Rachel, Rachel (1968)

What begins as a feel-good-human-interest story turns into a mystery, then a tragedy, and ultimately an outrage.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

In the turbulent cultural and political year of 1968, movies hadn't quite yet figured out how they wanted to address current events, or indeed whether they wanted to address them at all. The year's Oscar winner for Best Picture was "Oliver!," an entertaining but utterly irrelevant big-budget musical; "Funny Girl," another stage-to-screen musical that hasn't aged at all well, was also among the nominees. "The Lion in Winter" found Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn bickering in period costumes, while "Romeo and Juliet" gave Shakespeare a jolt of sexiness for the younger generation. Movies that actually felt like they had their finger on the uneasy pulse of the changing times, like "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Rosemary's Baby," "Faces," and "The Battle of Algiers," were nominated in lesser categories but none were up for the big prize. That fifth slot went to "Rachel, Rachel," in which Paul Newman directed his wife, Joanne Woodward, to a Best Actress nomination."Rachel, Rachel" certainly did not deserve a place at the Oscar podium above those titles just mentioned that weren't even nominated, but it does have much to recommend it, and the themes it's about speak more to a modern-day audience than those of many of its contemporaries, because they're both universal and timeless. Woodward plays a woman in her 30s, living with her annoying and needy mother and watching her life slowly drip away from her day by day. It's about that moment -- and I have to believe anyone over a certain age has experienced it at least to some degree -- where one realizes that he/she isn't so much living a life as dying a slow and inevitable death. What one does with the time in between suddenly becomes urgent in a way it hasn't ever felt before, and one understands how easy it would be to do nothing and let that slow death gradually come. Woodward's character, brought up in a mortuary and morbidly obsessed with death, doesn't exactly figure out what to do with the time left to her, but she does figure out that she needs to try something different, which is perhaps the best any of us can hope for. Woodward gives a beautiful and nuanced performance as a shy turtle coming out of her shell one painful inch at a time. The movie is melancholy and sad, but it's also hopeful in its conclusion that it's never too late to at least make a grab for, if not happiness, then at least contentment.In addition to its nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress, the film also received nominations for Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons, as Rachel's closet lesbian friend), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Stewart Stern). Newman himself was not nominated for Best Director, which doesn't really surprise me. The Academy has always shown a penchant for acknowledging the showy over the subtle when it comes to that particular category.Grade: A

Joanne Woodward effectively plays a bored and boring middle-aged school teacher who still lives with her mother at a funeral home in Connecticut. She's on the verge of mental collapse, but hides it well and pretends everything's okay. A guy from her childhood comes to town from the big city (James Olson) and her appetite for change comes to the fore.This potent drama was Paul Newman's first stab at directing and it's the best cinematic depiction of the inward struggle of flesh and spirit -- id and superego -- I've ever seen. This struggle explains why it's called "Rachel, Rachel." Rachel is experiencing the undercurrent conflict between spiritual and carnal impulses. She's stuck between goody-goody Rachel and libertine Rachel and is therefore in living limbo. Various outside factors encourage this lifeless state: Disturbing childhood memories of living in a funeral home, a mother who essentially views Rachel as her personal servant and a genuine friend who's love is starting to become unhealthy (Estelle Parsons).The film features a mind-blowing pentecostal church sequence that lasts 10-12 minutes. I can't believe Newman had the cojones to include this scene and it's pulled off expertly with Terry Kiser as the guest preacher who "speaks in tongues," which is what Calla (Parsons) tells Rachel when it's reveal that he's the speaker. Parsons is fabulous here, by the way.Due to the subject matter and the fact that this is a drama there are some boring stretches, so you have to be in the mood for a serious drama. Nevertheless, the film deserves credit for having the gonads to show real life and refusing to be politically correct -- an amazing drama.In case you didn't know, Newman and Woodward were husband & wife for 50 years, up to his death in 2008.The film runs 101 minutes and was shot in Connecticut.GRADE: A-

Frankly, it appears that mine is a minority opinion. My own favorite story of a lonely woman is SUMMERTIME with Katharine Hepburn which had a lot more flavor as well as a genuinely entertaining and moving story.However, RACHEL, RACHEL drags along at an interminably slow pace with many close-ups of star Joanne Woodward as she reflects on the emptiness of her dull, spinisterish life in a small town. And the script provides no scenes that give us any real hope that things have changed for her by the time we get to the fantasized ending. Most of the scenes are played too long to hold viewer interest.As a result, I found it tedious and somewhat boring at times because nothing of real interest seemed to happen, except in a few flashbacks showing the effect her disturbing childhood had on her upbringing.The acting is competent but I never found the story involving enough to care about the fate of the main character or the few supporting characters for that matter. It fails completely to be anything but a character study of a lonely teacher without the needed dramatic power to make us feel her suffering.

It's amazing to me how far and how fast we've fallen in the realm of cinema. I caught this movie midway and was gripped by the intense emotion Joanne Woodward conveys with her distraught portrayal of an emotionally inexperienced "middle-aged" woman (35 years old and middle-aged!). Naturally, the acting was so compelling that I found the film and watched it through. The direction is wonderfully simplistic and the portrayals deep and rich with emotion and confusion. There's not a film that's been made in the past 25 years, perhaps with the exception of The Apostle, that captures the emotion of a common person with such depth.