Love Story (1970)
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I blame Wikipedia's list of Christmas movies for the fact this one slipped under my radar as long as it did - it's on there but for whatever reason it's currently separated into a category containing only itself. That's absurd, by the way: this is part of a long tradition of Christmas romantic dramas dating back to early talkies and continuing through the present (I'm realizing belatedly Love Story is more or less the template used for the 2022 film, Spoiler Alert, though the holidays are are employed differently).
It's directed by Arthur Hiller, who made an impressive number of films I haven't seen along with a few I did (Man of La Mancha being the most notable). For purposes of summation, let's start by saying Love Story is a very good, very beautiful movie... that's also perhaps a tad laughably melodramatic at points. This seems to be the origin of the line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry," which would have been hard to take seriously even before it was used and mocked past the point of cliche. This thing is cheesy, over-the-top, and absurd. And I loved it.
I should probably qualify that. I loved this as a comedy and an artistic film more than a drama. This movie didn't manage to wring any tears out of me, and I am not hard to get tears out of. I never really connected with the characters as real human beings or felt for their plight or the tragedy at the core of the film. This thing is, in many ways, basically the 1970 version of Titanic: a grandiose, melodramatic, tragic romantic epic which cleaned up at the box office.
That tragic part isn't a spoiler, by the way, unless you're worried about having the first twenty seconds spoiled. The opening lines establish that Jenny (Ali MacGraw) has just died, and Oliver (Ryan O'Neal) is mourning her. The titular love story is a short one as measured in years.
The point being, this didn't connect with me on that level... but it did still connect. Hell, it even connected with me emotionally, through the evocative wintery imagery, beautiful score (it won the Academy Award in that category), and even some of the underlying philosophy. And more than that, I found it pleasantly charming and surprisingly funny. I enjoyed it quite a bit and absolutely recommend it.
Normally, this is where a spoiler warning would go. And, if you're interested in seeing it and are adamantly opposed to having any of the plot spoiled, feel free to close the window. But... look. I'm a spoiler-averse person, and in my opinion nothing I could possibly say here is going to spoil a damn thing, at least until I start digging into tone, theme, and application of the holidays. And that stuff would probably only register as a spoiler to an excessively weird nerd like me. Proceed accordingly.
The movie opens and closes on the shot of Oliver sitting alone staring at an empty ice rink and reminiscing. In between, we get the story of his relationship with Jenny, who he met when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and she was studying music at Radcliffe. Oliver is an athletic pre-law student from a wealthy family, while Jenny is sarcastic, witty, and poor. Immediately upon meeting Oliver, Jenny starts needling and insulting him, though it's clear she's interested. If the gender roles were reversed, this would come off as toxic behavior, but here it's just delightful and fun.
Soon, they're a couple, and before long we meet their families. For all intents and purposes, in each case the only significant figure is their father. Jenny lost her mother years before, while Oliver's relationship to his father is the movie's only other story arc. Jenny has a close relationship with her father, as evidenced by the two being comfortable telling each other they love them. Oliver's family, on the other hand, is preoccupied with appearance and etiquette, to the point Oliver only address his father as "Sir," at least until the ending. He also resents the way his father pressures him into a life he isn't sure he wants.
When he decides to marry Jenny, his father asks him to wait a few years. The two fight, and Oliver ends up being cut off from the family fortune, which is a problem, as he had planned to go to law school. Jenny supports him through: they get married, move into a cheap apartment, and she works while he attends classes. In the midst of this, we see their first Christmas, where Oliver's picking up work at a Christmas tree lot and Jenny's teaching kids to sing.
More time passes. Oliver graduates with honors and gets a well-paying job in New York. They move and start trying to have a family, but they're unable to conceive. They get medical testing to determine the cause of the problem, and Oliver (though not Jenny - sexism is a bitch) is informed that Jenny is terminally ill. Taking the doctors' advice, he keeps this from her a while. Eventually, she learns and isn't pleased with the secrecy (though she forgives him immediately). To the movie's credit, the implication is that Jenny should have been told - she's strong enough to handle anything, and Oliver should have known this.
