She\u2019d initially been the Hollywood couple\u2019s brighter star, winning an Oscar in 1958 for The Three Faces of Eve<\/em> while he was still struggling in the shadow of his former Actors\u2019 Studio classmates Marlon Brando and James Dean. Ten years later, their career trajectories had reversed. Woodward no longer had the heat to get a movie like this made, but her husband could call the shots. He\u2019d intended to only produce the picture, but unable to find a filmmaker he liked to take it on, Newman said<\/a> “What the hell, I majored in directing at the Yale Drama School,” before telling the crew, \u201cI’m a virgin and I need your help.\u201d Adapted from Margaret Laurence\u2019s novel A Jest of God<\/em> by the couple\u2019s longtime friend Stewart Stern, it\u2019s a low-key character study tuned to Woodward\u2019s exquisite performance, one of the decade\u2019s finest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirty-five-year-old Rachel Cameron is entering what she calls \u201cthe exact middle of her life,\u201d lamenting her \u201clast ascending summer\u201d before settling into spinsterhood. She\u2019s a desperately lonely woman, making tea and sandwiches for her domineering mother\u2019s elderly bridge club in a modest apartment above her family\u2019s old funeral home. Yet Rachel is neither morbid nor a mope. She\u2019s a good teacher and people enjoy her company, especially her classroom colleague Calla (Estelle Parsons), who wants to make sure Rachel hears the good news about our lord and savior Jesus Christ. The character\u2019s suffering is in silence, conveyed to us through Woodward\u2019s astonishingly subtle work and Newman\u2019s obtrusive, often club-footed direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film features so many close-ups of Woodward that a friend of Newman\u2019s joked that watching the movie was like looking through his wallet photos. But you can hardly blame the guy, as his wife registers so vividly the character\u2019s secrets and lusty longings. Rachel falls into a brief affair with an old high school acquaintance who\u2019s home for some unpleasant family business. He\u2019s a beery, loutish sort played by James Olson, waving all sorts of red flags to which our na\u00efve schoolteacher is heartbreakingly oblivious, especially when he asks if she\u2019s \u201clooking for action.\u201d Rachel\u2019s still a virgin at age 35, a status of which he has barely relieved her before she\u2019s recklessly telling him that she loves him and wants a child. (No surprise he skips town the next day.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a \u201csummer that changed my life\u201d movie about a woman entering middle age, with Rachel\u2019s first heartbreak making her stronger and able to assert herself for the first time. It\u2019s a love letter to late bloomers. But even moreso it\u2019s a love letter to Woodward, who Newman always insisted was the genius of the pair, while he considered himself a lucky guy with a good work ethic. Woodward was such a seemingly effortless performer, while Newman didn\u2019t really hit his stride until nearly the end of the 1970s, when he finally learned how to relax onscreen. Compelling as his earlier performances may have been, you could still spot the elbow grease. Newman was a workhorse, and that striving comes through in Rachel, Rachel<\/em>\u2019s more overwrought sequences. The film is best when he simply points the camera at his wife, which was the whole reason for making the movie in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRachel, Rachel\u201d is currently streaming on HBO Max<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/rachel-rachel-scaled-1024x667.jpg\")
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Rachel, Rachel<\/em> is one of those movies wearing a big old date stamp that says 1968, full of fads that would quickly fall out of fashion. A reverb-heavy narration track echoes snippets of the character\u2019s anxious interior monologue, which is all already there for us to read on Woodward\u2019s face. There are jagged cuts to soft-focus fantasy sequences slathered in freaky-deaky flute music, with the camera pushed in too close to everyone like a bad trip from a \u201860s head movie. None of this nonsense is remotely necessary, as Newman has assembled a top-notch cast and is an excellent director of actors. When he hangs back and trusts them, Rachel, Rachel<\/em> is extraordinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n