Review of Saturday Night Fever (1977) by David C — 22 Nov 2014

This is a self-serious movie about the foibles of pathetic little people engaged in a pastime that is objectively trivial but which to them is a matter of life and death. Namely, disco dancing-disco dancing in the seediest, most peripheral of clubs on the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge, no less.

For a while the lack of any whiff of sarcasm or judgment on the part of the filmmakers, of the sort you might see in a Coen brothers movie about the dregs of society and their quixotic refusal to acknowledge the futility of their existence, raises questions with direct ramifications for the movie's quality: Does the film not understand how sad and silly its characters are? Are we really supposed to think that disco dancers were the new rebels without causes, or that Travolta's strutting and preening made him the next great underdog like Rocky or the next tragic antihero like one of Al Pacino's roles? And then a conversation happens between John Travolta's character and his dancing partner (Karen Gorney) after which there is no doubt that the seriousness of the film stems from its real understanding and concern for these pitiable, fragile individuals.

Here they lay their cards on the table for the first time, and suddenly their personalities are present and clear. The introspective Travolta is indeed smart in his way and is beginning to realize how limited his options in life are, and the guarded Gorney wisely can't bring herself to trust anyone in her sphere of society, and therefore acts as if she doesn't really belong to it.

For the first time it is possible to feel sympathy for them both, and that remains the case even as they continue down a destructive path amid the rotting infrastructure of late-70s greater New York. There are some side characters, potentially just as interesting but who don't ever come into focus quite as neatly, on whom the movie's seriousness and good intentions are misspent: Travolta's priest brother, who is a loose end, a woman who seeks Travolta's affections but who is used by the movie in increasingly unsatisfactory and unjustified ways, and a group of Travolta's lowlife buddies whose predictable B-plots involving racial violence and teen pregnancy come to nothing.

It is therefore understandable, if slightly unfair, that "Saturday Night Fever" seems to be remembered primarily for its soundtrack.