Charles stalks Laura. Literally stalks her. At night, he likes to park outside the A-frame where she lives with her husband and stepdaughter. During the day, he sometimes parks across from the little girl’s school because he knows when Laura will pick her up. When not stalking Laura, he obsesses over her. This includes building a model of her home so he can tell Laura goodnight and tuck her in. This also allows him to take the doll representing Laura’s husband (co-producer Mark Metcalfe perfectly portraying an ex-jock) and stick its head in the oven. The stepdaughter? That doll is sent to a foster home.
Laura and Charles went out for only two months. That was it. They met at work. At the time, she had just separated from her husband. Charles fell in love on sight.
“I haven’t felt ‘terrific’ in a long time,” she tells him on their first date.
“If I make you feel terrific, will you marry me?”
He’s not joking.
Then Charles drove her away. He was too obsessed, clingy, jealous, and insecure, and when she told him it was over, he said, “I’m going to rape you.”
How’s that for problematic?
The problematic-ness gets worse: There’s Sam, played by the always-great Peter Riegert. He’s a hound dog who likes to hit on the ladies. Sexist.
There’s Betty (Nora Heflin, daughter of Van Heflin), Charles’s co-worker. She’s needy, lonely, and looking for love with Charles. Nope, no agency there. Sexist.
Finally, there’s Charles’s mom Clara (a wonderful Gloria Graham). She’s a head case who spends all her time drinking in a bathtub threatening suicide. Sexist.
Is Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) a thriller?
A drama?
A feminist statement?
Nope.
Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) is a romantic dramedy and as humanist as movies come. Charles, who’s played by the great and much-missed John Heard, is our protagonist. We root for him to win Laura back. The equally great Mary Beth Hurt plays Laura. She’s perfectly cast as The One Who Got Away, the unknowable one with a piece missing that even she can’t find.
Doesn’t this all sound disgustingly inappropriate?
Doesn’t this sound exactly like the kind of movie MEN would make, terrible men who would dare ask us to sympathize with a toxic male stalker driven crazy by all the annoying women in his life — the crazy mother, the love-starved co-worker, and a beautiful woman who doesn’t know what she wants?
Except.
Men had nothing to do with creating this masterpiece.
The movie is based on the (charming, insightful, sad, and laugh-out-loud funny) debut novel of the same name by Ann Beattie (who has a cameo as a flustered waitress). And other than the ending, the movie is pretty faithful to the novel, especially in tone and spirit.
The movie was adapted (brilliantly) and beautifully directed by a woman, the late Joan Micklin Silver, a genuine talent who deserved better from Hollywood.
For all the reasons listed above, Chilly Scenes of Winter could never be made today, and what a shame that is. A delightful movie that depicts human nature as it is and then expertly and with great empathy explores the very flaws and contradictions that make the human animal the most fascinating subject art could hope for.
Does Charles behave badly? Of course, he does. Nevertheless, he’s no monster. He’s not dangerous. Instead, he is wonderfully and relatably human. He’s desperate, heartsick, and jealous. You know, like we’ve all been.
Most of all, he’s helpless. Man or woman, we’ve all been through this. Unrequited love is the worst, and because we’re imperfect, we sometimes snap just to feel some sense of control — and as a result, we sometimes do stupid things. After Charles does something exceptionally dumb (and awkwardly hilarious), his friend Sam warns him: “Man, are you going to be suffering when you come down.” And suffer he does. Who can’t identify with that? Who hasn’t felt that comedown? My wife can tell you stories, some real doozies.
“Girls used to like me,” says unemployed jacket salesman Sam at one point. Disillusion and despair during winter in Salt Lake. Nothing melodramatic. No suicides or car accidents. Just people, wonderfully flawed, funny, everyday people slugging through each interminable day trying to figure out what it’s all about.
This is a wonderful, insightful, unforgettable movie created by women who took the time to understand and sympathize with the average man who came of age during what was supposed to be the endless promise of the 60s and was then dropped into the harsh reality of the 70s. They work dead-end jobs, drink too much, worry about things like heating bills, and have no idea what to do with themselves.
It’s the dead of winter. Charles works as a civil servant who writes reports about reports for the city. His sister Susan (Tarah Nutter) is going to marry a pretentious pre-med student named Mark (co-producer Griffin Dunne in a killer scene). Charles’s boss wants him to solve his son’s sexual problems. Sam won’t leave Charles’s house, and now everyone thinks they’re gay. Charles’s mother won’t get out of the bathtub. Charles’s stepfather tries too hard to be loved by his stepkids. And Charles is in love with a woman who doesn’t know what she wants. But she probably doesn’t want Charles, and that’s eating him alive.
Laura. What a wonderful character, so real, so achingly real. The unspoken Mary Beth Hurt brings to the role — that missing piece — it’s what makes the movie work. Charles wants to be that piece, but he can’t. Maybe no one or nothing can. Laura isn’t neurotic or selfish, or narcissistic. She’s just lost, and Charles seems to love her more than she feels she deserves to be loved. At one point, she tells him:
We go to movies and you say I look better than the movie stars. We go to the best restaurant in town and you say I’m a better cook than the chef. You have this exalted view of me and I hate it. If you think I’m that great, there must be something wrong with you.
Laura’s an extraordinary creation: fetching and in need of saving. Everything that makes good men sail right into the rocks. Her husband loves her too little. Charles loves her too much. She doesn’t want to be the sun a man revolves around. She doesn’t know what she wants. But this isn’t really about Laura. Instead, it’s a movie about men created by two women who cared enough to care enough.
When Charles says, “I’m going to rape you,” it’s not meant as a joke or a threat. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, an astonishing moment that illustrates how powerless, hurt, and confused Charles is as his worst nightmare comes to life. He would never rape Laura or deliberately hurt her. It’s just that he can’t think of a better way to express his anguish. Maybe he thinks that she’d stay if she understood the depth of his feelings. Maybe he thinks that if he says something terrible, it’s like ripping off a band-aid, and the heartache won’t last as long. Maybe he’s like the rest of us: a fallible human being who sometimes says things he wishes he hadn’t.
Instead of dividing and shaming us, movies used to want to help us understand and accept one another.
***SPOILERS ROSEBUD IS A SLED SPOILERS***
In the novel, Laura comes back to Charles, which is perfect for the novel.
In the movie, Laura leaves her husband but still isn’t sure she wants Charles. So he decides he can’t live like this anymore and tells her it’s over.
“It’s not that it doesn’t still hurt,” he explains. “It’s that you get used to it.”
This is perfect ending for the movie.
Instead of breeding narcissists by telling us we’re perfect (and those other people are all bad), movies used to inspire us to be better, to grow, to move on, and mature.
Movies used to be great.
Chilly Scenes of Winter is also a reminder that the #MeToo movement is a fascist over-correction of what is a real problem. Initially, the studio tacked a happy ending on Chilly, released it as Head over Heels, and watched it flop. Micklin Silver fought and fought for her ending and the original title. She won, and that movie was released in 1982, earned solid reviews, and grossed $40 million. Today, thanks to people like me (and TCM’s Robert Osborne) who championed it for decades, Chilly Scenes of Winter is now considered a classic (and soon a Criterion release). Nevertheless, over thirty years, Micklin Silver had to fight and scrape for every movie she got made. For thirty years, she had to prove herself over and over again, and she did. Nevertheless, oh-so-progressive Hollywood never gave her the studio film she deserved.
Movies used to be great.
Left-wing Hollywood, not so much…
You can watch the whole movie on YouTube, at least for now.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.