Review of Making Love (1982) by Kenneth L — 06 Aug 2010

An important film in its frank depiction of homosexuality for its time, Making Love unfortunately lays claim to no other worthy distinction. Which is not meant to be a glib statement. Making Love holds the honor of being one of the first mainstream Hollywood films out there that doesn't villify, victimize, or marginalize gay characters but instead puts him in the center of the film, replete with a tastefully done gay sex scene. The film is groundbreakingly explicit in its depiction of gay sex even if it remains as coy as Zack is in naming his 'condition'. Still, no mean feat for a film made in 1981.

So it is doubly ironic that director Arthur Hiller has presented an almost utopic world populated by attractive, entirely pleasant characters who don't seem to exist in the same world as the rest of us. So important it is to Hiller that our characters remain sympathetic and likable that the film happily skims through what must be the most traumatic discovery any man or woman could fathom in a relationship. Michael Ontkean's Zach is perfectly generic, and perfectly likeable - a doctor in a beautiful large home and a beautiful wife. What could possibly be wrong? Enter Bart (played by Harry Hamlin) who is happily single and happily promiscuous - a foil to our very monogamous and suddenly very self assured lead. Kate Jackson plays Claire with heartbreaking naivete, and speaks her painfully trite lines with such ease and whimsy one even forgets that the film was made right at the brink of the AIDS epidemic when homophobia was rife, and still largely taboo. You wouldn't think it seeing this picture. Against the backdrop of when this film was produced, you wouldn't be far off if you thought this film was more science fiction than drama.

The film's strength, in bringing positive images of homosexuality onto the mainstream cinema screens, is ironically also its weakness as it sets its characters up against cringeworthy dialogue, soap opera type melodrama, petty contrivances and a drippy score by Leonard Rosenman played ad nauseam. Coupled with incongruently glib performances, and a painfully trite story-telling device of propping characters in direct address against a sentient netherworld narrating personal reflections, Making Love plucks this gritty subject matter out of the streets of reality and plops them in the world of fantasy. This power to imagine a utopic world sans judgment would be commendable if it didn't also shy away from the depths of its interpersonal relationships. Indeed throughout the film, Claire never once displays any curiosity about who Zach had been seeing. As it turns out, the film goes through a similar trajectory as Zach - it is similarly plagued by an intellectual dishonesty.