Amanda Seyfried earnestly attempts an honest portrayal of Linda Boreman, but the Deep Throat actor remains a mystery
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Directors: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Entertainment grade: B+
History grade: C+
Linda Boreman, credited as Linda Lovelace, was the star of 1972 porn film Deep Throat. Later in life, she became a prominent figure in the anti-pornography movement.
Structure
Lovelace is a film in two parts. In the first, a young, naive and compliant Linda (Amanda Seyfried) falls in love with shady Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), stars in Deep Throat and achieves fame in a whirl of kitschy 70s glamour. Then the film flips back to the beginning and starts filling in the nasty bits it left out the first time round. This is a clever way to handle Boreman's own take on events. Like Katie Price, she published four autobiographies. (Price has announced her fifth, which would put her on a par with Julius Caesar – though historians think Caesar actually wrote two of his himself).
Evidence
The first two Lovelace books, published in the 70s, were lascivious tales of her adventures as a "superfreak". The second two, in the 80s, told a much darker story of her being raped, beaten, prostituted and forced into pornography at gunpoint by Traynor. At the time, and perhaps still now, many have found it difficult to accept Boreman's apparently changed story. Yet it's clear from even the most cursory reading – or even not reading and just looking at the pictures – that the earlier autobiographies were intended as fantasy-pornography rather than strictly documentary material. Both Boreman and Traynor stated that Traynor wrote the first; Boreman said her later boyfriend David Winters, who isn't in the film, wrote the second.
Boreman faced much greater opposition to bring the third, Ordeal, to the public. She tried 33 publishers before she found one who would accept it, and they obliged her – as shown in the film – to pass an extensive lie-detector test on its contents. She stuck by its claims for the rest of her life. This makes Ordeal substantially more credible as a piece of historical evidence than the first two books, though it is so upsetting some readers may wish it wasn't.
Pornography
The film captures the spirit of Boreman's later books, but it could be accused of tidying things up. Some of these tidyings are reasonable: presenting Boreman's harrowing account of appearing under coercion in a bestiality porn film called Dogarama to a mainstream audience would be, to say the least, challenging. More questionable is its construction of a conventional fall-from-grace narrative. Lovelace shows Linda being drawn step by step into ever worse things by Chuck, culminating in him selling her to five men for a gang bang after the Deep Throat premiere. The real Boreman and Traynor both agreed this did happen (though Boreman said it was rape, while Traynor claimed she "wanted to do it"), but it took place right at the beginning of their relationship – before their marriage, before Deep Throat, before fame.
Effectively, the story as told in Ordeal flows the other way from the film. Boreman's relationship with Traynor began as complete hell, and – though it did not improve – her increasing celebrity gradually allowed her more independence. Interestingly, it was porn stardom that gave her the chance to escape. As she put it, Deep Throat was "at once a low point and a salvation".
People
Without exception, the performances in Lovelace are brilliant – especially the principals, as well as Robert Patrick and an unrecognisable Sharon Stone as Linda's ice-cold parents. Seyfried gives presence to a role that could have been flimsy. Off camera, Linda Lovelace was a deeply damaged person stuck in a really terrible relationship. After years of abuse, no one knew who the real Linda was – perhaps including her.
Politics
Some critics have taken issue with the fact that the film ends before Boreman's involvement in the anti-pornography movement, alongside feminists Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. Both Steinem and MacKinnon advised on the film. Demi Moore was originally cast as Steinem, then replaced by Sarah Jessica Parker, but her scenes didn't make it to the final cut. That story isn't straightforward, either. Boreman later complained that some feminists used her for their own gain, though she remained friendly with Dworkin and MacKinnon.
Verdict
A valiant attempt to make a fair and emotionally truthful biopic of Linda Lovelace – though the woman herself remains unknowable.
More from the Reel history series
• Reel history on Fair Game
• Reel history on The Enigma of Kasper Hauser
• Reel history on Land of the Pharaohs
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/aug/29/lovelace-porn-star-feminist-amanda-seyfried
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