Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THAT ferocious and self-annihilating way," wrote Phillip Roth in the voice of Alex Portnoy, "in which so many Jewish men of his generation served their families, my father served my mother, my sister Hannah but particularly me. Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream...
Nothing gets gritty in the film except the language, and then most of the grit has been taken out. Roth's book made the sex explicit and the characterizations vague, often openly begging a personal response from the reader. Lehman's movie does the reverse, making the characterizations explicit and the sex removed. The sets are overit and uninteresting. And little of the Jewish ambience is evoked visually; being Jewish to Lehman means the mother wearing a mezzuzah, being Gentile means a Catholic hooker wearing a cross...
Being caught in the middle of Ernest Lehman's debasement of Roth's novel isn't funny either. As the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus proved, the controlled hysteria with which Roth cauterizes his past is hard to translate into film. Actors, scenery and background music only dilute the intensity of Portnoy's brilliant lie-down comic routine on the psychoanalyst's couch. Roth's re-Joycing in the scenes of Portnoy's heroic masturbations lose their hilarious dimension and descend pathetically into the baggy-pants scatology of the oldtime burlesque skit...
...part: his high, shiny cheeks and full, wavy hair give him the bright man-child appearance to complement the 33 -year-old character's infantile emotions. But when Benjamin opens his mouth, he seems about as out of place as Howdy Doody in Hamlet. His readings of Roth's lines are pure balsa wood...
...novel's plot remains more or less intact, but it is laden with Lehman's heavy touches of sympathy and maudlin sentimentality. These do little to focus Roth's savage vision: Jewishness as a perpetual circumcision of the psyche...