The novel Endless Love isabout a teenage boy who remembers, with full ferocity and grief and yearning,the great love of his life, after it has been ended by fate and the adultworld. The movie “Endless Love” is about a teenage boy and girl who are inlove, until fate and adults end their relationship. There is all the differencein the world between these two story sequences, and although there are a greatmany things wrong with the movie, this blunder on the narrative level is theworst.
Advertisem*nt
Didn't the makers of this movie understand thepoignancy at the very heart of the novel? The book begins with its hero, David,committing an act that will end all of his happiness for years. Forbidden to seehis girl, Jade, for thirty days, he sets a fire of newspapers on the porch ofher house hoping to win a reprieve by being the hero who "discovers"the fire. The house burns down, and David is sent into a long exile in a mentalinstitution. The novel's point of view is of a boy who has lost everything hevalues and remembers it with undying passion. But the movie rearranges theevents of the book into chronological order. That means that the love affairbetween Jade and David, instead of being remembered as a painful loss, is seenin the "now" as, well, as a teenage romance. Its additional level ofmeaning is lost.
A story that began as a poem to the fierce prideof adolescent passion gets transmuted into a sociological case study. Thismovie contains some of the same characters and events as Scott Spencer'swonderful novel (indeed, at times it is unnecessarily faithful to situationsand dialogue from the book), but it does not contain the book's reason forbeing. It is about events and it should be about passion.
There are many other problems in the film. Onecrucial mistake is in casting: Martin Hewitt, as David, the seventeen-year-oldboy, is a capable actor but is too handsome, too heavily bearded, too old inappearance to suggest an adolescent bundle of vulnerability and sensitivity.Another mistake is in narrative: The sequence of events involving David'srelease from the institution, his trip to New York, and exactly what happensthere, is so badly jumbled that some audience members will not know how and whyhe went to New York, and hardly anyone will be able to follow the circ*mstancesthat reunite him with Jade.
A third mistake is in this movie's ending, orrather, its lack of one: The final three minutes in this movie are enraging toanyone who has made an emotional investment in it, because they are a cop-out,a refusal to deal with the material and bring it to a conclusion. The fourthmistake is the one that made me most angry, because it deals with the centralact of the narrative, with the disaster around which the story revolves. In thebook, David sets fire to the newspapers as an act of passion, confusion, andgrief, sure it's dumb, but he's confused and in turmoil. The movie, withoffensive heavy-handedness, has another youth suggest the fire to David as astrategy. Apparently the filmmakers thought the fire had to be"explained." The result is to take a reckless act and turn it into astupid one, diminishing both David's intelligence and the power of his passion.
Advertisem*nt
The movie's central relationship, between Jade(Brooke Shields) and David, comes out as a disappointment, because their scenesare not allowed to develop human resonances. We never really feel andunderstand the bond between these two people. That's partly because of Hewitt'sinability to project uncertainty and adolescent awkwardness; he comes on sostrong and self-confident that David seems like a young man making a bold bidfor a good-looking girl, rather than as one-half of a pair of star-crossedadolescent lovers.
Is there anything good in the movie? Yes. BrookeShields is good. She is a great natural beauty, and she demonstrates, in ascene of tenderness and concern for Hewitt and in a scene of rage with herfather, that she has a strong, unaffected screen acting manner. But the movieas a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel thatinspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seemto know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.
Film Credits
Endless Love (1981)
Rated R
115 minutes
Advertisem*nt
