So, if my review for yesterday started off by pointing out how little experience I have with the work of Burt Reynolds at the height of his fame, the same could easily be said for Jane Fionda. About all I have seen of her older movies is Barbarella, and, well, I was not a fan. That said, Fonda is a much more controversial figure for a very good reason given her actions during the Vietnam War, so that may not be overly surprising. While I personally always strive to judge the art and not the artist, that doesn’t mean some people somehow fall through my mental cracks, so to speak. It could also be that her movies rarely seem to pop up in places I care to watch them on, but the point stands.
With that out of the way, she is easily the best thing in Klute.
The first of director Alan J. Pakula’s unofficial “paranoia trilogy,” Klute opens with a few investigative interviews. It seems a man named Tom Gruneman, a chemical company executive, has disappeared. The only real clue is an obscene letter addressed to prostitute Bree Daniels (Fonda) in New York City. Another executive from the company, Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi) hires small town P.I. John Klute (Donald Sutherland) to look into the case. He finds Bree easily enough, but she is not exactly a friendly witness, claiming that whoever he is asking about was a client of hers maybe two years earlier, and she sees a lot of men. Having no better angles, Klute works with Bree to see if he can find Gruneman, particularly since it seems people connected to the case seem to keep turning up dead under suspicious-looking suicides.
Now, despite my description and even the title of the movie, this isn’t really Klute’s story. Sure, he’s there as a dogged investigator, but he’s not some sort of action hero or anything. He doesn’t say much and does what he can to be unflappable in the face of Bree’s open sexuality, something he doesn’t seem to approve of immediately. The small town guy in the big city who won’t quit is basically all the character is, and Sutherland does a fine enough job with the role. It isn’t overly flashy or anything, so he’s arguably not the main character.
No, instead the movie seems more structured around Bree, a character Fonda initially wasn’t sure she, as a feminist, could play and even suggested Faye Dunaway take the role. The movie follows Bree as she does her job, flirting with and having sex with men while having little or no interest in them, and then sporadically going to see a psychiatrist to talk about her issues. The psychiatrist scenes really offer a view into Bree’s world as she slowly lets her guard down even as she’s sure she’s being watched. She isn’t used to having affection for a man, and she somewhat wishes she could turn it off. She is also, in just about every way, the exact opposite of the movie’s title character, being lively and vivacious to Klute’s more quiet ways.
If anything, it says something about the movie that even when Klute and Bree locate the killer, Klute still needs to rescue her in a sense. What happens when he arrives says something about what sort of movie it is: it was more about the characters, particularly Bree, then it was about the case itself. Additionally, maybe it’s unlikely that the detective and the call girl will attempt to start a life together, but perhaps the bigger issue for me watching the movie in 2021 is not so much that as the idea that the one thing Bree needed to get past her problems was the love of a good man. Still, seeing movies like this gives me an idea, just as The Longest Yard did for me with Burt Reynolds, why Jane Fonda was as big as she was back then.
Grade: B
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