Acts Of Love (1996)

In light of my recent revisitation of The Mother & The Whore, here's something I wrote in 2020 (hence the WAP reference) and never got round to posting on another film which expresses scepticism about the Sixies and similarly concludes in favour of traditional marriage. But it is not a similar film. 

Elegaic, quiet, gentle, Acts Of Love is a film about life’s disappointments which, it might be said, embodies its theme too well. It’s beautifully written, constructed and acted and I’ve seen it many times but every time I do, even if it’s convincing in its parts, I’m yet to be convinced either by its anti-60s bias or its reliance on that bias to tell us how true love works. This flaw doesn’t lie in the initial premise. We lay our scene, by implication, in the late 60s or early 70s in what looks like Minnesota, specifically a farming town, where Joseph, a school teacher with emotional baggage and a bad leg (played by Dennis Hopper), has a hot fling with Catherine, a 17-year old blonde from his class (played by Amy Locane, aged 26). Sold. End the film there. But then a lot of moping around begins, along with our doubts. Here we have a movie that could have been Cardi B and ends up as a bit of a crumpled MAGA cap.

Countless films have stood upon the brink of the generation gap and tremulously gazed downwards but this one stands at a pretty acute angle. The older generation is repressed, uptight, frustrated, and feels forgotten and eclipsed; the younger is free, wild, irresponsible, sexually liberated, and nurses its private pain in a haze of hedonism. Joseph, the awkward old guy who makes a fool of himself, tries to join in his own personal summer of love, in the brief hope it might mend his misery before – and here the contrivance comes in – he gets reassured that his dreary life’s not so bad and the girl just wanted to mend her own misery through him all along. To get us to that point takes a couple of hours as we watch Joseph dither between two options, one of which is obviously much better than the other: punch above his weight with sexy Catherine, all new and now and nuts, or settle for his six-year girlfriend and life-long love, the well-worn and (let's be honest) dull Rosalee. He chooses Rosalee; Catherine was just the whoopsie he needed to, deep breath, psycho-dramatically exorcise the ghost of his jealousy over his martyred war-hero brother who Rosalee married first (Joseph already loved her when they were teenagers, etc). Catherine handles the break-up quite well by burning her pet horse to death. “I thought you would save him” she says, unsubtly – alas, Joseph can’t save him/her. So a grown man and an emotionally damaged girl stupidly use each other as emotional crutches before they’re forced back to their stupid lives.  Well, worse premises for films exist.

All of which is placed in service to a nobler cause, a tender tribute to the unfussy lives of small town America when it’s not disrupted by crazy bitches from the city. And the film goes about this with its own absence of any showy technique. It opts (a bit sententiously) for a modestly naturalistic mode, understated acting, and a classical simplicity, in a kind of aesthetic solidarity with its subjects. A schmaltzy score marks the odd one out here because the rest of the film, and the plot itself, depend on restraint. Style and protagonist become inextricable - if Joseph really loosens up and enjoys himself, the film in its current form would fall apart. His shyness is the movie itself. And it is restraint rather than austerity – there’s no suggestion these rural types have been dehumanised or scoured by their hard lives close to the soil, quite the contrary – this is life stripped of all slick coastal or urban pretence and from which a good ol’ American pastoralism emerges, where buried feelings run deep. Although, if we go by the last scene, they should be buried a bit deeper.

Faced with such a placid presentation, we might expect symbolism to be drafted in to sound the depths beneath the still surface, and how astute we would be if we did: there’s a barn, a horse, a rifle, a pot of coins too heavy to move, a piano, a painting of the ocean, a wolf with a limp, a fire in said barn, the ocean itself. None of this adds an esoteric hidden layer; we’d know what we needed to know without it, but it runs a demure commentary. If there are lapses into obviousness, they’re more obtrusive in moments like the board of bureaucrats who take his job away - supercilious and insincere and with, oh shit, a black woman. They’re the classic Reaganite nightmare of stuck-up-liberal-pen-pushers-who’ve-never-done-a hard-day’s-work-but wreck-good people’s-lives-with-their-pesky-little-rules-and-regulations. He calls them assholes and the Greek chorus of rural whites behind him laugh with approval.

Catherine presents a narrative opportunity to ventilate this stifling approach, and to unfurl the liberating potential in her relationship with Joseph. When that opportunity is quite firmly not taken (bitches be crazy), the film loosens the hold on us that seemed about to tighten - but not so much that we won’t continue to watch it stumble along with the limping Joseph, make a false show of daring up to a point then lose its nerve in a hurry. Haunted by the memory of a man he can’t equal, Joseph acts out a semi-conscious mimicry; tight-lipped and cross-armed about the Sixties, so does the film, with its twilight feel for the end of America’s John Ford heroic era. Numerous shots evoke this cultural memory – take the “here comes trouble” intro of Catherine during the pledge of allegiance (its doorway framing an evocation of The Searchers). And look at her father, plainly a John Wayne archetype. His wife’s a drunk and his daughter’s amorously involved with a crippled wimp at least his age. America’s old self-image is frayed here, like the school flag, but the thread goes unpulled by Acts of Love – disciplined of it, in a way, but so frustrating when you can see it dangling. Incidentally, you can also see Hopper’s penis dangle in one scene, but I felt less compulsion to pull that.

