SMALLER THAN LIFE
by Pauline Kael
In Swing Shift, the director, Jonathan Demme, attempts to recapture the atmosphere of the “home front” during the Second World War. He has the kind of respect for working people’s homes that James Agee had for the shacks of tenant farmers, and he shows you the details of lower-middle-class life without satire or condescension. Demme could be said to have a reverence for kitsch. His tenderness—his looking for poetry in the tacky—is a rare quality, but in Swing Shift it isn’t backed up with much of anything else.
Demme’s vision of the lives of the workers on the swing shift (4 p.m. to midnight) at an aircraft factory in Santa Monica has a glazed lyricism. Goldie Hawn is Kay, a cuddlebug housewife who married her blue-eyed Iowa high-school sweetheart (Ed Harris) and moved to California; he joins the Navy right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and she becomes a riveter at the factory, where she meets a foreman (Kurt Russell) who’s also a trumpet player. He develops a crush on her, and eventually they begin an affair. Christine Lahti is Hazel, who sings with a dance-hall band; she breaks up with her lover (Fred Ward), the dance-hall operator, and goes to work on the assembly line, and she and Kay—they both live in the same set of tiny garden-court bungalows—become pals. Most of these performers, along with others in the cast, seem too old for the parts they’re playing. They look stuffed and posed, as if they were consciously trying to re-create themselves in the images of the shiny-faced teen-age servicemen and girls-next-door in the forties issues of Life. It’s a case of talented, intelligent actors turning themselves into waxworks. The cramped, stage-set look of those bungalow interiors seems deliberate, and the way the workers are positioned at the factory makes you think the movie is about to turn into a musical, with candy-colored production numbers. For Demme, the film must have been an exercise in style, in the way that New York, New York was for Martin Scorsese, but Demme’s style is softer, pastel, mild.
Kay and her husband hear the news about Pearl Harbor when they’re spending their Sunday at an outdoor skating rink; we can’t fail to observe the picturesqueness of the era. The people in this movie don’t do anything that wouldn’t have been done in forties movies, and the clichés of those movies are played here as daily life. Demme isn’t debunking anything; on the contrary, he seems to insist that the images of innocence given to us by the magazines and the movies are accurate. And from the way he sees things it’s as if movies never had a darker side. (In some ways, Demme’s vision seems as privately enraptured—and as superficial—as that of his near namesake, the French director Jacques Demy, in his weaker films, such as his 1969 American production, The Model Shop.) The insubstantiality of Swing Shift may make us feel as if we were dozing. Or we may be tapping a toe, waiting for the heroine to lose her virtue—waiting for the public images of virtue to come into conflict with the characters’ desires. But Demme doesn’t appear to register that the audience has a problem; he sticks by this false innocence. And he keeps the camera gliding romantically, though its movements don’t seem to relate to the situations that the characters are in.
Goldie Hawn dampens the picture. It’s not that she gives a bad performance. Like Private Benjamin, this film was made by her own production company, and she certainly doesn’t have the kind of cruddy role that she played in, say, The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976); she doesn’t repeat herself, either, the way she has been doing in pictures such as the more recent Seems Like Old Times. The role of Kay is a stretch for her, all right, but Goldie Hawn as a subdued ingénue is not a stretch that does anything for the audience. A passive Goldie Hawn seems a violation of nature. We’re used to her all turned on and infectiously funny, and for us not to feel let down by her performance in a straight role it would have to be a really good one. As Kay, she’s trying to make herself simple and ordinary—she’s playing a new stereotype: the child-woman who learns how to be a competent person. And there’s very little she can do without calling up echoes of Jane Fonda in Coming Home. She has fallen into a very old acting trap: she wants us to identify with her character, and she thinks that she will become typical by flattening herself out. It’s a stretch in reverse: she diminishes herself. At times, her mouth is set; she looks uncomfortable, repressed—not as the character but as an actress who’s unhappy with what she’s doing. (Maybe she senses that the picture is turning into a neutered version of Private Benjamin.)
