I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

Do people talk about Pretty Woman (1990) today? Yes. It’s probably one of the most widely seen and discussed films that I will review for this website. Everybody has heard of the concept, they all derisively snort at the idea of a hooker with a heart of gold and they all fall over themselves to talk about how debonair Richard Gere is here. 31 years later, it retains its cultural cache and it has entered into the ranks of iconic romantic comedies that non-cinephiles gladly sit through. I’m one of those oddballs who has never been a fan of it. As part of this project, I had hoped that I would be able to gain a new appreciation for it. That didn’t exactly work out.

It concerns prostitute Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) who helps corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), drive his manual transmission car from Hollywood Boulevard to his upmarket hotel. He ends up agreeing to employ her as a prostitute for one week. She is paid $3000 and he gives her money to purchase an expensive new wardrobe so that she will be able to impress his clients. The two begin to fall in love, much to his chagrin, and she softens him as he struggles to dismantle the company of a man who wants to continue operating it. With her new outfits and relationship with Lewis, Ward begins to gain confidence. She is also able to charm Lewis’s associates with her straightforward style of speaking and beauty. They face challenges when Lewis is forced to reveal to others that Ward is a prostitute and they begin to question the nature of their relationship. After Ward departs for fear of simply being an object to Lewis, he realises that he loves her. He wins her back when he performs a routine in which he acts like one of the ‘knights in shining armor’ that she had dreamt of as a child.

Whenever you talk about star making roles, you inevitably end up talking about Julia Roberts in this film. The smile, the blend of blue collar charm and regal sophistication and the cute little eyebrow raises, are all referenced. She became America’s Sweetheart as a result of her appearance in this film and it remains a career defining role for her. As much as she won an Academy Award for Erin Brockovich (2000), she is still the ultimate hooker with a heart of gold in the minds of many. This film is most remembered for turning her into a star and, paradoxically, her performance is one of my biggest issues with the film.

This is a tale as old as time and the trope of the fallen woman who regains her dignity by falling in love with a respectable man can be seen in countless films. This is why it is essential that Roberts puts a new spin on the role. She has to make us forget about the memories of Shirley MacLaine, Greta Garbo, and Janet Gaynor; all of whom played similar roles. She is meant to swing between carefree sensuality and occasional touches of melancholy that attempt to add depth to her thinly written role. On the page, Ward feels like every other fallen woman that we’ve ever seen. She didn’t want to go into her profession but difficult circumstances forced her into it. She hasn’t become particularly tough and hardened because of the life that she has spent on the streets and she retains a childlike innocence. This means that she can magically re-introduce joy and happiness into the life of the depressed but wealthy and powerful man who falls in love with her. She does this by being whimsical and uncouth in social situations where other snooty women lack her free spirited air. I know that the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ is overused but it definitely applies to Ward.

Roberts has to deal with all of the different contradictions that come with this character type and she fails to bring out the more disturbing undercurrents that lie beneath the irritating grin. She, and the script, fall back on the idea that Ward is all sunshine and rainbows. Most of the time, she’s just a small town girl who is dazzled by the opulent life that her new employer lives. We never skirt too close to considering whether she is attracted to Lewis because he can offer her a stable financial position rather than simply offering her love. There is also the rather offensive suggestion that Ward is ‘not like most prostitutes’ and they deserve to suffer in the streets and face abuse from clients while she spends the money of an immoral businessman. Her beauty and her cutesy behaviour are meant to serve as substitutes for a well developed personality and real character development.

She is adorable and quirky from the moment we meet her and regales our hero with stories of growing up in the Southern United States and having extensive knowledge of cars. This satisfies the fantasy that a lot of women seem to have about being seen as “Just one of the guys.” Ward is sexy, pretty, and traditionally feminine; but she’s also cooler than other chicks. Her exuberance as she exclaims “It corners like it’s on rails” is supposed to turn her into a touchingly naive figure. Unlike your average prostitute, she has time to chat to her client and isn’t solely focused on earning her living. It’s hard to say that she changes that much in the following 110 minutes. She retains all of the same Roberts-y tics and there are so many scenes in which Garry Marshall lovingly photographs her as she sticks her hand into a jewelry box or is visibly moved by the opera. Most of her transformation is superficial and she offers Lewis the sort of motivational proverbs that one would find in a greeting card.

