1977 was an interesting year at the Oscars. Annie Hall was battling it out for the top spot with Star Wars, and the other three nominees really just fell by the wayside, especially the film I am looking at today. The subsequent years have not been kind to the likes of The Turning Point, making it one of the harder films to track down these days. I will not say where I found my copy, but it wasn’t cheap and took several weeks to arrive for me to view it and determine if, in my opinion, it had any chance of taking the top award or if it was all just an afterthought and the award was going to go to either Annie Hall or Star Wars, no one else.
The film is about two women, former friends and ballet competitors when they were both young. The first is DeeDee Rodgers (Shirley MacLaine). DeeDee is now married to Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and has three children; the eldest, Emilia (Leslie Browne), is a proficient and talented dancer herself. The second woman is Emma Jacklin (Anne Bancroft). Emma is still dancing, although she is starting to age out of his position and knows it is only a matter of time before she will no longer be offered parts on the ballet stage. When the two women were much younger, they were both up for the same role in Anna Karenina. Emma took advantage of DeeDee’s love for Wayne, a fellow dancer, and convinced her to marry him and start a family rather than continue her dancing pursuits. This allowed Emma to land the coveted role and have a long career on the stage, becoming a prima ballerina and a well-known figure in the ballet community.
While the company is on tour through Oklahoma City, DeeDee and her family go to see the show and run into Emma. The reunion stirs up old memories in DeeDee, and she begins to question her decisions as well as feel resentment for Emma and all her success. She also starts to wonder if she had not married Wayne, she may have been chosen over Emma for the role. Emma is also questioning her decisions, wondering if she should have chosen a family over her career. These feelings intensify as Emma becomes a bit of a mentor for DeeDee’s daughter, who, upon Emma’s suggestion, gets offered a chance to take a class with the company in New York City. Emilia is uncertain if she should accept the offer but, with a little encouragement from her parents, does.
Though shy and slow to make friends, Emilia eventually falls in love with fellow dancer Yuri Kopeikine (Mikhail Baryshnikov), and the two begin a physical relationship. This relationship is doomed as Yuri is soon after caught in bed with another dancer, causing Emilia to feel betrayed. Meanwhile, Emma is fighting for a better role in an upcoming performance, a role she is denied in favor of Emilia. DeeDee, feeling frustrated herself, eventually confronts Emma about that fateful day when she was encouraged to get married and finally gets a confession out of Emma. Emma saw DeeDee as a real threat to her getting the role and pushed her to marry in order to secure the role for herself. The women fight it out briefly but are soon laughing at the stupidity of it all and reconcile the lives that they have chosen for themselves.
The Turning Point was nominated for eleven Academy Awards in 1977. Unfortunately, it failed to take home any of them, and looking at the individual categories, it becomes apparent that the Academy made the right decision with how those votes landed, at least in regard to The Turning Point. Many felt that Star Wars should have taken Best Picture, but that is a discussion for another day. This was a year where acting nominations were for the most part on the weaker side, which explains how Mikhail Baryshnikov managed to secure a nomination for a performance that is uninspiring at best. He is a great dancer but not really an actor. He didn’t get a win out of it, but even getting a nomination is head-scratching. This film also saw nominations for Art Direction, Editing, and Sound but didn’t stand a chance in beating out Star Wars for those.
The best part of this film is the dual-nominated lead actresses who are both excellent here. There is so much inter-conflict going on with both of these women, and the emotional struggle that is going on there is palpable. Some of the best moments are in the silent scenes where DeeDee is watching her daughter practicing, and you can see on DeeDee’s face that she is struggling between pride for her daughter’s beautiful dancing and her own insecurities over what she gave up to get to this point in her life. She wouldn’t give up her family for the world, yet she also struggles with this lingering doubt that she made the right decision in the first place coupled with a dose of envy for her friend, Emma’s, life.
Emma is on the opposite end of this struggle. She chose to not have a family life and pursued dance instead. What she is dealing with now is realizing all of that is coming to an end, and she has little to show for it besides the memories and the hollow accolades. It stings her when she is told bluntly that she needs to be teaching now rather than taking the center stage. She feels this the most when she is working with Emilia and imagining it is her own daughter.
Emilia Rodgers, played by Leslie Browne, is based on Leslie herself. It was not planned that way, but production changes saw that little bit of happenstance fall into place. While the story is fictionalized, it is loosely based on Leslie Browne’s life, so it is fitting that she ended up playing the part in the end. Her acting is just okay, and it did get her nominated for the Oscar, but what ultimately stands out for her is her dancing. She is in her element on stage, and it shows in this film. It is these moments that caused me to stop thinking for a moment and just watch her moving effortlessly around the stage, executing moves that at times feel virtually impossible. Yet she is doing them and making it look easy. I’m no ballet expert nor do I pretend to understand the intricacies of the art form, but I know beauty and grace, and Leslie has that in spades. To see her perform is breathtaking.
The Turning Point has mostly fallen into obscurity in recent years, hence the difficulty in finding ways to watch it. It simply got swallowed up in the race for Best Picture by two films that were going to be impossible to beat. On top of it all, aside from some good acting and ballet choreography, there isn’t enough here to keep audiences interested for repeat viewings. It will really only appeal to ballet enthusiasts, and that is just too niche of an audience to keep this one in the public interest. It’s too bad because there is a compelling drama here, and it has more than a little to say about feminism and life in general. We can look at DeeDee and Emma as basically the same person on the other side of a life changing decision and how it would have played out each way. It’s a hard sell for modern audiences, and by making the film difficult to find, it makes it all the more likely that it will continue to fall further into obscurity. It deserves better, but as of right now, that is exactly where it is heading.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Herbert Ross and Arthur Laurents
Best Director: Herbert Ross
Best Actress: Anne Bancroft
Best Actress: Shirley MacLaine
Best Supporting Actor: Mikhail Baryshnikov
Best Supporting Actress: Leslie Browne
Best Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen: Arthur Laurents
Best Art Direction: Albert Brenner and Marvin March
Best Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Best Film Editing: William H. Reynolds
Best Sound: Theodore Soderberg, Paul Wells, Douglas O. Williams, and Jerry Jost
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Release Date: November 14, 1977
Running Time: 119 Minutes
Rated PG
Starring: Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine, Tom Skerritt, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Leslie Browne, Martha Scott, Marshall Thompson, and Anthony Zerbe
Directed by: Herbert Ross
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