1969

Someday soon, someone is going to mine the decade of the 1970s for cultural significance and social value, and we’ll see a series of movies, plays, and books about the era. These things go in cycles, and the ’70s are due. But until that happens, we’re stuck with the ’60s.

Just how stuck we are is more apparent than ever with the arrival of 1969, a truly dreadful movie written and directed by the author of On Golden Pond, Ernest Thompson. 1969 follows the antics of a couple of college lads (played by Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Downey, Jr.) over the course of the rocky year.

Thompson’s portrait of the time is, as they say, deeply superficial. The correct posters are on the walls, and the songs on the soundtrack are the familiar head-trip selections. But in Thompson’s version of 1969, there isn’t the slightest sense of what it’s like to be alive at a certain moment in time, no sense of what people are thinking about and doing. Or that any of it might be fun. God forbid that any of these characters should enjoy themselves at such an important time in our history.

Instead, Thompson gives us a series of snapshot glimpses into the lives of his characters. Sutherland’s mother (Mariette Hartley) brings cookies to campus and gets caught up in a riot at the administration building. Sutherland and Downey take off for the road because “that’s what the hippies do.” When Sutherland’s brother (Chris Wynne) leaves for Vietnam, the mother shouts to him, “Don’t die!”

Meanwhile, Thompson bravely takes on the drug culture by having Downey experiment with pot as Sutherland casts a disapproving eye. Yeah, right. Later, Downey tries LSD and executes a perfect freak-out in a high school gym, in a scene that approaches Reefer Madness intensity.

Almost every scene reaches some cliché. When Sutherland heads for Canada to escape the whole crazy scene, he has a change of heart right at the border, and returns to his hometown to organize a corny march. (By not going to Canada, of course, he also keeps alive the possibility that he could one day be the vice president of the United States.)

Both the leads are stranded. Sutherland does his sensitive thing, while Downey’s heart seems to be elsewhere (understandably). Bruce Dern and Joanna Cassidy, as confused parents, try to capture a certain period authenticity, but Thompson doesn’t help them much. Only Wynona Ryder (the daughter from Beetlejuice), as Downey’s budding flower-child sister, catches something winning and tender.

Meanwhile, unless someone makes a good movie about the 1960s soon, the decade is going to be remembered through a filter of bad movies and TV commercials with pig-tailed hippies hawking oldies collections.

First published in The Herald, November 20, 1988

Another review that sounds like it had its final paragraph lopped off. Well, the point had been made. I was obviously making a joke about the 1988 election with my “vice president” comment, but now I can’t remember what it specifically refers to.