After apparently tectonic-plate-shaking sex with Catherine, it must be hard to ignore the hollowness of an entire life in the middle of nowhere, so if Joseph needed a jolt before he’ll move on, this should be more than enough. But the film bottles it. The sexual revolution cannot be endorsed. The children of the revolution must be shown as mixed-up and lost. Now, naturally, let me concede at once, it’s easy to believe his attempt would be futile. We trudge out of the cinema resigned to the plot's brutal bottom line – however much he wants another life, a more vivid, vital life with a new lease on it, he can't live one. Growing old, with a bad foot, no job prospects and nowhere to go outside his remote hometown; this is a man trapped in a cell that would send shudders through hardcases in Alcatraz. But we also get the real point made here: like poor Joe, America’s best days are in the past and the golden years can’t be resurrected. The youth are fated to be disillusioned with their country. Joseph wanted to make his life Great Again but his country has become depraved and must go back to the old ways – the favourite paranoid “decline of vigour” myth on the American right. Half-hearted criticism of Joseph is allowed but not a criticism of the myth. For that we’d need a whole different plot, and instead we just have the story of the first and only excitement in the life of a deeply repressed man (who lives on a farm, after he’s been fired by liberals) and his inability to enjoy it much. In short, a Republican campaign-spot.

Once the fix is in and Catherine isn’t allowed to be cooler than the old folks, we get what may be the weirdest move in Acts of Love - it’s so intent on the “May-December is bad” message, and at the same time so enamoured of a community that doesn’t judge, it simply decides that, like a socialist-realist exercise, any conflict at all would be too dangerously dialectical. So everyone finds out about Joseph’s affair and then everyone, promptly or eventually, forgives him. His friend understands, his mother understands, Rosalee understands, her son understands, and then Catherine’s father lets him off the hook too. Everyone’s entirely reasonable about it. Not much point stopping then, you might think. (He lost his job already, so the minor matter of whether or not the school board would be chill with it is tactfully circumvented.) But no, Joseph has to be unhappy banging a hot blonde, which everyone else is more or less ok with, and he has to end it because that’s the grown-up thing to do. But if there was any confidence behind that proposition, Catherine wouldn't be portrayed as unstable. 

At the root of this film’s troubles is its mistaken belief that it has a happy ending, a homecoming for the nation after the self-indulgence of the Bad Decade. When he goes back to Rosalee, it’s supposed to represent a personal breakthrough for Joseph, his long-delayed, long-awaited maturation - and herein lies the problem. Not to be indelicate, but she’s his only choice left. He doesn’t pick her: it just doesn’t work out with the jailbait so that only leaves the other one. We’re supposed to think, of course, he’s rejected sexual liberation on principle now that he’s learned its shortcomings (and long comings, by which I mean protracted orgasms but made a pun for the purpose of amusement). But this is just coyness. A much better film would be one where he eloped with Catherine and burned the shit out of his bridges for the sake of an ephemeral thrill in all its glorious doomed folly. Maybe it’s too much to ask he skips town with a teen, ok fine. I still think they could at least do a weekend in Vegas. But maybe it’s not too much to ask for him and Rosalee to realise they don’t love each other as much as they say they do and shouldn’t stay together out of inertia. Or if they do stay together, then at least acknowledge the inertia, admit it’s not because they’re made for each other but because there’s nobody else in a hundred mile radius and, to be blunt, time’s up. But really, they should call the whole thing off.

They don’t, so the final scene seems utterly bleak at the same moment it confidently assures us this is a happy ending about how solemnly impressive it is to be a grown-up. Ah, wonderful, there they are, on the beach, looking out on the sea, the great adventure that is the voyage of marriage, all the emotional blocks finally overcome and at long last they can sail off together – adorable, if you duck the simple question, what else could he do? What is his other option? For the American market, the title was Carried Away but Acts of Love is a better title for a film where so many of the characters put on – wait for it – acts of love. Is anyone in the whole film actually in love? Catherine’s just a crazy kid with a crush, Joseph exploits her to live out his daydream, and Rosalee would rather be with her dead husband but she’ll take second-best because eHarmony doesn’t exist yet. It’s not even last-chance-saloon, it’s just surrender to the inevitable. 

This entirely dour scenario doesn’t seem to realise how grim it is purely because it’s set in Real America so it must be from the heart. But the rest of his life’s going to be just more of the same old same old, forevermore - exactly what he doesn’t want unless you count, oh I’m sorry, a trip to the beach. With a woman his own age. I’m sure that’s much better than afternoon rolls in the hay with a blonde teenage nympho. (And hello to anyone who googled for the last three words.) To tell us that our psychologically and socially imposed limitations are a virtue is to stretch our good will as an audience, more so when it's presented as a fable for the condition of (of all places) the United States. On every occasion I have gone back to this film, although anything so well done and so re-watchable obviously has much to recommend it, I can’t escape the nagging sense that it’s quite simply not true. But then perhaps that doesn't matter - if it doesn't, and I'm the one getting carried away, then Acts of Love is even better than I have so far thought.