By now it's the Christmas season again, and he and Jenny spend time together until she needs to be hospitalized. To afford better care, Oliver swallows his pride and asks his father for a loan, though he doesn't reveal the reason. She passes soon after (somewhat infamously, suffering no visible symptoms or apparent pain). As he leaves the hospital, Oliver runs into his father, who's learned the truth about the reason for the loan and come to apologize. Oliver repeats the "love means never having to say you're sorry" bit (Jenny said this to him earlier) and calls his father, "father." The movie closes where it began, with him alone reflecting on his loss and what it all means.
As you'd expect, the movie's main theme centers around love, though maybe not in the sense you'd think. Jenny's philosophy - which seems to be the one the movie embraces - is specific. That "not saying sorry" line that became a punchline for five decades actually has a bit of weight in context, as it encompasses the idea that to truly love someone is to love all of them, faults included. Further, this "all of them" is based in a materialist framework: Jenny states outright that she can't imagine a world better than the one she's in, citing music and love as the reasons why. In doing so, she rejects faith as having any meaning to her. The movie doesn't entirely connect these points, but the implication seems to be that if there were a heaven, those in it would be incomplete, as their bodies wouldn't make the transition. If loving something is to love it in its entirety, it serves to reason a heavenly existence wouldn't encompass that completeness or the wholeness of that love and therefore be less significant than an Earthly existence.
That's right, we're not just looking at the rare good 1970s US Christmas movie: we've found an even rarer atheist Christmas movie. Probably. I mean, that's not the only way to interpret this. You could view Jenny's death as a repudiation of that ideology, but that doesn't really align with the ending, which shows Jenny's love as unconditional and admirable. The movie certainly seems to be elevating love as the highest ideal and outright stating that God, heaven, and faith aren't exceptions.
The film's use of Christmas is likewise fascinating. The holidays make up approximately a third of the movie's runtime in total, with the bulk of that around the end. However it feels longer, as far more of the film is set at winter, often showcasing snowy landscapes and bare branches. This of course foreshadows the tragedy encompassing the narrative, but it also creates an impression that time isn't flowing normally. There are a handful of sequences set in other seasons (though most of these are indistinguishable from other days in winter). The first Christmas we see lasts only about six minutes before cutting to perhaps the only unambiguously summer sequence. Five minutes later, it's winter again.
Even before we see Christmas, the holidays are alluded to humorously a couple times. Between that, the wintery scenery, and recurring holidays, you're left with the sense time is as frozen as the imagery. Which of course it is - keep in mind this is all framed as Oliver's memory as he reflects on losing the love of his life.
The holidays are often used in movies to highlight the passage of time, but here that's inverted. Instead, the film is capturing the sense of time being flattened by memory and emotion. I think that's an ingenious use of the holidays.
Oh, and of course they're also weaponized to contrast Jenny's impending demise against ironically bright decorations in the hospital at the end. But that's hardly unique.
As I said before, I wasn't deeply won over by the characters as people, but I did enjoy watching Jenny as a character. I found MacGraw's take on the character a bit one-note, particularly at the start, but I really liked the note. She feels like something of a forerunner to the brilliant, sarcastic female characters of the '90s (I never watched much Daria, but from the limited amount I've seen the characters feel very similar). She comes off far smarter than Oliver, who's just unlikeable enough for it to be fun watching her toy with him, but not so unlikeable we resent the love story.
It's unfortunate the producers forced writer Erich Segal to change her background from Jewish to lapsed Catholic - it would have been nice having a Jewish character this cool in a movie this successful, even if she was destined to die.
This is absolutely a movie you could pick apart - as I keep noting, the melodrama is a bit heavy-handed, and the characters don't feel entirely real. But for my money, the movie works in spite of these aspects (or maybe because of them - perhaps this was supposed to be a sort of meditation on love, rather than a straightforward tragedy). Either way, this is the best American Christmas movie I've seen from the 1970s to date and second best over all (this still takes the top spot for that decade).
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