Lovelace: soap opera – not that there’s anything wrong with that

Lovelace is a soap opera about a nice girl who meets the Wrong Guy and, before she knows it, she’s in a porn movie.  The movie is cleverly constructed.  First, it outlines the true story of the naive and troubled young woman soon-to-become porn star Linda Lovelace, culminating in the 70s porn megahit Deep Throat.  Doing so, it captures both the polyester period and the appeal of the then-novel campy humor in Deep Throat.   Then it fills in the blanks, completing the flashbacks of earlier scenes (and inserting new ones) so we see the relentless abuse of Lovelace by her Wrong Guy husband. His abuse of her – even pimping her out – is horrific.

It’s generally a well-acted film.  The appealing Amanda Seyfried works as Lovelace.   The most welcome aspect of the film is the goofy team of Hank Azaria, Bobby Cannavale and Chris Noth as the pornographers – they’re very funny and lighten the film.

As we would expect, Peter Sarsgaard makes for the most despicable movie husband since Lawrence Fishburne’s Ike Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It.  His sadistic sociopath is both smarmy and sadistic.

An unrecognizable Sharon Stone is excellent as the rigidly devout Catholic mother who insists that Lovelace return to her physically abusive husband and obey him (although, to be fair, the mom can’t imagine the depth of the abuse).

Robert Patrick is excellent as her terse father, especially in one particularly heartbreaking scene.  So many of Patrick’s roles are in action movies, so I’m glad that he got a chance to play a rigidly unemotional guy that is having deep emotions.

Some of the other casting is pretty random.  James Franco is completely wrong as Hugh Hefner.  Hef is cool only because of the Playboy Empire.  Franco is cool because he’s Franco.  Here Franco doesn’t swap out his own personal magnetism for the real Hef’s stiff reserve.  Less would have been more.  And, oddly, Chloe Sevigny receives a credit for what may be less than five seconds on-screen.

The real Linda Lovelace wasn’t particularly deep, and neither is Lovelace.  As well-crafted as it is – and with the superb performances of Skarsgaard, Stone, Patrick, Azaria, Cannavale and Noth – the central cautionary tale of Lovelace – the fall and redemption of a sympathetic character – nonetheless remains a not very profound soap opera.