Growing up being picked on by your fellow classmates is something many of us can relate to. All of us, at one time or another, have felt uncomfortable in our own skins and having those who should be our piers turn on us and magnify that awkwardness can be so demoralizing and have long term damage to our self images. As I watched 1968s Rachel, Rachel, all I could think about for long periods of time was how much I could relate to the protagonist, Rachel Cameron (Joanne Woodward).
This was the directorial debut of Paul Newman who was also directing his wife in the leading role. As such, there are times when you can feel the inexperience behind the camera. But then there are other times when Paul Newman’s choices are brilliant and you can see why he ended up having a somewhat successful career as a director as well. He’s no Alfred Hitchcock or Martin Scorsese but he’s a far cry from Ed Wood, too. He really captures that awkwardness of being a “nobody” who has grown up but never outgrown the trappings of being a shy little girl still feeling the sting from all that adolescent heckling.
When we are first introduced to Rachel she is thirty-five years old and a school teacher. But she still carries around the emotional scars from the schoolyard taunts, narrowing her out for being the daughter of an undertaker. She feels for her students, especially the underdogs because she was one herself. In many ways she still is. Her life is sheltered, living with her mother and seeing her sister marry and move away to start a family. Rachel longs for that but cannot bring herself to take control of her own destiny.
Part of what is holding her back is her frail mother who takes advantage of her health problems to guilt her daughter into staying with her, never going out at night lest there be no one there to give her her heart medicine should she have an attack. In this environment, Rachel never flourishes and, as summer break commences, she supposes that it will be yet another boring few months without even school to break things up. But then Nick enters the picture. Nick (James Olson) grew up with Rachel but, as a child, his twin brother died and his parents felt the better brother was taken from them. He now teaches high school in the city but is back in town for a short period of time and is just looking for someone to hook up with. When he bumps into Rachel in a store he tells her flat out that that is what he is interested in. She rebuffs the advance but later accepts a date with him that ends with the two getting intimate under the moonlight. Later, he invites her to his parent’s old home for a night of lovemaking but grows cold when she proclaims her love for him and wanting to have his kids. In her inexperience with romance she has mistaken lust for love and he pulls away from her, showing her a picture of a child in his wallet, passing him off as his own. She will later figure out that he is not married nor does he have any children.
This is a film about a woman discovering that she doesn’t need to wait for the world to come to her but that she can go to it, looking for what she wants in life rather than hoping things will just magically land in her lap. The message is perfectly clear but the way it is shown to us is at times jarring and confusing. We get a lot of Rachel’s inner monolog as well as glimpses of her imagination as she thinks about actions she is too shy to ever carry out. Whether these are Paul Newman trying to deliberately be confusing as a symbol of Rachel’s own personal confusion or simply an example of an inexperienced director, either way it doesn’t fully work. Instead, it just makes these moments hard to follow and took me out of the story. The saving grace is Joanne Woodward whose earnestness and complete commitment to the role elevates this movie.
Joanne was still a relatively young mother, herself, when she took on this role. For some time she had been sidelining her career to focus on raising a family, letting her husband, Paul Newman, be the star in the family. This movie allowed her to not only keep her family close to her while filming - two of her children even appear in it - but to also work side by side with her husband. One of the drawbacks of this arrangement, though, was the tension that developed between the two over artistic decisions. It’s one thing to argue with the director; it’s quite another thing when the director is also your spouse. Whatever tensions there were, it didn’t seem to affect their marriage too much as they stayed together until his death in 2008.
Rachel, Rachel is one of those films that reflect the time in which it was made. This is obviously a 60s movie and the style of the film reflects what was going on in the world at the time. We see a single black student in Rachel’s classroom and one other in another teacher’s class. This is rural Connecticut and segregation was just recently dissipating but even schools in the north would have had few, if any, black students. We get a scene at a religious revival that is reminiscent of the reverend Jimmy Jones, who was still a decade away from his ritual suicide but was active in California at this time. There’s also a large number of child deaths in this town during the flashbacks of Rachel’s youth. Every time we see her father at work he is attending to a child funeral. It’s an interesting detail that never gets explained. There’s even a subplot involving Rachel’s friend, Calla (Estelle Parsons), who is always inviting Rachel to activities and events, including the revival, and seems to have feelings for Rachel that would have been very taboo for the 60s.
This is a film that, while its message is still relevant, the method used to portray it is dated. I found the subject endlessly fascinating and Woodard completely watchable but so much of how it was shot fell flat. It was edited by Dede Allen and a lot of what she is doing here keeps things afloat but just barely. Paul Newman would go on to make better films after this but, for a first effort, this isn’t awful. It’s uncomfortable to watch which is exactly what Newman was going for. Unfortunately, that element, while the right instinct, just doesn’t hold up after all this time. It’s a good look at a bygone era but it doesn’t really work as entertainment anymore. There is so much good here, but it ultimately gets buried in everything else.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Paul Newman
Best Actress: Joanne Woodward
Best Supporting Actress: Estelle Parsons
Best Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium: Stewart Stern
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Release Date: August 26, 1968
Running Time: 101 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Joanne Woodward, James Olson, Estelle Parsons, and Geraldine Fitzgerald
Directed By: Paul Newman
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