An Officer and a Gentleman
R, 126 m., 1982
Richard Gere (Zack Mayo), Debra Winger (Paula Pokrifki), Lou Gossett, Jr. (Sergeant Foley), David Keith (Sid Worley), Robert Loggia (Byron Mayo), Lisa Blount (Lynette), Lisa Eilbacher (Casey Seeger). Directed by Taylor Hackford and produced by Martin Elfand. Screenplay by Douglas Day Stewart.
An Officer and a Gentleman is the best movie about love that I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe that’s because it’s not about “love” as a Hollywood concept, but about love as growth, as learning to accept other people for who and what they are. There’s romance in this movie, all right, and some unusually erotic sex, but what makes the film so special is that the sex and everything else is presented within the context of its characters finding out who they are, what they stand for—and what they will not stand for.
The movie takes place in and around a Naval Aviation Officer Candidate School in Washington state. Every thirteen weeks, a new group of young men and women come here to see if they can survive a grueling session of physical and academic training. If they pass, they graduate to flight school. About half fail. Across Puget Sound, the local young women hope for a chance to meet an eligible future officer. They dream of becoming officers’ wives, and in some of their families, we learn, this dream has persisted for two generations.
After the first month of training, there is a Regimental Ball. The women turn out with hope in their hearts and are sized up by the candidates. A man and a woman (Richard Gere and Debra Winger) pair off. We know more about them than they know about one another. He is a loner and a loser, whose mother died when he was young and whose father is a drunk. She is the daughter of an officer candidate who loved and left her mother twenty years before. They dance, they talk, they begin to date, they fall in love. She would like to marry him, but she refuses to do what the other local girls are willing to do—get pregnant or fake pregnancy to trap a future officer. For his part, the man is afraid of commitment, afraid of love, incapable of admitting that he cares for someone. All he wants is a nice, simple affair, and a clean break at the end of OCS.
This love story is told in counterpoint with others. There’s the parallel affair between another candidate and another local girl. She is willing to trap her man. His problem is, he really loves her. He’s under the thumb of his family, but he’s willing to do the right thing, if she’ll give him the chance.
All of the off-base romances are backdrops for the main event, which is the training program. The candidates are under the supervision of a tough drill sergeant (Lou Gossett, Jr.) who has seen them come and seen them go and is absolutely uncompromising in his standards. There’s a love-hate relationship between the sergeant and his trainees, especially the rebellious, resentful Gere. And Gossett does such a fine job of fine-tuning the line between his professional standards and his personal emotions that the performance deserves its Academy Award.
The movie’s method is essentially to follow its characters through the thirteen weeks, watching them as they change and grow. That does wonders for the love stories, because by the end of the film we know these people well enough to care about their decisions and to have an opinion about what they should do. In the case of Gere and Winger, the romance is absolutely absorbing because it’s so true to life, right down to the pride that causes these two to pretend they don’t care for each other as much as they really do. When it looks as if Gere is going to throw it all away—is going to turn his back on a good woman who loves him, just because he’s too insecure to deal with her love—the movie isn’t just playing with emotions, it’s being very perceptive about human behavior.
But maybe I’m being too analytical about why An Officer and a Gentleman is so good. This is a wonderful movie precisely because it’s so willing to deal with matters of the heart. Love stories are among the rarest of movies these days (and when we finally get one, it’s likely to involve an extraterrestrial). Maybe they’re rare because writers and filmmakers no longer believe they understand what goes on between modern men and women. An Officer and a Gentleman takes chances, takes the time to know and develop its characters, and by the time this movie’s wonderful last scene comes along, we know exactly what’s happening, and why, and it makes us very happy.
Once
R, 85 m., 2007
Glen Hansard (Guy), Marketa Irglova (Girl), Hugh Walsh (Drummer), Gerry Hendrick (Guitarist), Alastair Foley (Bassist), Geoff Minogue (Eamon). Directed by John Carney and produced by Martina Niland. Screenplay by Carney.
I’m not at all surprised that my esteemed colleague Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune selected John Carney’s Once as the best film of 2007. I gave it my Special Jury Prize, which is sort of an equal first; no movie was going to budge Juno off the top of my list. Once was shot for next to nothing in seventeen days, doesn’t even give names to its characters, is mostly music with not a lot of dialogue, and is magical from beginning to end. It’s one of those films where you hold your breath, hoping it knows how good it is and doesn’t take a wrong turn. It doesn’t. Even the ending is the right ending, the more you think about it.
The film is set in Dublin, where we see a street musician singing for donations. This is the Guy (Glen Hansard). He attracts an audience of the Girl (Marketa Irglova). She loves his music. She’s a pianist herself. He wants to hear her play. She doesn’t have a piano. He takes her to a music store where he knows the owner, and they use a display piano. She plays some Mendelssohn. We are in love with this movie. He is falling in love with her. He just sits there and listens. She is falling in love with him. She just sits there and plays. There is an unusual delay before we get the obligatory reaction shot of the store owner, because all the movie wants to do is sit there and listen, too.
This is working partly because of the deeply good natures we sense these two people have. They aren’t “picking each other up.” They aren’t flirting—or, well, technically they are, but in that way that means “I’m not interested unless you’re too good to be true.” They love music, and they’re not faking it. We sense to a rare degree the real feelings of the two of them; there’s no overlay of technique, effect, or style. They are just purely and simply themselves.
Hansard is a professional musician, well known in Ireland as leader of a band named the Frames. Irglova is an immigrant from the Czech Republic, only seventeen years old, who had not acted before. She has the kind of smile that makes a man want to be a better person so he can deserve being smiled at.
The film develops their story largely in terms of song. In between, they confide their stories. His heart was broken because his girlfriend left him and moved to London. She takes him home to meet her mother, who speaks hardly any English, and to join three neighbors who file in every night to watch their TV. And he meets her child, which comes as a surprise. Then he finds out she’s married. Another surprise, and we sense that in his mind he had already dumped the girl in London and was making romantic plans. He’s wounded, but brave. He takes her home to meet his dad, a vacuum cleaner repairman. She has a Hoover that needs fixing. It’s kismet.
He wants to record a demo record, take it to London, and play it for music promoters. She helps him, and not just by playing piano. When it comes down to it, she turns out to be levelheaded, decisive, take-charge. An ideal producer. They recruit other street musicians for a session band, and she negotiates a rock-bottom price for a recording studio. And so on. All with music. And all with their love, and our love for their love, only growing. At one point he asks if she loves him, and she answers in Czech, and the movie doesn’t subtitle her answer because if she’d wanted subtitles, she would have answered in English, which she speaks perfectly well.