Wick's Review

Summary - Very Good 3.5

Linda Lovelace gets her story told her way, finally. While the whole truth doesn’t fully out, the truthyness of her bizarre celebrity does, making Lovelace a worthwhile 90 minute investment for the curious.

Her’s is the story of a pimp as much as a porn actress. A scumbag named Chuck Traynor found her, seduced her, trained her to be open-mouthed and act open-minded, and then brutalized her to not back out when it came time to perform. Amazingly, she didn’t come to hate men, instead settling down, marrying and apparently becoming a good mother.

Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard are great as the star of the porno chic movie Deep Throat and as Chuck Traynor, the user and abuser who forced her into it. The biopic in which they star is less than great, though it does minimize the prurience of an infamously prurient story. It also packs several ironies.

• The movie has it that Linda Lovelace was her real name, Lovelace taken from the father of her first child or something. Wikipedia claims it to be a stage name. In any case, the fact that she supposedly played herself in Deep Throat was central to her transcendent stardom.
• She apparently had a loving and respectful relationship with her Father and claims no abuse from any other man prior to Chuck Traynor. This belies the conventional wisdom that sex workers tend to be sex abuse victims from a young age.
• After publishing her autobiography, she expressed the hope that more girls wouldn’t follow her into porn. Yet countless girls and boys have, given how the industry exploded in the internet era.

Finally, the sad and bizarre story of Linda Lovelace makes clear that celebrity is its own currency, one that’s divorced from its origin. From Linda Lovelace to Dennis Rodman, famous is as famous does.

Acting - Great 4.0

Amanda Seyfried is entirely convincing as conflicted good girl Linda Lovelace, the seminal porn superstar. Seyfried proved she can play provincial as the eldest daughter in Big Love and that she can play glamour in In Time. Combine them – complete with some head-bobbing – and you get her recipe for Linda Lovelace.

Peter Sarsgaard often plays the good guy, which works for playing Chuck Traynor, the pimp who seduced Linda and her parents, then brutalized her into performing previously unspeakable acts.

Supporters

• Sharon Stone has turned herself into a character actress. The onetime glamour queen wasn’t recognizable as the terrific actress who plays Linda’s Mom.
• Robert Patrick is downright touching as her stolid yet goodhearted Dad. The Great Granitehead isn’t often this sympathetic.
• Juno Temple as Linda Lovelace’s daring girlfriend, the one who stops well short of porn. JT is ideal for roles like this, as she showed in Little Birds.
• Chris Noth as Anthony Romano, yet another Mr. Big.
• Bobby Cannavale as Butchie Peraino, porn producer.
• Hank Azaria as Deep Throat director Gerry Damiano.
• Adam Brody as nice guy shlongmeister Harry Reems.
• Chloë Sevigny as a self-declared Feminist Journalist who tosses puffball questions at Lovelace.
• James Franco gets to play Hugh Hefner, as if his career wasn’t already a fantasy ride.
• Debi Mazar as a sister porn actress cum makeup specialist.
• Wes Bentley cameos smoothly as a glamour photog.
• Eric Roberts is one of the mugs apparently.
• Ron Pritchard delivers a wax museum impression of Sammy Davis Jr.

Film - Very Good 3.5

The film is studded with grace notes, which both softens it and makes it more realistic, since normal people are rarely all or even mostly bad. For instance, Linda Lovelace’s Mom reveals that she was a single Mom when Linda’s good guy of a Dad came along and married her, back when such happy endings were rare. Thus when Linda says to her “Ma, you just don’t understand” about the domestic abuse she was suffering and the mother replies “I don’t,” it makes sense and is all the more heartbreaking because of it.

Nonetheless, her parents kicked her out of their house and into the hands of a pimp, a fact they couldn’t have known, but that proved a turning point in their daughter’s downfall.

Other notable moments include when Chuck Traynor taught Linda Lovelace to “deep throat” and when she ultimately reconciles with her parents, proving to be a bigger person than her Mom.

Edge - Sordid 3.1

No explicit sex, yet 12 minutes in and Amanda Seyfried’s topless. Soon she’s learning to relax her throat and exercise her neck muscles.

It’s the violence that’s hard to take however, even if more threatened than shown.

Reality - Glib 1.2

Linda Lovelace declares in the movie that a mere “17 days in the porn industry doesn’t define” who she is. Further, Lovelace strongly implies that Deep Throat was her only porn experience. Yet Wikipedia documents a porn career that predated and continued beyond the movie that made her famous, in a partial filmography totaling nine titles.

More generally, Deep Throat marked a turning point in the coarsening of our culture, when the terminology of an underworld realm entered the mainstream. The term went into august usage when Woodward & Bernstein codenamed their Watergate source Deep Throat. It’s been Katie, bar the door! ever since.

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