We are assured that she has done something extraordinary for Lewis by having sex with him, acting like a five year old, and lecturing him for engaging in practices that are common for most businessmen. The film wants us to ignore the fact that she is using all of the money that he has earned from destroying businesses in the past to pay for her new wardrobe. She’s hardly stealing from the rich in order to help the poor. She spends money recklessly and becomes excessively materialistic but all of this is seen as empowering. When she hands over chunks of Lewis’s cash to the owners of stores on Rodeo Drive, we’re supposed to view this as a victory over snobbery. This is because she has embarrassed the shop assistants who could have worked with her, but she’s still buying into a system that disadvantages poor, uneducated people like her. This really is a Capitalist romance as two people fall in love because of their financial arrangement and it operates on the myth that some people are just more deserving of being wealthy.

The ‘bad’ prostitute that we are presented with, is Kit De Luca (Laura San Giacomo). She’s a drug addict and she’s less conventionally attractive than Roberts which naturally means that she deserves to fail in life. The virtuous Ward leaves her rent money, but De Luca spends it on drugs and attracts Ward’s ire. I was angered by the fact that De Luca, who displays some signs of being traumatized by the horrible treatment that she might have faced in her profession, is seen as trash for possessing more humanity than Ward. Our female lead is so unrealistically pure that she uses dental floss instead of taking drugs and is cultured enough to take an interest in opera. It seems like De Luca exists to bolster Ward’s image as the ideal hooker, who deserves to be saved from a difficult life. This only furthers the extremely conservative message that the film tries to send. Only a few people deserve to make it to the top and those who are weak and vulnerable don’t deserve any additional support if they make a few mistakes. They deserve to get screwed over by a system which benefits people like Lewis.

Speaking of Lewis, his character arc also seems strange. He’s written as an emotionally cold, ruthless businessman whose father issues have driven him to serve as a corporate raider. According to the screenwriter, corporate raiders are all immoral and we are meant to pity some elderly businessman when he learns that his business will be broken up. It is telling that more sympathy is offered to the privileged, elderly WASP who has lived a life of comfort, as opposed to the disadvantaged prostitute who is struggling with addiction. Ward’s great contribution to his life is convincing him to form a partnership with the old man so that he will be allowed to have some control over his business. None of the details in this exchange of power are ever very specific and, if Lewis can make the same amount of money by being less aggressive, why does he use aggressive tactics in the first place? The world of business in this film, is one in which there are clear divisions between what is good and what is bad. Businessmen are evil for no reason and could very easily adopt practices that make them more ethical without cutting down the amount of money that they have to spend on their mistresses. I wonder how she would react if he told her that she had to return all of those pretty dresses that he bought her?

Lewis is also painted as a knight in shining armor when he saves Ward from being sexually assaulted before choosing to have sex with her minutes later. Sexual assault is used purely as a plot device to make Lewis look heroic. It is supposed to establish the fact that, while he is paying Ward to have sex with him, he is chivalrous in the way he treats her. My disgust only increased when they decide to have sex in a semi-public area and shoo away employees who clearly know what’s about to happen. Maybe some interpreted this as a fun of example of the two of them having an exhibitionist streak? I found it difficult to enjoy this moment of intimacy because it followed so closely after a moment in which there was the potential for Ward to be seriously hurt. It also felt terribly contrived and I just couldn’t forgive the clumsy emotional manipulation that Marshall was trying to pull off.

All of this completely turned me against Pretty Woman and everybody involved in its production. The cheesy, unimaginative finale was salt in the wound as it only made a lot of the tropes seem more toxic. They finally agree to get together after a silly, improbable breakup in which she decides to leave him because she wants to live in a fairy tale. She reemphasizes the fact that she is a hypocrite because she has already happily accepted payment for serving as an escort and a sex partner. It seems a bit rich for her to turn around and act holier than thou about the concept of serving as Lewis’s permanent mistress. If the film had treated this like a business move and presented Ward as a shrewd negotiator, I might have been more engaged. Instead of taking a cynical angle on her decision, it acts as though she is a youthful, inexperienced ingenue who still has the naïveté to entertain frivolous romantic notions.

His grand romantic gesture to get her back ends up seeming pathetic and you despise these two fools for being so self satisfied. He asks her “So what happens after he climbs and rescues her?” and she smugly responds with “She rescues him right back.” Firstly, this feels like the filmmakers trying to cover their bases by arguing that they have put a feminist spin on the traditional Cinderella story. Even though Ward is bought by Lewis and does almost nothing beyond having sex with him and buying fancy clothes, she briefly claims that she has played an equal role in supporting him and changing his life. They don’t bother to show her actually doing anything of importance for him and that had me throwing my hands up in the air. It also feels like an attempt to make the ladies in the audience believe that it is enough to be attractive. You don’t have to contribute anything to a relationship and your partner will lavish money, gifts, and affection on you for doing almost nothing. This isn’t true and it tells women that men have no interest in them beyond the way that they look.

