hill, Sally Kellerman, Broderick Crawford
Director: George Roy Hill
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Score*, Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

There once was a time, ladies and gentlemen, before child-acting was a sea of precocious tots trying to become the next Jodie Foster or Dakota Fanning.  Children were less about being precocious and pre-naturally smart and relatable to adults, and more about just being children onscreen.  This was one of the first things I was struck by in George Roy Hill's A Little Romance.  Theolonious Bernard (who eschewed acting after this and now is a dentist in Western France) and Diane Lane (in her film debut-as you might be aware, she never took up dentistry) are admittedly precocious and incredibly smart, but there's still a sense of childlike wonder in their performances that occasionally becomes missing in today's films.  It's pitiable that most of the adult actors in the film (save for one) become cartoons, but Bernard and Lane's romance is actually quite sweet and enjoyable, lifting this film even when it doesn't know what to do with itself.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Daniel (Bernard), a cinema-loving French teenager who lives with his cabbie father as he begins to woo Lauren (Lane), an equally brilliant girl who is from a wealthy American family living in France.  Daniel frequently borrows lines from movies and tries to impress her with Humphrey Bogart and Robert Redford and is persistently charming despite being a massive dork, and she falls for it hook, line, and sinker.  One of the cuter aspects about this movie is that we don't see a struggle for them to fall for each other-they're pretty much perfect together, but like Romeo and Juliet (an analogy mentioned multiple times), they're pulled asunder by fate and in particular Lauren's snobbish mother.

The film's best moments are always the two of them together-it's sweet to watch them discover love and kissing and shared interests (as well as interests that are less shared), and the two have mad chemistry.  Lane would make such a huge splash after this film that she ended up on the cover of Time magazine, and while this film occasionally veers into the super cute, sometimes you need that in a movie, and I quite enjoyed it.

The adults in the film, however, leave something to be desired.  Arthur Hill as Lauren's stepfather seems to only be in his relationship to try and be a father, rather than to stick with Lauren's obnoxious and odious mother (Kellerman), who seems plucked out of a Disney movie stereotype.  Neither actor is particularly strong in their role (between this and MASH, Sally Kellerman is not getting a great reputation on this blog as an actress).  Worst of the major actors in the film though is Olivier, who is of course a legendary actor but is pretty dreadful as a sympathetic pickpocket whose accent always feels far too affected and whom Daniel is constantly jealous of despite foolishly acknowledging he's well into his seventies and that it's completely out of character for the teen.  Olivier minces, ticks, and is pretty much every angle of bad overacting in the movie, and though he's always had a penchant for scenery-chewing, this is probably the worst I've seen from him.  The only adult actor in the film who is any fun is Broderick Crawford, who plays a boorish version of himself, and has a great scene with Daniel where he argues over whether he punched Ward Bond or Richard Widmark in Sin Town (of course Daniel was right and it was Bond, not Widmark).

The film received a pair of Oscar nominations.  The first was for Adapted Screenplay, and here I give it a mixed review, mostly because the film's cute dialogue between the two children is juxtaposed against the really awful way that the adults are written and handled, which damn near ruins the movie (and quite frankly the Daniel/Lauren scenes work more due to chemistry than writing).  The second is Georges Delerue's score, which shockingly won the Oscar despite Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek and Henry Mancini's 10 (both considered more iconic today than A Little Romance).  The score is great, but to be honest I'm flummoxed as to how it was eligible for an Oscar considering that the best parts of the score (such as the bike ride scene) are actually by Vivaldi, not Delerue.  Normally when you seamlessly put a classical composer into your score that automatically disqualifies you (look at, say, Alexandre Desplat and The Tree of Life), and I suspect that more people were voting for Vivaldi than Delerue when he topped Mancini and Goldsmith.  As a result, I give this an okay, knowing that while the music fits the film well, it's doing a lot of borrowing from another source to get to that purpose; this is great for a composer (do whatever works best for your movie, and the classical nature of the score works with such romantic scenes), but when you're judging an original score Oscar it doesn't seem an appropriate nomination.

There you have it on A Little Romance-have you caught the film?  If so, what were your thoughts?  Do you think that Delerue's Oscar was inappropriate based on later readings of the score?  Do you find the film cute or cloying?  And what did you think of Olivier in one of his final film roles?  Share in the comments!