Word: moment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Moment by Moment is an awful movie, but it may some day occupy a hallowed place in the pantheon of high camp. This isn't your everyday Hollywood boo-boo; the film is downright perverse. For a couple of hours, two of the screen's best actors, John Travolta and Lily Tomlin, walk around overdecorated rooms and whisper sweet nothings to each other. They have sex in a Jacuzzi full of bubble bath. They build sand castles on a Malibu beach. They fondle cute dogs. They say things like: "I don't even know what the word...
Maybe, just maybe, it is. Jane Wagner, the film's scenarist and director, has long been one of Tomlin's most able comedy writers. At some point, perhaps, she conceived Moment by Moment as an extended stand-up routine or as a screwball romance along the lines of the old Carole Lombard-William Powell comedy, My Man Godfrey (which is quoted in the film). But the movie's subject, a liaison between a bored Beverly Hills matron and a younger man, is too provocative to be entirely laughed away. Wagner deals with this dilemma by switching...
Since Travolta's lines, however drippy, are all written to be read sincerely, he escapes Moment by Moment alive. He works powerfully hard to make Strip vulnerable and compassionate: watching him, one can imagine how the film might have dealt seriously with the issues it raises about men and women. Travolta alone, of course, cannot save the movie, but it is reassuring to know that there is at least one professional onscreen...
Whether Travolta is enough to pull in huge audiences this time around is an open question: next to this film, Grease starts to look like Citizen Kane. He appears fairly often in his Saturday Night Fever bikini briefs, but Moment by Moment's sexual drift is more than a little ambiguous. When Tomlin touches his body, she does so in the clinical manner of a doctor probing for telltale lumps...
...secret, on assimilating and liquidating the traumas and griefs of that overlong epoch. If so, then perhaps the most memorable thing about the '70s has been simply that, as Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, "nothing disastrous is happening." Such a historical pause may not at the moment seem worth remembering - but it will as soon as disaster drops among us again...