After I watched this I read up on Roger Ebert’s review of it (as most tend to look up to him as some kind of golden standard). It was pretty hostile. Maybe unfairly so. But I can at least understand his points. At times I got the nagging sense that these characters all existed merely as functionaries to their idiosyncrasies. Nothing more. That the only reason their manic adventures had been captured on-screen was somewhat exploitative in the same way that horror movies attempt to kick up the shock with gallons of corn syrup and things that pop out and go “boo!” But…in the end…it’s hard, very hard, to stay mad at someone as lovable as Ruth Gordon.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, the word is romance. Except I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find another one in which a such relationship, between a well-to-do but lugubrious nineteen-year-old named Harold and a seventy-nine-year-old eccentric named Maude, is featured quite so prominently. Or seriously for that matter. Though it seems as though they play with this kind of dynamic in a cheap way , in truth, Hal Ashby (who’s brought life and heart to other humanist pieces as “The Last Detail” & “Being There”) dignifies their love. Yet what is surprising about his approval is that he both acknowledges the social awkwardness of their union and still manages to move beyond it, to a realm that's both mature and knowing.
Among the problems: I couldn’t get really over Harold’s acute obsession. His pasty skin, appropriately corpse-like and sallow, was distracting to say the least. His dialogue too was so limited that it was akin to making friends with a mute at first. Only I wasn’t able to practice ASL with him. But there is an obvious lovability to it, in spite of the disturbing and jaded qualities which dominate his personality. And again, Ashby is sure to point out to us that this is precisely the idea. Harold’s fascination doesn’t quite settle with us as firmly as I would have liked it to and Maude’s antics, while madcap, put me anxiously in the passenger seat beside her, praying that she’d ease up on the accelerator a bit as she makes her last turn around Dead Man’s Curve.
The point is that they don’t have to change. Harold doesn’t need to sit well with us. Not for the snobbish socialites who frequent his mother’s dinner parties or his psychiatrist or his pious padre. Nor for us. Not for anyone really. Overall, it is a boy-meets-girl story, but more so it’s a statement on individuality; a message that is wonderfully evoked by Cat Stevens’s enigmatic acoustics (trust me, you’ll recognize the best song of the film even if you’ve never heard him before…). It is rare to find a movie that is purely about pure love. Even movies about underdogs who get the girls or awkward women who catch up with the dreamy boy-toys of their dreams, there’s a level of falsity that often jolts us out of our pleasing little fantasies because, for the pragmatists, we know that the world doesn’t work that way. But this movie, which proudly boasts characters as opposed to clichés, manages to come very close to realizing that notion.
For Best Use: A.) Ironically, it’s dark but it’s not depressing. If you need to feel happy, watch this. B.) You liked a ‘certain’ few scenes from “Every Which Way But Loose”. C.) You like going to funerals.
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