Lovelace

Film Review by Josh Slater-Williams | 23 Aug 2013
Film title: Lovelace
Director: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard, Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, Chris Noth, Bobby Cannavale, Hank Azaria, Juno Temple, Adam Brody, James Franco, Debi Mazar, Eric Roberts, Wes Bentley, Chloë Sevigny
Release date: 23 Aug
Certificate: 18

A very strong performance from Amanda Seyfried anchors this biopic of the most notorious period of Linda Boreman’s life, that of her troubled marriage to the abusive control-freak Chuck Traynor (the reliably unnerving Sarsgaard) and subsequent foray into pornography as Linda Lovelace, star of 1972’s infamous Deep Throat.

Painting a relatively light portrait of Linda’s journey from Floridian innocence to superstardom, albeit with certain marital tensions intact, the narrative later rewinds and exposes a much darker truth to prior incidental details, fully exposing Traynor’s violent tendencies and how he exploited and coerced his wife into both pornography and prostitution.

This is a relatively successful story tool, framed by Linda taking a lie-detector test years later, and helps it stand apart from films mining similar territory. That being said, for all its apparent aims to reveal Linda’s real story, it is bothersome that the filmmakers, perhaps through wanting to rigidly stick to this Rashomon-esque narrative device, seem to have no interest in her subsequent campaigning for feminist issues and anti-pornography movements that defined far more of her life.