OVP: Afterglow (1997)

Film: Afterglow (1997)
Stars: Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Lara Flynn Boyle, Jonny Lee Miller
Director: Alan Rudolph
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Julie Christie)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each cinematic era has its quirks, and you have to remember them, as oftentimes what feels like a weird aesthetic choice in the present was very common sense at the time.  Take, for example, Afterglow, where now-pop culture punching bag Nick Nolte is playing an aging lothario, who somehow has women throwing themselves at him despite, from my vantage point, having virtually no  sex appeal whatsoever.  This might sound cruel, and quite frankly it probably is, but considering it's a crux of this particular picture, you have to let it go (anyone want to take bets on which current leading man will come across as bizarre as a romantic love interest in the future?).  This is, however, one of many suspensions of belief in the very-90's Afterglow which scored a precursor-less nomination for Best Actress with Julie Christie over Jessica Lange & Pam Grier.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, by Alan Rudolph, reads a lot like a chamber play.  We have four central characters in the form of two couples.  There's the older of these two pairs, Phyllis (an aging B-movie actress played by Christie) and Lucky Mann (yes, that's really the name they give him with not enough of a wink, played by Nolte), who is an aging handyman who regularly sleeps with the women for whom he works.  The younger couple is Marianne (Boyle), a woman in a sexless marriage who wants a baby with her husband Jeffrey (Miller), a suicidal corporate executive who is struggling with some sort of crisis-of-faith, and also really has a thing for older women.  The movie unfolds with the pairs starting to intermingle, with Lucky & Marianne starting an affair, while Jeffrey has an emotional fling with Phyllis.

The film would feel pretty standard-fare on the stage, and probably would work better there as it could handle the "too much plot" angle a bit better.  Here, though, they gloss over many of the essential details and perhaps should have worked better on where to focus the story.  For starters, with the exception of Christie, none of these roles really work in hindsight.  Even suspending belief for a moment, it's hard to picture Nolte's handyman as being something of a sex symbol.  He's haggard, not-particularly-attractive, and has little actual charm other than being able to carry out a series of double entendres with a woman shoving her bosom in his face.  That's literally it, and it's a problem in particular because none of this movie really works if you don't buy that multiple different women are madly in love with Nolte's Lucky Mann, and I never did.

But this is only part of the problem.  Even if you're like "to each his own," the younger couple is all kinds of messed up.  Boyle brings nothing to this role other than looking thin in a negligee, and her  marriage to Jeffrey is absurd-how the hell was he nice enough to her to begin with to have us buy that she actually would marry him; they're both attractive, but these two play so polar opposite and so bitter it's impossible to imagine them ever finding each other desirable.  There's not even a sign from either actor that this is a George-and-Martha, where time has made them bitter, but instead every indication they've always been like this.  Then there's Miller, who only brings a blank handsomeness to his Jeffrey, and clearly cannot connect to his scripted mother obsession.  Bennett doesn't help him at all by casting Christie, who even in her early 60's looks decades younger and is the sort of beautiful that only an aging movie star can be.  As an audience member, you think less when he's enamored with her that "he has a thing for older women" and more "yeah, I'd try for that too."  Miller's the weakest link here, which is a bad sign (as Nolte & Boyle are giving bad performances), mostly because you leave knowing virtually nothing about him except what's on the page, and there's a lot on the page left for him to handle (homophobia, loss of libido, issues with masculinity), but he can't connect with any of it.  It's am embarrassingly bad piece of work, and perhaps a sign of why his star never took off like his movie star wife Angelina Jolie's.

The sole redeeming factor is Christie, who is still able to manage endless movie memories with her face still the ethereal beauty of our Lara (fun fact-Boyle is named after Christie's character in Doctor Zhivago).  Here she's playing a B-movie actress and has some fun with the script, which is a juicy part.  She lands some of the absurd comedy of the role, and the scenes where she's struggling with her betrayal of Lucky years previously, and the deadness that resulted from her having to give up her daughter, are solid work.  But there's still a lot missing in this performance, which is kind of why I was shocked after watching the film that it landed the Oscar nomination over showier parts like Lange, Grier, or Julia Roberts big comeback in My Best Friend's Wedding.  You don't buy the film's climax, where she's upset with Lucky for breaking their agreement, perhaps because you never buy them as a couple who cares about one another, or understand why they never broke up.  Christie feels too detached in her scenes where she isn't pining for a time gone by or trying to charm a charmless Miller.  Some might market this as a diamond in the rough, but it's really more the vanilla sitting between the arsenic and cyanide-it's the only item on the menu that's not going to kill you.