"Up Close and Personal" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL March 2, 1996 I had quite a bit of trouble getting in to see "Up Close and Personal" last night -- it was sold out at the screening time I wanted to go to so I had to come back for the late show and I'm not a late night person. Sometime when this happens, if the film doesn't hold my attention I'm likely to be pretty harsh on it in the morning when I write my reviews. I'm happy to say "Up Close and Personal" was worth the trouble and kept me interested, involved, and moved. That was a relief, because a local print reviewer had trashed it and, besides, I wasn't expecting anything very feminist from a project that Joan Didion (who with her husband John Gregory Dunne wrote the screenplay) was involved in (as I recall, she's someone who wrote attacks on the feminist movement long before it was the current fashion to do so). But this is the story of a woman's rise to prominence in the television news industry, it is told from the woman's point of view. The narrative starts as technicians are setting up to videotape a bio spot on Tally Attwater (Michelle Pfeiffer) for a television network affiliates banquet and the director asks her to tell some anecdotes about how she broke into the business. A long flashback ensues that tells the whole story of how she faked a demo tape that seemed to show that she had a lot more experience than she actually had and was hired by a station in Miami. Her boss there, Warren Justice (Robert Redford), is a former big-time network newsman on the down side of his career because he was a maverick who offended a lot of people and when he made a big mistake he was out there all alone. His manner is the arrogance of someone who knows he's better at what he does than the people he has to work with. He treats Tally terribly at first, having her make the coffee, pick up his cleaning from the laundry, and criticising every piece of work she tries to do. In retrospect--at least as far as the criticism is concerned--he's giving her invaluable lessons in how to tell a tv news story. The one thing that he doesn't do that everyone expects he will, is make her his mistress of the moment. Just as he's moving in that direction she has to go home to Reno to help out her sister who is having a crisis over a man. When Warren shows up there she is furious at his intervening and tells him how she will not fall into the trap her sister did, she will not say "Good bye Upper Westside," that is, she won't give up her plans to get to the top, just because some man comes along. Warren, to his credit, honors that. It's not until Tally wants to show what she can do on her own, without Warren's tutelage, and gets a job in a bigger market, Philadelphia, that they finally act on the mutual attraction between them. How their careers and lives play out after she makes her move in the direction of the big-time is very engrossing, intelligently written, and the emotional truths rang true to me. Jon Avnet directed this big-budget, mainstream Hollywood film with flair and care. He has a superb supporting cast. I was especially taken with Kate Nelligan's performance as an older, big-name tv newswoman who is Warren's ex- wife and is very warm and supportive to both Warren and Tally. Stockard Channing plays another version of tv news woman, the top dog at the Philly station who has never quite made it to be big time and who is pretty nasty when the younger, prettier, Tally arrives. When she's replaced by Tally and has to take a job in a less prestigious market, instead of blaming her, there's a nice scene in which she makes the point that it's not Tally's fault but the fault of an industry that thinks that a woman over the age of 42 is too old to be on her way up. Once Tally and Warren get together and subsequently marry, the relationship between them is very appealing. Maybe it's because Didion and Dunne are themselves married to one another and know about the tensions and joys of a marriage between two more or less equally matched partners with careers that are important to them. I'd call this a love story rather than a romance, but "Up Close and Personal" has many more facets to it than those words imply, and, in contrast to another recent love story about mature adult professionals, "The American President," here the woman does not have to choose between career and love. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce the review without the permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu