Category Archives: Reviews

Deja Viewed: Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude feels like a movie made on Opposite Day.

It’s a May-December romance, but in the reverse order of most Hollywood love stories. The stars look as un-cinematic as stars get (read: like normal people). It features one of the greatest movie soundtracks ever produced — which was never commercially released.

From the opening scene, in which we see a young man methodically hang himself while his unconcerned mother bustles past his swinging body, it’s clear: We aren’t in regular romcom territory.

The very-much-alive body belongs to Harold (Bud Cort), a college-aged kid obsessed with death, fake suicides and getting under the skin of his unflappable mother (VivianPickles).

During one of his routine drop-ins of a stranger’s funeral, Harold meets Maude (Ruth Gordon) a 79-year-old also intrigued with the macabre. But where Harold sees funerals as suicide dry-runs, Maude sees them as life’s lily pads, springing her into seize-the-day adventures. 

Director Hal Ashby balances fairy tale absurdities with a sincere love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history: Maude is a fiesty Holocaust survivor who inhabits a gentle universe that abides her casual car thefts; Harold is a lonely teen who drives a modded hearse.

Ashby jolts the film with overlapping sound, oversaturated color and an underrated soundtrack — a Graduate-level gem by Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam. Unlike The Graduate, (which this film subtly subverts), the soundtrack was never released. Thankfully, the nine-song, 29-minute playlist is eminently streamable.

As we bound from bad date to good, from death to life, from privileged suburbia to Vietnam-era nihilism, it’s easy to forget that the film, now more than 50 years old, was as far ahead of its time as his other cult hit, 1979’s Being There.

Here, Harold is lost in the computer dating world. Maude practices mindful meditation. Ashby wields Lynchian absurdities before that was a term. And were it not for its cult-film bonafides, Harold and Maude features a twist ending that would be called Shyamalan-ian today.

Make no mistake: this is an oddball movie that lives on eccentricities and an outsider worldview. The symbolism of Harold’s “deaths” have divided diehards for more than a half century over whether the film is a counter-culture statement or poem urging viewers to make every breath count.

Either way, the viewer wins. It may pose as a comedy about staging death, but Harold and Maude ultimately says something profound about rehearsing life.

My Problem with Val


I’m sorry. I have to say something.

I had a problem with Val, and I have a problem with Val, the Amazon film that’s dazzling critics and has set social media a’swoon.

Complete with yearbook videos of Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon and others from the dimpled heyday of a Dirty Dancing generation, Val charts the Shakespearean fall of a man who never lived a life more than an arm’s length from a videocamera. And that’s how Val feels: like a sad video with heart that can’t quite connect because the lens gets in the way.

Make no mistake: Val is courageous filmmaking. Any Hollywood project that underscores the humanity of an inhumane industry is worth noting. And seeing Kilmer squeeze synthesized words through a dime-size hole left gaping in his throat because of cancer is agonizing. Combine that with the actor’s admission that he’s been reduced to autograph-signing for a living, and his film is a bonafide heartbreaker.

But having an Incurable doesn’t make you a hero, or even brave. And Val seems too content to conflate illness with fortitude, disease with determination. In that sense, Val is guilty of a cardinal-sin-trope.

That is a common mistake in film, however, and I have learned to forgive it. My real problem with Val is my problem with Val. He is one of two actors in my career who I considered insufferably aloof.

The first was America Ferrara, the Disney star who has become the poster child of princesshood. I was interviewing her for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and she was backstage for some made-up award. While she fielded my questions, she never took her face off a mirror. She would play with a lock of hair, gazing adoringly while she gave pat answers. And I thought: She will not remember a moment of this.

America Ferrera

A similar realization struck when I interviewed Kilmer for the film Alexander. We met at a diner on Wilshire, just down from the Academy. I arrived early and took a booth by the window to see him arrive. He must have taken a back or side entrance, though, because he seemed to just appear — and walk past the booth. He did not look around; Kilmer was used to being recognized, not recognizing. I called him back to the booth, and tried to interview him.

I say try because it wasn’t really an interview. Like America, Kilmer spent the entire lunch gazing away. Unlike America, Kilmer wasn’t looking at his reflection. He was looking at a bus stop on the corner, as if he were watching a dog read a newspaper there; transfixed, bewildered, but not enough to warrant mentioning. I assumed he was high, drunk, or both. Either way, he was rote, automatic, and checked out for the interview.

Which is the failing of his autobiographical film. Kilmer has clearly gone through intense personal drama, from cancer to the jacuzzi drowning death of his 15-year-old other brother. Yet none of that grief and recovery seems to inform a film that is, ultimately, about loss. Val’s moral seems to be ‘Shit happens, so look good when it hits.’

And Val looks good. The movie makes clear: Kilmer went nowhere without a videocamera and an Action! worldview. An early adopter before that was even a term, Kilmer used a camera as electronic journal, taping actor buddies, ambushing directors with 60 Minutes-style confrontations and lamenting their shortcomings in video confessionals.

But his famous feuds with Cruise and Marlon Brando were unfilmed and almost unmentioned here, instead glossed in the movie with press junket pleasantries. There is no reflection on whether a James Dean lifestyle led to a James Dean darkness. No pondering whether smoking led to cancer. Not much pondering, period. Just ‘Love is the answer.’ And ‘Jesus saves.’

That’s a form of filmmaking honesty, I guess. But it’s a subjective, selective honesty.

Hollywood honesty.

Speaking of which, I wasn’t going to review Val because of the above personal interaction with him. And I acknowledge that feeling brushed off by him — and from anything real and personal — likely colored my impression of the man.

I just can’t get over feeling the same way about the film.