I also bristle against the idea that this is a comedy because it didn’t elicit any laughs. Most of the humour is meant to come from Roberts raising her eyebrows in an exaggerated manner. We’re supposed to laugh as she shocks high society with her gaucheness and disregard for manners, but it all feels like a retread of Pygmalion (1938). That was a biting satire about how ridiculous the class structure is and how pompous and hypocritical members of the upper class can be. This wants to have it both ways as we are meant to look down our noses at the elderly women who sneer at Ward but also fetishise the idea of powerful Daddy Warbucks figure who can make all of her problems go away with money. None of the jokes are sophisticated deconstructions of societal norms and it isn’t enough to have Roberts nervously glancing at rich people in order to make some larger point about this issue. It backs away from saying anything that could be interpreted as controversial and I can just imagine George Bernard Shaw rolling in his grave.

For all of these reasons, it should not have been on this list. It fits into the romance genre but it has some disgusting ideas to impart about what you can get out of a relationship and how men and women view each other. It’s misogynistic in its treatment of female characters who are not Ward and I can’t believe that it has been embraced as a classic by so many young women. It made it onto the list because of people like that, those who were willing to look past the horrible values that the makers of the film were espousing. In their minds this was just an opportunity to see Roberts at the height of their beauty. I assume this was a film that some of them had actually seen. I’m not surprised by its placement on the list as it is not seen as a respectable piece of cinema. They sheepishly placed it at 21 and hoped that the populists would cheer them on for picking something accessible while the true cinephiles wouldn’t get too incensed over it making the list. Their attention would be diverted by the presence of a sapfest like Ghost (1990). Personally, I am turned off by the fact that it made this list and I question the sanity of the people who voted for it.

I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

Reds (1981) is a film about members of the radical chic, people who possess the fashionable affectation of left wing views, and Warren Beatty gets away with criticising their approach to philosophy while also romanticising an era in which public intellectuals could flourish. He ends up with too much on his plate as he tries to turn this into a romantic epic, the tale of an idealist having his views crushed, the story of the internal conflicts within a tight knit group of Communists and the saga of a woman going through a journey of self discovery.

The film really succeeds at focusing on some of these topics but falls short in others and that turns Reds into an uneven film. There were times when I was thoroughly engrossed and admired Beatty’s gutsiness in including lengthy scenes in which different characters simply engage in debates on a variety subjects. There were other times when I felt as though he was aiming for undeserved narrative sweep and over-stretching this story when it would have functioned better as a small scale study of a specific community.

The film concerns Communist journalist John “Jack” Reed, Warren Beatty, falls in love with uptight housewife Louise Bryant, Diane Keaton, who pursues her aspiration of becoming a feminist writer after leaving her husband for him. Bryant struggles to establish herself in Reed’s circles and becomes frustrated by his constant absences as he travels overseas to visit other communists and tries to establish a stronger movement in the United States. Her efforts to ingratiate herself with figures like Emma Goldman, Maureen Stapleton, are not successful. She has a passionate affair with playwright Eugene O’Neill, Jack Nicholson, when Reed is gone for a long period of time. When he returns the two reaffirm their love for one another and are married. When Russia becomes a Communist nation the two travel to the country full of optimism and hope but Bryant is disillusioned by the horrors she witnesses. Reed becomes a fervent supporter of the regime and becomes trapped in Russia, being imprisoned before being let go in order to unsuccessfully lobby for American interest in communism. Bryant journeys to Russia and reunites with Reed but he tragically dies a short time afterward.

This film flourishes when it is focusing on the supporting characters. Reed and Bryant are viewed through rose tinted glasses and Beatty seems to feel too much affection for the characters to really pick away at them. It almost feels like Beatty has crafted his own persona onto the character and can’t separate the two things. The parallels are clear as Reed is a gregarious womanizer with a successful career and a serious interest in liberal politics. Perhaps more importantly, Beatty was also an idealistic dreamer who wanted to mount massive productions that most mainstream studios didn’t want to touch. There were times when his skill did not match his ambition and he was unable to overcome obstacles that caused a film like Ishtar (1987) to fail. I don’t necessarily think that it was bad that Beatty was trying to comment on his own personality while also considering Reed’s life but he doesn’t provide us with enough self reflexivity. He turns Reed into a tragic hero with a few flaws that make him loveable and we always feel as though we are looking at him through glass.