Goldie Hawn and her moviemaking team have also made a basic mistake in strategy: they’ve given Christine Lahti’s Hazel the wisecracks. Christine Lahti, who has dark hair, high cheekbones, and a long neck with great cords in it, is one of the marvellous new towering Venuses who are changing our image of women. Like Sigourney Weaver, Joanna Cassidy, Kathleen Turner, and, of course, Vanessa Redgrave, she’s heroically feminine. She’s also a ripsnorting comedienne, and she gives the picture whatever spark and intensity it has (which is mostly in the first half). Her role doesn’t make much sense: she’s a singer who never even hums after she takes the job in the factory, and she goes on for years carrying a torch for the man she broke up with (until he has an offscreen change of heart). But Lahti plays this role to the hilt, and the simple fact is that her height plus her tough manner and her few wisecracks make Goldie Hawn’s Kay seem dim and shrimpy. (For one thing, there’s more of Lahti for clothes to look great on, though she has become shockingly thin.) If Kay had been conceived as more hip and had swapped cracks with Hazel, Goldie Hawn might have had all her tickling charm to draw upon. But she’s got both arms tied behind her back. And Lahti, a spangly goddess with her little forties hat propped on the side of her head, is smiling down at her.
At times, I got the feeling that everything in Swing Shift was muffled because the moviemakers were afraid of covering the same ground as Connie Field’s documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter and also of overlapping with New York, New York. It’s a wisp of a movie, with vague aspirations to be touching, and I got the impression that there had never been a very strong script. (The writing credit goes to the pseudonymous Rob Morton; the writers who were listed before and during production were initially Nancy Dowd, then Bo Goldman, then Ron Nyswaner, and there was last-minute, attempted-rescue work by Robert Towne.) The scenes rarely last more than twenty seconds. They don’t quite come to anything; they abort—with a sometimes audible pop—and it’s always before we can get a sense of what’s going on with the characters. There are no high spots, no exciting moments. The picture just goes popping from one recessive, undeveloped scene to the next. Swing Shift was reëdited after Demme turned in his cut, and so it’s difficult to gauge his plan for the movie, but it may be that he didn’t want a stronger script. The charm in Demme’s movies is in the small talk. He knows how Americans sound when they’re relaxed, and Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have an easy, casual way with each other. But Demme isn’t good at building scenes to move a story along, and this picture is never satisfying at more than a minute-to-minute level.
Last year, I sat all the way through Romantic Comedy—and that rather puzzled me, because I’ve walked out on a lot of much better movies. Then I realized that the reason I’d sat there was that the picture drained me of the strength needed to get up and leave. Swing Shift isn’t stupid, like Romantic Comedy, but it, too, is draining. You sit there wondering what nothing is going to happen next. There’s a feminist-fairy-tale aspect to Kay’s story: she gets a job and proves her worth by saving a fellow-worker’s life, she has her sexual fling, and then she goes back to her husband, and, in some screwy way, what she does seems meant to parallel and represent what happened to women in general. There’s also something sickening about the way Hazel’s lover turns up and apologizes for the way he treated her, and then turns up again, cringing, asking for forgiveness. Maybe part of what makes this movie seem so befuddled is that Demme’s nostalgic fixation on the ambience of the war years excludes any real interest in the lives of women workers, and the feminist script sees the characters as precursors (with lessons to learn) rather than as people. The women’s experiences in the “home front” are treated as a warmup, a rehearsal for the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies. The point of this picture is that men laughed at the idea of women riveters and welders but that the women “showed them.” It’s as if the women were pampered darlings who went to work just to prove something to their husbands and to themselves. The fact is that many women needed to work before the war and had only been able to find low-paying jobs, and after the war they were pushed out and were once again trapped in domestic service, “women’s” factory jobs, and department stores. The softening of economic facts devitalizes Swing Shift. You can’t keep all that pie-eyed lyrical innocence without betraying the subject. The movie doesn’t even put across the feeling that’s so rousing in documentaries about the period: the sass and bounce of the women workers, earning good money for the first time, and strutting because they were doing what was considered “a man’s job.”
The New Yorker, May 14, 1984
