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Natlie Portman is a terrific actress, one of the best in the business at the moment. Okay, what else? A lot, but that’s not the purpose of this commentary. This is about Portman and the movie No Strings Attached that hit the theaters in January and is just now out on DVD rentals.
I feel fairly certain that there was considerable conversation among Portman and whoever manages her career as to whether she should be doing a light RomCom. Obviously, to be a full bore movie star with staying power, she needed to break out of the heavy drama rut. Yet, there is little doubt that Portman belongs in more serious films about more serious subjects, but apparently she thought she might need to recover, for her fans, after the apparently drearily, deadly serious Black Swan (sorry, I haven’t seen it).
Which brings us to No Strings Attached. What a stinking turkey of a movie. Well, in fairness, I should say that the movie is not aimed at people in my age bracket. It is aimed a people in their twenties, preferably single, and people in their thirties who still think and act like they are in their twenties. Its subject matter is the dreary, long period of adolescence that American life and prosperity now allow, so that people in their late 30s are still wondering if they should consider getting married and having a family.
Natlie Portman plays a woman, a medical intern, who is not merely commitment shy, she is, for unexplained reasons, phobic toward any attachment and the emotions that go along with it. She finds what seems to be a perfect match in Ashton Kutcher, playing a kind, wide eyed young male who believes he will be perfectly happy exchanging sex for sex and nothing else.
These two and their cardboard character friends live in a moral free universe where anything you can think of doing is just fine and dandy, even while Portman and her friends are rooted in the seriousness and hard work of young, about to be medical doctors. As they jump from bed to bed, back room to medical storage space, making sex, there are no qualms, no doubts. Wee, this is fun! Except, it isn’t.
Portman’s character is meant to stand for all of those crazy young people out there who think they can get laid and not involve themselves further with the person doing the laying. She is intended as a contemporary, attractive everywoman who knows that love hurts, but sex is a necessary function.
Along the way, there is more than ample talk of penises and out of the ordinary sexual practices that once were never mentioned in mixed company, but, in this movie, are presented as a necessary conversation components for the young and the hipper than hip. The film makers, in trying to grab hold of the way it really is out there in America’s youngland, are actually pushing their viewers to believe that this conduct and language is good, normal and fun. They are attempting to mirror contemporary trends, but in a lot of circles, they will be seen as advocates.
The people in this film are utterly lost in a sea of meaningless encounters and relationships, caught between a time of strict moral codes that have faded fast and the time when it might be accepted widely that morality has little or nothing to do with sex. Bumbling along, they try to move forward.
Natlie Portman is wrong for every stage of the character she plays. She isn’t believable as the cold as ice intern seeking a mere hook-up, she is totally unacceptable as a slutish woman trying to hook on to an older, more accomplished doctor (that scene is cut away from so quickly, I think the film makers were ultimately ashamed that it was in the script), and she doesn’t achieve much more creditability as the love struck woman who belatedly realizes she can’t live without him.
She has a scene where she tells off the father of her sex buddy for being unrestrained and immature throughout his life and this might have made the movie, except it doesn’t play all that well either. At that moment, she truly might have been expressing the rage of younger people looking at their elders and wondering why those elders won’t grow up and stop taking drugs, alcohol and new lovers, but someone yelling about growing up to a stranger in a restaurant while she, herself, refuses any connection to adulthood doesn’t really ring true. Unless, of course, you believe it is perfectly fine for younger people to act stupid, but it is farcical and ugly for older people to do the same. Those old people, have they no standards!
Kevin Kline plays the obligatory oversexed and abundantly lame brained old farts generation. It is not enough in these kinds of movies that the older people look particularly bad next to the slick younger generation in the leading roles, they have to be disgusting in their actions, too. Playing the father of the male lead, he’s pathetic to the core. Every attempt is made to make this old hipster look bad, including mispronouncing lil’Wayne’s name as Little Wayne. How dumb can you get? Wow, this guy is so far out of it, Mars must be his neighborhood. Old people. Ha ha.
As for the main characters themselves, they live in what is not only a morality free zone, it is a humanity free zone where showing the slightest longing emotion to be with someone beyond sex is taken as a huge and reprehensible failing. You know, like caring for someone. Ick!
I have no doubt that some moments of this film bear some flickers of truth in the lives of those now in their twenties. I once read an advice column question in which a young woman wrote in to say that the man she was having sex with was not, to her great disappointment, interested in dating her. How, she pleaded, could she turn a sex only relationship into one of going out to dinner and the movies? The short, appropriate answer would be, “Forget it, sister”. That’s not what anyone wants to hear, of course.
The pill, combined with the lingering aftereffects and misunderstandings of the women’s movement, have created a bad situation for young women. They are free to pursue the kind of mindless sex that many young men seem always to want, but, for the women, their sexuality and pleasure are still tied to their emotions and their need for some level of protection and commitment from males. Good luck with that.
Since, in urban, educated cities, they are forbidden to demand one to get the other, women are stuck. A sense of caring and love, which once was thought of as the starting point for an intimate relationship, now has to be negotiated after the fact from reluctant males who might not be willing, in the least, to consider those dumb, entangling options. Caring as an option in a relationship is not a good bargain for most women most of the time. Many might be more than happy with an occasional night of meaningless sex, but as a lifestyle, it conflicts dramatically with basic desires and fundamental needs.
The Natlie Portman character is trying to be ahead of the game and winds up a loser, but her sex partner finds himself in the same, unhappy boat, which makes for happy endings. Or something. This hipper than thou movie should never have been made and Natlie Portman, the class of her generation, should have run from it like a house on fire. This was a Reese Witherspoon or even Cameron Diaz movie with the wrong person in the hot seat.
One would like someone to step into this movie and explain to the characters that they are not merely having trouble with relationships, they are just dead wrong in what they are doing. It isn’t going to work out, kids, anyway you try. Yet, that wouldn’t be successful, would it, because the movie is aimed at a young audience and the message wouldn’t go down very well. Each generation has to go through its own blooming stupidities to learn life’s hard lessons. The first one these nitwits need to learn is that simply deciding how the world should be when you’re 26 doesn’t in any way make it so.
Doug Terry, 5.13.11
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