COMMENTARY : Emotional Rescue in the ‘80s? Forget It

The imminent demise of the ‘80s drives home a sad truth: Rarely has a movie decade offered a more dismal roster of romantic encounters. Or, for that matter, a more dismal roster of films.

The social forces that have jimmied sex roles and altered the way men and women relate to each other, at home and in the workplace, have only occasionally made it into our movies. Instead, we’ve endured a decade of buddy-buddy confabs and teen-pics and space romps. Men are double and triple-teamed in an endless parade of cop/war/gizmo movies, while the women are addenda to the action. A film like “Top Gun” may have featured a love story between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, but it took third billing to the sonic booms and the camaraderie. It’s probably fair to say that most of the ardor in ‘80s movies took place between man and machine. Or between man and his mirror.

The rule-breaking tumult of contemporary romance doesn’t fit the usual Hollywood formulas. That’s one big reason why so few such romances have made it to the screen. Honeyed, homiletic, the standard Hollywood game plans don’t account for the disaffections and confusions and rage that have worked through our lives. Now we appear to have entered a movie era where parenting and baby-making are the reigning themes; romance has become strictly utilitarian. It’s as if the social contortions of the past several decades never happened.

But who wants to see movies about divorce, sexual confusion, the consequences of promiscuity? Aren’t these the sorts of things we go to the movies to forget ? Well, yes, sometimes. But the almost complete absence of these dramatic conflicts means that the movies have relinquished an opportunity to once again become vital in our lives. Television, which has been quicker (and slicker) in developing such themes, holds more immediacy for audiences now. This absence is more than an oversight. It’s an agenda--a means of promoting the (supposedly) kinder, gentler status quo. Even a film like “Parenthood,” which make a stab at “serious” romantic themes, culminates in a calculated blandness. We’re left with the image of babies being hoisted like balloons at a patriotic rally.

The fact that the movies have determinedly skipped over vast dramatic terrain has resulted in some weird concoctions and compromises. We don’t get the lash, only the backlash. For example, Hollywood may not have dealt with the strong yet romantically isolated career woman, but it did a good job of turning her into Freddy Krueger in “Fatal Attraction.”

The confluence of career and romantic allure, a contemporary subject one might imagine to be overripe with dramatic possibilities, amounts to a big zero in “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” a movie in which its bright, highly successful New York careerists talk nary a jot about what they do for a living. Instead, they quip a lot. “Working Girl” demonstrated with crowd-pleasing unconvincingness that Melanie Griffith’s Tess could be ditsy, addled by love, and yet still have the steel to be the stuff CEOs are made of. In “sex, lies and videotape,” James Spader’s dysfunctional video voyeur gets mystic-moral brownie points for not having sexual relations. He’s the modern sexual hero: all erotic portent without any threat of follow through.

In movie terms, one of the great losses in the relationship-less ‘80s has been the abandonment of strong roles for women. There has probably never been a time in movie history when so many terrific actresses have been so under-utilized. A particular lack is the near-disappearance of the screwball heroine. The subversion of strait-laced values embodied in Comedy has a tendency to set things straight and so, inevitably, romantic comedies venture into dramatic territory where rules of good taste don’t apply. This is why we’ve been seeing so few romantic comedies of consequence. It’s no accident that most of the best and most vital romantic movies have been those that openly recognized, and kidded, modern romantic confusions. “Tootsie,” “All of Me” and the Albert Brooks-Holly Hunter sequences in “Broadcast News,” were goofball admissions that something befuddling was going on in the sexual landscape. And, for that reason, they connected with audiences in ways the retro movies couldn’t. They had an edge.

But the films with the sharpest edge were those in which the confusions were the most riotous and uncensored. It’s practically a given that any movie about sex and romantic love will, if truthful, be explosive. There are just too many mine fields underfoot.

Alan Parker’s 1981 marital break-up movie “Shoot the Moon,” from a script by Bo Goldman, was a monumental, lacerating achievement; its characters burned from the binds they had so severely tied for themselves.

Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” (with its screwball heroine) and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” both of which came out in 1986, subverted the era’s feel-goodism. Both featured men who are drawn, siren-like, down the mean corridors of sex. The films were species of comedy. The joke they imparted was, “Don’t let the good times fool you.” And then there was Phil Kaufman’s unclassifiable “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a film that expressed sensuality and the ache of romantic longing with such stinging clarity that it left one dazed. (Unsurprisingly, none from this quartet was a commercial hit.)

The most fascinating and perplexing of modern romances, however, may be the ones that attempted to straddle the straitened present and the swoony past. Films as disparate as “Roxanne,” “Bull Durham,” “Tequila Sunrise,” and the current “The Fabulous Baker Boys” share a common trait: They are all contemporary romances that appear to have been spun in a time warp. They recall bygone eras, and the movie styles of those eras, yet they also seem unmistakably modern. Their then-and-now atmospheres are paradoxical and characteristic. They express both a yearning for a “simpler” time and the realization that those times are insufficiently complex to express modern longings.

“Roxanne,” a modern reworking by Steve Martin of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” is close to the antic, lyrical spirit of the ‘20s--the era of the arrant, chivalrous Buster Keaton comedies it so poignantly conjures up. Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” is closer to the Depression-era ‘30s, with its Cooperesque, mythic loner hero, Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis, paired to Susan Sarandon’s superannuated ‘60s flower child. (The collision of types is what gives the movie its sexual tang.) Robert Towne’s “Tequila Sunrise” has the glossiness of a ‘40s romantic thriller, but the sexual triangulations among the characters played by Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer, as the woman they both covet, seem avid, up-to-the-minute.

These romances move the pop emotions of their old-movie models into the ambiguous present: they convert pop feeling into pure feeling. Watching a film like Steve Kloves’ “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” which is about a piano lounge act of two brothers (Jeff and Beau Bridges) and the singer (Pfeiffer, again) who comes between them, it’s as if one were staring into a double image. The film expresses the dislocations of romantic yearnings in a way that feels exactly right for these times, but the look of the film is drizzly ‘40s noir .

What does it say about our movies that so many of our most gifted film makers, the ones with the tenderest sympathies for the present moment, are caught up in a then-and-now dream time? Clearly these film makers are in love with the movies; their films are tributes to the inseparableness of movie romance and real-life romance. The dream-time distancing is a way of formalizing the messiness of infatuation. But there’s more to their work. It’s as if these artists were declaring that the emotional hurts of modern romance can only be approached sideways; that a fierce, lush nostalgia for the past is a necessary poultice for the present pain.

They seem to be saying: This is how you make a romantic movie work for modern audiences. And they may be right.