Bryant gets slightly more room to breathe and isn’t placed on a pedestal in the same way that Reed is and yet Beatty cast the wrong actress in this role.

Whenever I realize that Keaton is appearing in a film, I begin to feel uneasy. This is because she has appeared in a lot of truly dreadful fare, such as Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and Town & Country (2001). I do not like her when she is playing a quirky, airy fairy ditz who just has to sing in one long, self indulgent scene (see: Annie Hall (1977) and this is the character that she seems to play most of the time. I find it terribly annoying when she gazes into the camera and expects me to find her adorable as she tilts her head to the side or says something like “La-Di-Da” but I can’t help but feel intense annoyance whenever she does something like this. I am especially irritated because I do think that Keaton has been marvelous on a select few occasions and I find it mind-boggling that she has committed herself to essentially playing one character when she appears to have range. Why can’t she bring out the fiery pugnacity that she possessed in Shoot the Moon (1982), more often? It seems like she has been stuck in a groove for almost four decades and it drives me crazy.

I say all of this because I don’t think that Keaton is on good form in this film. She herself has admitted that she didn’t feel that she had a firm handle on the character and her uncertainty is obvious throughout. She falters in moments that are pivotal in Bryant’s development and we feel as though her character arc has been truncated in some ways. She seems eager to hit emotional highs and in the moments in between she relaxes into the pose of the type of cool, detached cynic who might have appeared in the pages of Vogue magazine. There is always the feeling that she is playing dress up and is not at home in this time period. You always feel as though she’s about to talk about the release of the latest Ingmar Bergman film or head to some dingy bar in order to pick up a sexual partner. Shirley Ann Russell could only do so much when it came to costuming and Keaton never quite adapts to the surroundings that she is working with. It feels like she is trying to play one of the celebrity radicals of the 1970s, Jane Fonda or Vanessa Redgrave, for example, instead of trying to evoke the memory of a forward thinking woman in the late 1910s. I could never shake the feeling that she was entirely out of place and this prevented me from fully investing in Bryant’s dramatic growth over the course of 195 minutes.

For these reasons, I was never all that swept up in Bryant and Reed’s love story, even though it is meant to serve as the center of this story. It finds a far more compelling focus of attention in the form of the arguments that the friends of the main characters have. Individual supporting characters don’t get that much screen time but together, they do leave quite an impression.

One of these supporting characters is O’Neill. He is played by an insanely charismatic Nicholson, who plays O’Neill as an aloof but undeniably talented playwright. This is a successful example of somebody deconstructing their own persona. Nicholson suggests that his gruffness and standoffish attitude is just a front to cover up the fact that he is self conscious and afraid of people who have an interest in getting under his skin. Nicholson is as raffish as ever and his trademark charm is on display but it rings hollow in a way. There is always the sense that O’Neill is not passionately invested in the Communist cause and lives a life separate from this social circle. We are never fully allowed to understand O’Neill and Nicholson is willing to play him as somebody who is enigmatic but impossible to truly get close to.

His catlike grin makes an occasional appearance and we see him gruffly ordering people around but there is always something threatening about him. All of the Communists are so earnest about their beliefs and genuinely think that they would be willing to lay down their lives for the cause. They lack self awareness and imagine themselves as glorious freedom fighters who have a lot of knowledge about what is happening in the newly formed Soviet Union. In reality, they are all sheltered and prefer having pie in the sky discussions about hypothetical situations rather than confronting reality. They live in a bubble where they can argue with their friends without facing real consequences but they convince themselves that they are as important to the movement as somebody who is actually creating change in the Soviet Union. This blinkered worldview does limit their effectiveness but it is fascinating to see them reacting to somebody who is self aware.

O’Neill doesn’t seem to have as many pretensions as they do, about his work having an impact on audiences and shifting the political views of the masses. He stages plays that are about the issues that the common faces but we don’t hear him giving grand speeches about his influence. This is not to say that the film entirely lets him off the hook for being so standoffish and detached. The other Communists are pompous, think too highly of themselves, and look down on the people that they claim to want to help but they have the confidence to be honest about their beliefs. Even if they are living in an echo chamber, they have a willingness to debate and put themselves in vulnerable positions in a way that he doesn’t. He is more honest in his self-assessment but he also uses his self deprecating manner to avoid going out on a limb when discussing his beliefs or the themes in his works.

