Review of Coal Miner's Daughter (1980) by Edith N — 16 Nov 2007

If I remember my Oscar trivia properly, this was the first occasion wherein someone won an award for acting with the person they were portraying sitting in the audience, watching the whole thing. As I've said, often, it's hard to portray a living figure, because everyone has a very clear mental image of what that person is like. (Okay, not everyone. [i]I[/i] don't have a clear mental image of what Loretta Lynn is like. But most of the people who'd see this movie would.).

I know next to nothing about country music other than that I don't much like it. According to the IMDB discussion boards, there is some information--which we'll get to in a minute--that Loretta Lynn specifically refuted. But other than that, I haven't a clue as to what's accurate and what isn't. You couldn't prove by me that Patsy Cline died in a plane crash, for example. So we'll be passing on that aspect. There's still a fair amount to talk about.

The one scene, for example. It is, apparently, true that Loretta Lynn married her husband before her fourteenth birthday. (I'm so not okay with that, incidentally.) And it is, apparently, true that their early sex life wasn't very good, their eventual six kids notwithstanding. (I understand she later wrote a song about the usefulness of the Pill for married women.) However, their wedding night was not the rape portrayed in the movie.

There are people who argue that term, incidentally. However, if a person says no and their partner doesn't stop, it's rape. In the movie, Loretta says no, and she says no repeatedly. No and stop. But at the time, you couldn't rape your wife, so it wouldn't have been rape to him. It was to the movie's Loretta, however.

Loretta says, late in the movie, that her life had moved very, very fast. That much is certainly true. I don't know how old she was by the time she was a star, but if it was ten years after her marriage, I would be very surprised. By which point she had four children. It wouldn't, I think, have helped that she essentially skipped her adolescence.

I've no real interest in seeing this movie again. The filming isn't bad, and the acting's pretty good, but the story is a cliche, notwithstanding that it's true. And, of course, I don't much like the music. But as a biopic of someone I couldn't care less about, it's pretty good.