Giving a twist to nostalgia

Wednesday, June 25, 1997 - 10:00

Inventing the Abbotts
Produced by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Janet Meyers

Review by John Tognolini

The advertisement on TV shows three young women. "They're the Abbots — they're rich", it blasts out. The next scene is two young men, and the voice blasts again, "They're the Holts — they're poor".

It's about class struggle and sexuality in a small all-American town in 1957. That's what the PR hype says.

I own up to being a sucker for nostalgia films about youth in small town USA. Abbotts takes its place in the Last Picture Show genre. It's well acted, with a great script and characters of depth.

Writer Ken Hixon says, "People are mistaken if they think the '50s were a sexually chaste time. Sex and status have always been issues. The plight of women then, with the stigma of divorce, the Madonna/whore syndrome, putting women on a pedestal until they make a mistake, has always fascinated me.

"It touched all women, housewives, ambitious women, women who had sexual desires, unmarried women who got pregnant, women like Helen Holt."

Helen Holt (Kathy Baker) is the widowed mother of Doug (Joaquin Phoenix) and Jacey (Billy Crudup). She has raised her sons by herself since her husband's car crashed through the ice of the local lake, on a drive which he risked on a wager with the head of the Abbott clan, Lloyd (Will Paton).

So where is the class struggle in the film? Is there a strike in the small town? No. Is there a fiery political rally? No.

Billy Crudup says, "Contemporary films that are set in the '50s tend to either romanticise the era or study the development of civic unrest and race relations. This film is more interested in the issue of class and what it means on a practical level in people's lives in middle America."

So Jacey Holt sees himself taking vengeance for his father's death through having an affair with each of the three Abbott daughters, Eleanor (Jennifer Connelly), Alice (Joanna Going) and Pamela (Liv Tyler).

The twist is that Jacey's flings are not all that one sided. The Abbott daughters are strong characters who break with the stereotyped portrayal of women in the '50s.

The other balance in the story is Doug, Jacey's younger brother, who sets his own standards and doesn't care what other people think.