'Flynt' obscured by pretty porn, unasked questions

By Jessica Winter

So is Larry Flynt a total whitewash? The early buzz hailed the Milos Forman-directed film as an irreverent, empathetic portrayal of the Hustler kingpin and First Amendment foot soldier--whose fight to publish his porn uncensored resulted in a Supreme Court victory in 1988--and an ebullient celebration of American gumption, commerce, and good old-fashioned sleaze. But then Gloria Steinem busted the lovefest with a January op-ed in the Times that attacked the film for glorifying a mealworm like Flynt, whose magazine once ran a cover portraying a naked woman in a meat grinder. Steinem's argument went something like this: the First Amendment protects racists as well as pornographers, but no Hollywood executive in his right mind would consider a script chronicling a young, ambitious Aryan Youth's struggle to circulate his White Now! newsletter without getting hassled by the man. So why similarly iconize an unabashed misogynist, who peddles his misogyny to millions of Americans for millions of dollars?

It's a good question. But watching The People vs. Larry Flynt, it's not one that promptly springs to mind, because as portrayed by Woody Harrelson, Larry Flynt isn't some vicious woman-hater. He's just a red-blooded American male: he likes money, he likes sex, he alternately fights with and dotes on his wife, Althea (Courtney Love), and he has a blast putting out his very profitable nudie rag. So it seems absurd when Flynt and his young publication end up in a Cincinnati court on obscenity charges. When his lawyer, baby-faced Alan Isaacson (Edward Norton, ES '91), tries to enter into evidence "27 other adult magazines legally sold in Cincinnati with material virtually identical to" Hustler, we can't help but think, Selective prosecution! The guy's being scapegoated!

Well, yes, but it's not that simple. As Steinem will readily point out, Hustler is cut from different cloth than Playboy or Penthouse. Rape pictorials, women beaten or smeared with feces--it's all familiar ground for Flynt's publication to tread. But the vast majority of us, having never opened a copy of Hustler, aren't going to know this, and the film makes sure to keep it that way. We see a pre-scandal Charles Keating waving a Hustler before an audience of concerned Christians, intoning, "You cannot hide from this." But in Forman's hands, we can. A braver, more challenging film would have thrust Flynt's sordid fetishes and fantasies in our faces, and even, perhaps, left a few of us thinking there should be stricter boundaries circumscribing the First Amendment. But striking such a balance would hinder the universalized, home-team sports crowd response Forman is seeking for the escalating legal drama, and no doubt he gets it. After Flynt is shot (and paralyzed from the waist down) outside a Georgia courtroom, Harrelson can't quite nail Flynt's resulting nerve-damaged speech impediment, and resigns himself to a half-assed Jimmy Stewart impression. Suddenly, all the elements are there: it's Capra with titties!

Well, at moments, at least. Most of the time, though, Forman stops just short of placing Flynt on a pedestal; there's a lot he's not showing you, but he's not doing a varnish job, either. Flynt's manic depression and self-destructive tendencies are evident, and though he is playing a selfish, self-aggrandizing man prone to grandstanding, Harrelson remains a generous and self-contained actor--wise, graceful, and seamless, Jimmy Stewartisms aside. One forgets he's acting. The same cannot be said of Courtney Love, but that has more to do with her burdensome public persona bleeding into the frame than with her acting ability. She and Harrelson have a volatile, bracing chemistry that is more symbiosis than sparks, and their relationship is the soul of the film.

Indeed, if Forman wanted to present a complex morality tale, he might have been wise to allegorize the stuff of the couple's lives. Larry and the bisexual Althea enjoy their share of other women; one scene in a hot tub finds them tossing a nubile young lass between them like a beach ball. They remain fiercely devoted to no one but each other, practicing a kind of selective morality that is stronger than anything the Christian right (an unnuanced, buffoonish nemesis in this film) could offer. They spend the years following Flynt's shooting in a drug-induced, codependent haze that Althea never pulls out of; she becomes addicted to heroin and contracts AIDS. Love's later scenes, spent slurring semi-coherently and stumbling about, have a ghoulish intensity, but it's wasted, just a reminder of the darker story that is left to merely cast its shadow over the courtroom platitudes and patriotism.

Forman, to his credit, doesn't attempt a celebratory ending. "We won, baby," Flynt murmurs to his wife when he gets news of the Supreme Court decision, but in so doing they have become textbook God's-vengeance cases for the religious right that Flynt antagonized (most famously in a parody of Jerry Falwell that had the preacher fornicating with his mother in an outhouse). Flynt, who spent his life exploiting sex for profit, is left impotent, while Althea dies of the most morally-loaded disease Christian zealots were ever handed. But Forman doesn't intend to plumb for irony or meaning in the Flynts' personal lives; he focuses instead on his courtroom potboiler, a surefire crowd-pleaser for the American public he wants to both celebrate and seduce. Caught somewhere between the public and private realms in telling Flynt's story, Forman intends his tale as a case study, but all the details are missing.

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