FATAL ATTRACTION
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
In 2012, "Fatal Attraction" will celebrate its 25th anniversary as a pop-culture moment in film history. I do not begrudge those who like this picture but I have been on the fence as to its dubious popularity and what the film actually says about marital infidelity. The surprise is that it says nothing at all. It takes a serious issue that many marriages face, turns it and twists into thriller dynamics on the order of the Grand Guignol of Horrors, and ends with a horribly misguided slasher film finish! The whole film is misguided.
Let's go back to 1987 for a moment. I first saw "Fatal Attraction" in theaters back in a cold December evening in that year, and I came away agreeing completely with Roger Ebert's pan of the film. The ending was dishonest and disgraceful, and a disservice to what preceded it. Let's backtrack for the moment to the plot of the film. Dan (Michael Douglas) is a successful New York attorney who is happily married to Beth (Anne Archer, in one of many thankless roles she has played). They also have a cute daughter who wants a bunny rabbit! Dan meets a sophisticated book editor, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), at a business meeting where she notices he has cream cheese on his chin. They have dinner and before you know it, they are boinking in the kitchen sink and in elevators! Dan doesn't take this fling seriously, though he admits he is happily married to Beth and repeatedly meets with Alex. "Then why are you here?," asks Alex. Good question because the marriage between Dan and Beth is not shown to have any flaws at all. Dan and Beth are shown to be happy and they have a cute happy child (one of the cutest shown in a film in a long time). So did Dan do this to have a thrill because the wife was out of town with the in-laws, or did he do it to see if he could get away with it? He doesn't use any contraception, nor does Alex since she makes the claim she is pregnant! Before you can say "she will not be ignored," we have Alex threatening suicide by cutting her wrists, attacking Dan with a knife, throwing acid on Dan's car, and, well, then she becomes a raging psychopath with a butcher knife who cuts herself in the leg when threatening Beth!
SPOILER ALERTS but you knew it was coming. Dan practically drowns Alex when Alex invades their home. Alex wakes up from her brief bathtub coma and Beth shoots her in the heart! So two lives are claimed, technically, Alex and Dan's future baby. Amazing how, at the time, this was completely avoided in any criticism whatsoever, aside from Ebert's review. The original ending that was shown in Japan and in previews in the U.S. had Alex committing suicide to the musical strains of "Madame Butterfly" by slicing her neck with the butcher knife. The knife had Dan's fingerprints thus framing him for Alex's death. What was also shown was a later scene of Beth finding evidence that could get Dan free. This apparently was not the ending that the American audience wanted. Frankly, it could have ended with Dan's arrest and that would be fitting for a film noir story but "Fatal Attraction" does not develop as a noir story. The bloodbath ending that was shot and used has nothing to do with what preceded the film either since Alex was turned into a Jason Voorhees villain who can rise from the dead. Such an ending also plagued and trivialized a Julia Roberts supposedly psychological thriller from 1991, "Sleeping With the Enemy."
So why do I dislike "Fatal Attraction"? Because the film starts strong as a psychological and moral story about a woman who clings to a married man who wants nothing to do with her, but it does not develop the characters along a psychological plane. We never truly know what makes Dan tick or Alex, or the far too underdeveloped role of Beth. The film, written by James Dearden, goes for the obvious: it amps up the feverish pitch of a thriller with a cop-out ending that is more troubling than germane to the story. Glenn Close is absolutely excellent in the early part of the film, especially in the dinner sequence that is handled with sublime restraint. I also like some of the early scenes between Alex and Dan as they sit in the park. But the movie is in a rush to get a roller-coaster ride mentality going, opting for needless and perfunctory scenes of an actual roller-coaster ride with Dan's kidnapped child; the gratuitous bunny boiled scene (Stephen King argued that one of the staples of Gothic horror is animal mutilations, but it shouldn't be included in a seemingly psychological drama); Alex arriving unannounced at Dan's apartment, which is a startlingly intense scene but, again, feels perfunctory; Beth getting into a car collision that would be at home in an action flick; and all the trimmings in the last half of the film that belong to the slasher film genre. Director Adrian Lyne (who helmed the stylish "Flashdance" and the haunting "Jacob's Ladder") loses all patience with subtlety after a while and gives the audience what they want: a bloodbath tinged with a psychological bent so that no married men or women ever consider having an extramarital affair. Sorry, the TV show "Maury" has proven that married couples still engage in affairs and the divorce rate is higher than ever. With regards to what should've been a controversial ending, Glenn Close, in a recent Entertainment Weekly article, claims she did not understand why Alex was made into a psychopath. I also want to point out that though Close's character, Alex, is pregnant and refuses to have an abortion, it is her choice and she is entitled to it so the double whammy of having her killed and along with her unborn baby leaves me feeling queasy. "Fatal Attraction" is ultimately a morally problematic film.
I held my tongue for many years on the pros and cons of "Fatal Attraction." I have seen it more than once and still feel that the film is simply gibberish, a supposedly moral tale of adultery that has no real morality to it. It starts off as a great film, and betrays every single idea it started to develop by soaking it with blood. The blood gives the audience a visceral, adrenaline rush, but it is hardly an intellectual rush.
