OVP: The Paper Chase (1973)

Film: The Paper Chase (1973)
Stars: Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wagner, John Houseman, Graham Beckel, James Naughton, Edward Herrmann, Craig Richard Nelson
Director: James Bridges
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-John Houseman*, Adapted Screenplay, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're going to do something weird this week, and I'm not entirely sure why.  I recently caught a double feature of two similarly-titled films from 1973, and thought "I had fun with the Best Actress theme week" so we're going to go through & profile five films from 1973 that were Oscar-nominated and that I had never seen until the past two weeks.  These films, other than the year they were made and their Oscar citations, have nothing in common-black-and-white, color, dramas, musicals-you name it, we're getting to it.  Today we're going to go with a film that, were it not for its Oscar nomination, would almost certainly have disappeared from memory.  Despite inspiring a long-running television series, The Paper Chase is not a movie anyone talks about today.  It's probably because the stars, unlike movies like American Graffiti from the era, didn't become famous (Timothy Bottoms went from starring in two big-name films to disappearing off the face of the earth by the mid-1970's).  Or it's because the movie is about as standard-fare as you can get for a coming-of-age college drama.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on James Hart (Bottoms), a first-year student at Harvard Law.  He starts rather casually, smart & confident, and is quickly taken down a peg on his first day by legendary law professor Charles Kingsfield (Houseman), a contracts professor who employs the Socratic method.  Hart becomes obsessed with impressing Kingsfield, insistent on gaining his approval.  The film oscillates between Hart's conversations in Kingsfield's class and his rather limited time outside of class with his study group (all assorted young, white men who are rank with privilege, but not necessarily humility and are realizing their stature will only go so far in a land where everyone is "the best"), and an on-again-off-again relationship with recent divorcee Susan (Wagner), who ends up being Kingsfield's daughter.  The movie continues with Hart finally realizing that he can find more happiness in Susan than trying to be something he's not, and impressing a man who cares so very little for him.

There's a lot of promise in the first twenty minutes of The Paper Chase.  Bottoms has the kind of bookish, Eddie Bauer-style handsomeness that would have only been en vogue in the early 1970's or right now(real talk-he looks a lot like the last guy I dated before the Covid outbreak), but he uses that for what it's worth initially-being disarming, and a strong, level-headed counter to the obtuse men in his study group, and Houseman's character has delicious promise initially.  However, it goes...nowhere.  The Paper Chase isn't a bad movie, but it's a movie with very little to say.

Bottoms' Hart becomes pretty much insufferable as the movie continues, his constant cries for attention to the clearly superior Susan becoming more annoying as he learns nothing from their encounters.  Seriously-by the end of the movie when you're supposed to be rooting for Hart, as a modern audience you're hoping that Susan dumps him and gets with someone who is her maturity equal.

Houseman's Kingsfield remains totally unknowable as well.  It's a neat trick-this is the sort of performance that I can totally get being obsessed with, but it goes nowhere.  We never understand anything about his humanity or his daughter, and so much of the film is him reprimanding & destroying the will of different students (pushing one to the brink of suicide) in an impossibly posh British accent.  I get the urge to give such a performance an Oscar, and Houseman certainly was a legend at that point (both for his early work with Orson Welles. eventually splitting irrevocably during a dispute over Citizen Kane, and for his long career in the theater), and this might have been one of those "old age" awards that the Academy randomly decides to bestow, but there's nothing there-there's no hint of anything but surface.  The same can be said for the other two nominations.  The script might give an intriguing look into the damned-to-hell world of Harvard Law School, but it leaves too much out, with the writers not understanding the characters they have written.  The Sound nomination is odd (like, why?)-the only explanation I can get is that they had a crush on John Williams score, but they'd already cited Williams three times in 1973-a fourth would have been a bit much for the Academy.  But this film really only has its Oscar nominations to thank for not slipping into complete obscurity, and none of them are particularly well-earned.