willmark markika starlete
Florencia Abila
The terrible emotions I was filled with are the truth of what it means to be alive. When you live, something else dies. Even if you only eat plants, animals die for you to be able to eat. We do not talk about that often enough.
Endless Love is a novel that seems to leave unsaid as much as it says; one has the feeling that its narrator, David Axelrod, could have told a story twice as long, or could write another novel made up just of the events he has left out. What seems to me most brilliant about this novel that is brilliant on every page is the place where it chooses to begin, on the warm summer Chicago night when David sets fire to the house of the girl, and the family, that he loves. He had been banned from the house for thirty days, apparently because his relationship with Jade Butterfield had grown so intense as to be almost dangerous, and he had hoped just to set a small fire, on the porch, so that the Butterfields would have to come out and he could see them (or was that all he intended? We soon realize in this novel that we are in the hands of a first person narrator, and have only his word concerning his motivations; others see things differently). The fire, however, has consequences he had never imagined. Scott Spencer seems to be taking up his narrative at the end, the end of a fabulous love story in which a boy falls hopelessly in love with a girl and, by extension, with her family, but really his story is not of that adolescent love, but of its consequences. The consequences are endless.
David is the only child of a Chicago lawyer, a man whose compassion for the oppressed and for lost causes has never allowed him to make much money. Arthur Axelrod and his wife Rose, in fact, had been members of the Communist Party; they continued consistently to support leftist causes, and David has grown up in a shabby city apartment and surrounded by the lunatic fringe that supports extremist causes. It seems no wonder, on the surface of it, that he would fall in love with the Butterfields, a family with three children inhabiting a large rambling house in a residential neighborhood. The Butterfields seem a warm family, remarkably open-minded, but very close-knit; it is not surprising that David would be drawn to their domesticity, though really, of course, he is attracted to Jade, the willowy, intense daughter of the family. But the novel does not try to describe the awakening of these passions in detail. We see their awakenings in glimpses of the past, sidelong glances; the novel focuses on what comes later.
I purposely relate almost none of the events of Endless Love, because it is a novel which partly achieves its effects by the stunning nature of its surprises. It is remarkable, looking back, that there are as few events described as there are; Endless Love is one of those books which, strung out over the space of more than ten years, tells its whole story by telling very little in enormous detail. The effortless narrative technique is masterful, and the prose itself has a sharpness and richness that seem capable of describing almost anything. The scenes of sex, for instance, the immense epic scenes of sex, are absolutely breathtaking, but never gratuitous; they are central to the story Spencer is telling, perhaps the most central thing.
Endless Love was actually published in hardback over a year ago, but has now come out in a highly publicized paperback edition (for once all the hype is worth it) that is marred only by a surprising number of typographical errors. It is hard to understand why Avon did not take a little more care with its product. At a time, however, when publishing is supposedly being taken over by commercial interests, it is comforting to know that so excellent a literary commodity can receive so much attention.
What I finally most admire about this novel is the way that its characters live for me, the way Ann Butterfield, for instance, becomes a person whose vulnerable self-assurance has touched me, and changed the way I think about myself. There is an immense sadness to this book, especially at the end, but it is a sadness that is squarely faced and thus in a sense overcome. It is the sadness that the past inevitably has, that these things happened and those did not, a life was given to this and not to that, a happiness that seemed available was not achieved. It is a sadness that the reality of our lives always has, but to find it expressed with such clarity and poignance in a work of art is rare.
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- When it opened in 1981, following director Franco Zeffirelli's nationwide talent search to find teenage romantic leads, Endless Love, inspired by the 1978 Scott Spencer novel of the same name, starred 16-year-old Brooke Shields and 23-year-old Martin Hewitt.
This remake, three decades later, also called Endless Love, is a look at first love, or puppy love, or whatever we want to call what seems like unshakable adolescent obsessiveness, but with the sexuality and drug use handled implicitly so that the film was able to gain a commercially more sensible PG-13 rating, given its youthful target audience.
David is not college bound. He works as a mechanic, repairing cars in the garage owned by his father (played by Robert Patrick) and supplements his income by working as a valet with his best friend, Mace (Dayo Okeniyi).
And Bruce Greenwood and Joely Richardson are Hugh and Anne Butterfield, Jade's disapproving parents, the former a controlling surgeon hoping to groom his daughter for a lucrative medical career. They're determined to head this budding relationship off at the pass.
Director Shana Feste (Country Strong, The Greatest), who co-wrote the screenplay about class differences and social mobility with Joshua Safran, alternates between exuberant scenes of the young lovers exploring their blossoming relationship and scenes of the father trying to put an end to it despite his wife's modest protestations in the name of her daughter's apparent happiness after years of depression.
Dramatic and romantic clichs and conventions abound, but the film's execution and energy are strong enough to keep us plugged in: the young audience being addressed should find themselves sufficiently engaged.
The British leads (both 23 in real life) have decent chemistry, but neither of them has the screen presence to register strongly enough to move us away from the shallow end of the pool as they superficially explore the universal conflict between a youthful desire for decisionmaking independence and parental protectiveness and territoriality.
However, Pettyfer has charm and appeal, palpably raising the game he brought to his earliest roles. Wilde holds her own even though she hasn't yet mastered the technique of calibrating the changes in her character from scene to scene so that they don't seem abrupt and arbitrary.
So we'll refuse to stop seeing 2 stars out of 4 for the passable romantic drama, Endless Love, (Take Two). The love does prove to be endless but the film, fortunately for its young fans, is not.
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