In my last post I commented that, despite garnering a Best Actress nod for Away from Her, Julie Christie wasn’t on screen enough to warrant an Oscar nomination for a leading role. I felt similarly after seeing how much screen time she was given for Afterglow, the film for which she was nominated for her third Best Actress Oscar in 1997. Afterglow is an ensemble movie, which makes it hard for anyone to be classified as a lead performer, however I would say that Nick Nolte’s philandering handyman Lucky is the closest thing the film has to a protagonist. The film itself is best described as a relationship drama with an older and younger couple entering into partner swapping, despite neither being aware of this fact. While an intriguing concept on paper, writer/director Alan Rudolph committed the mortal sin of not making one of his central four characters likeable or sympathetic, meaning that I really didn’t care about any of their predicaments.
The film starts by introducing us to successful businessman Jeffrey Byron, who is in a loveless marriage with wife Marianne. Marianne is keen to bring a baby into their relationship, however Jeffrey appears not to want to be intimate with his wife. However, unshaken by her husband’s reluctance to have children, asks her friend to recommend a handyman to turn one of the rooms in her apartment into a child’s room. The contractor she recommends happens to be Lucky Mann, who we learn early on has regular affairs with his clients a fact that is well known by his retired actress wife Phyllis Hart. Phyllis is in a malaise as the film begins, as she learns that one of her former co-stars Jack Dana had passed away and begins to question her own mortality. Complicating matters further is the fact that Jack and Phyllis had an affair which led to her becoming pregnant whilst Lucky was in the navy. We learn that Lucky didn’t find out that their daughter Cassie wasn’t his till years later and Cassie ran away soon after, with neither hearing from her since. To find their daughter, the couple moved from L.A. to Montreal and Phyllis regularly has moments where she believes she sees her daughter. When Lucky begins working with Marianne, there is an instant attraction and they are soon engaging in affair, with Marianne believing she can trick Lucky into giving her the baby she sorely wants. Meanwhile, Phyllis watched Lucky and Marianne on a date together at a hotel where Jeffrey has just booked a suite. Not knowing that their respective partners are having an affair, Phyllis and Jeffrey begin to flirt which results him asking her to spend the weekend on a business trip with him. Initially saying no, Phyllis changes her mind after Lucky rejects her advances and she and Jeffrey almost have sex but his jealousy gets the best of him. This intertwining of the relationships results in a final scene where all four confront each other but it’s unclear if any of them get what they ultimately want.
Before reading the background to the film, I was sure that Afterglow was adapted from a play as most of it consisted of characters talking in rooms. Alan Rudolph’s dialogue also felt incredibly stagey and there was a lack of authenticity to most of the interactions between the four leads. None of the people in the film talked like anyone I’d met before and the pairings between the respective members of the couples seemingly wanted to jump into bed with each other before they’d had a meaningful conversation. I do feel that Rudolph sacrificed character development over story and specifically had the final confrontation scene in mind so had to work backwards to get there. As mentioned, Afterglow’s other primary flaw is that none of the quartet of characters are likeable, and I found it hard to sympathise with any of them. Lucky Mann appears to be the film’s protagonist and is mostly presented as a philandering brute whose charm on the opposite sex is lost on me to the extent that I didn’t understand what any of these women saw in him. Lucky’s revelation to Marianne about his daughter’s parentage came too late into the film and had this been revealed earlier it may have changed things but, as it was, this just fell flat. Although Rudolph thought we would sympathise with Marianne’s longing for warmth in her marriage, her desire to get pregnant to trap her husband made her seem unhinged. Furthermore, Marianne and Jeffrey don’t appear to like each other so why they decided to get married at all remained a mystery to me. In fairness, Jeffrey didn’t appear to like anybody, including himself, which made me think why I should bother to care about him. Jeffrey’s lack of emotion was shown in the way he reacted when his closest friend came out to him and he reacted poorly. However, this revelation didn’t feel impactful, coming out of nowhere and seeming like a slightly cheap way to show how little Jeffrey cared for those around him.
Of all the four characters, I sympathised with Phyllis the most as she was the one character who was regretful for her past decisions and was wallowing in the past by watching her old movies. Even before the revelation of the conception of her daughter, we knew Phyllis was suffering emotionally and the scene in which she feels that she can see her child on the street was the only scene which felt genuine. I think part of the reason that I empathised with Phyllis was due to the performance from Julie Christie who lifted the picture whenever she came on screen. Like in Away from Her, I felt that Christie played on the audience’s knowledge of her past, especially playing a woman who today we would call a cougar. Christie relies on the undeniable sex appeal she still had to portray an actress with a dubious filmography who many men found attractive just not her husband. Probably the most impactful scene for me was when Christie portrayed Phyllis’s need for physical contact with Lucky and her rejection of him. However, like in the last film I covered, Christie isn’t in the movie nearly long enough to be truly considered a lead performer. In my opinion, the only lead performer here is Nick Nolte whose Lucky Mann is the central figure despite being an unlikeable protagonist. Nolte’s turn never made me understand Lucky’s sex appeal and instead he appeared gruff and uninterested apart from the times he shared the screen with Christie. Meanwhile, as Jeffrey and Marianne, I found both Johnny Lee Miller and Lara Flynn Boyle to be underwhelming as the young affluent couple. I felt miller was particularly bland and he struggled at times to keep his Scottish accent at bay.
Overall, Afterglow isn’t a film that I’ll remember much and is one that wouldn’t be recalled by anyone had it not been for Christie’s Oscar nomination. Whilst Christie is the film’s only positive attribute, her contributions aren’t enough to save what I found to be a film that thought it was cleverer than it was and was populated by smug, unsympathetic characters. If there’s a way to watch Christie’s scenes in a bubble, but I don’t think that Afterglow is a film that’s essential viewing and of all the recent movies I’ve covered this is the most skippable.
Next time I close this chapter with the final Julie Christie film in the trilogy in the form of 1971’s McCabe and Mrs Miller.
everynominee 