Beatty is aiming to mythologize these people but he is also comfortable with satirizing them and recognizing their limitations as people and public intellectuals. He has more distance from them and Goldman is a fierce wit as well as b being a shameless self promoter. We cheer as she needles Reed about his habit of picking up attractive young women, introducing them to radical beliefs, and then dropping them. It’s nice to see somebody putting up some resistance to him and who better than the acid tongued Stapleton to knock him down a few pegs? We see her chewing her way through dialogue that asks her to tie the opium trade to political elections in the East Coast and Goldman does it all with the assuredness of somebody who sees themselves as a brilliant sage. You can always tell that she is conscious of the manner in which she lectures the people around her, the upturned nose and pursed lips suggest a fearsome belligerence. She is seen urging one of her comrades to publicize her exploits and tell all of the newspapers about her achievements and this could have easily been a moment in which she turned into a villain. Fortunately, she is not punished for being an attention whore. It becomes clear that she isn’t the idealized version of a freedom fighter that Reed is but we can also mourn the era in which exceptional thinkers could flourish.

Back in 1981, the quality of public intellectualism had significantly declined and people were being exposed to talkback radio and trash television in a way that they hadn’t been before. It became easier to consume infotainment and people were able to watch fluff pieces and tell themselves that they were being educated. Daytime talk shows would aim to spark outrage in audiences by bringing on guests that held controversial views. Unfortunately, these guests were often uneducated and so obviously idiotic that it made it easy for people to yell at the screen instead of really listening to what they were saying and considering a different perspective. People like Goldman were abrasive but they did have an ability to write with passion and real interest in the subjects that they were exploring. We can tell that she is serious about this topic as she moves through her points about Anarchism. You would never have heard somebody like L. Brent Bozell Jr., a speechwriter for Joseph McCarthy and pro-life political commentator, thoughtfully expressing his beliefs rather than ramming them down people’s throats without evidence to support his arguments.

We are also provided with a nuanced view of the break between American liberals and the leaders of the Soviet Union. We see them entering into the country with stars in their eyes as they believe that this is going to be the magical utopia that they have all imagined together. There is a long stretch where they are trying to ignore the harsh realities that they are constantly faced with. Part of this is their own pride as they don’t want to admit that they backed the wrong horse or that they had very little real understanding of the situation in the Soviet Union before visiting Russia. Most of them have publicly spoken out about their belief that being in the Soviet Union will be preferable to being in the United States and to return home and admit that they were wrong, would be humiliating.

This slow realization is painful for them and this was one of the times when I was happy that this was an epic. We do get to spend a lot of time with these characters as they marinate in the fact that their illusions have been shattered. They have to practice what they preach, for once, and this is an eye-opening experience for a lot of them. After spending years and years preaching about the nobility of the common man whilst living like upper middle-class academics themselves, they come to understand that there is nothing that romantic about being poor and working long hours to earn low wages. That sense of them being slowly but surely broken down, could not have been achieved in a 90-minute feature that was working with a more limited scope.

The cinematography is the other major virtue that this film has behind it. Vittorio Storaro is a legend for a reason and he keeps the audience from fully disconnecting in scenes where they could be overwhelmed by the sheer size of this production. There do have to be massive crowd scenes in which the main characters blend in with other passionate Communists but Storaro is able to use depth of field to make us feel a sense of intimacy with the protagonists in these scenes. Beatty will hit us with a sweeping wide shot but Storaro will help us find common ground by returning us to the people that we are familiar with. He is able to make it appear as though they aren’t just engulfed in this giant gathering and they appear to stand out from the crowd. We also get all of the beauty and the spectacle that we expect from this sort of epic. The imagery of Reed making his way through the snow on his pushcart was dizzyingly romantic and you see why people chased the dreams that people like Reed had.

At the end of the day, despite all of its virtues, I am meant to be dealing with this film as a romance and I do not believe that it succeeds in that regard. Reed and Bryant remain the two least interesting characters in this film and whenever we are pummelled with beatific close-ups of Keaton, I began to yawn a little bit. Even though they were romantically involved in real life, it isn’t like the chemistry explodes off the screen. Too often, Beatty has that vacant facial expression in scenes in which he should be convincing us that he feels some great yearning for his love interest. As for Keaton, she seems so concerned with appearing like she has some idea of what she is doing, that she almost seems to be separated from Beatty when they are on screen together. They might as well have been in different rooms when they delivered all of their dialogue as there is very little warmth and camaraderie between them at the best of times.

I would never recommend this to somebody based on the romance that is supposedly at its center. I’d rave about Nicholson, the extraordinary color palette, and some of the thorny ideas that it tangles with. It is a shame that I have to end on a negative note with this article because there is so much to appreciate here. I wouldn’t dissuade you from watching it and yet I just can’t see how voters thought it was appropriate to put the film on this specific list.