PERSONAL BEST Directed and Written by Robert Towne
Hard to say who is going to be more put out by Personal Best: the track-and-field Establishment, the homosexual Establishment, or such freelance homophobes as still dare to speak their name. The harrumphing of the sportsmen is already being heard here and there; somehow it is not nice, as they see it, to let the general public in on the fact that women athletes can be just as nastily competitive and talk just as dirty in shower and sauna as their male counterparts. As for the movie's centering on a pair of pentathletes, Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnelly), who have not just a sweetly ambiguous lesbian encounter but a fullscale, move-in, move-out relationship—well, there goes what's left of the old image. Even if Chris finally leaves for a man, it is too late, the harm has been done.
The damage-control squad will doubtless be joined by groups with well-honed sexual biases to apply to the problem. Some image-conscious gays may blanch at the sight of Older Woman Donnelly making a pass at a minor, which is what Hemingway is at the beginning of their four-year affair, and they are not going to care for Writer-Director Towne's deromanticized view of the romance either. Neither are determined heterosexuals, who like to turn situations like this into tragedy—everyone tortured by irresistible forces, guilts and a society that misunderstands and condemns. Towne seems to shrug and allow as how these things do happen. Besides, he implies, since the ladies are Americans, they are a lot more interested in working hard and getting ahead.
Still, assuming there is such a creature as an objective observer of these goings-on, he or she may find a certain charm in Personal Best. Since pentathletes compete in both track and field events, Towne has a good range of athletic activity to cover in near documentary fashion. He is still pretty much in the awkward stage as a director, and there is more of this material than is good for the dramatic structure of the movie. He does effectively parallel Chris' rise from klutzy incompetence to championship caliber with her development as a woman from unformed adolescence to self-aware maturity.
The performances are of a piece, which is something of a surprise since the cast blends amateurs and professionals in the leading roles. Perhaps the simplest thing to say about them is that they all meet somewhere in the middle, at an agreeable semipro level. Hemingway has retained the sweet artlessness of her Manhattan days, while Donnelly, a sometime Olympic hurdler, makes something pleasantly older-sisterish of her role. Kenny Moore, the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED writer (and former Olympic marathon competitor), has a goofy grace as the man who sets Hemingway on the straight path, while Scott Glenn, the memorable heavy of Urban Cowboy, manages to make toughness funny as the women's hard-driving coach.
Neither slick nor glib, they all suit a film that may finally disarm everyone with its full-frontal naturalness, its unsmirking bawdiness, its obvious liking for athletes as people, and its refusal (most of the time) to poeticize sport. Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.
—By Richard Schickel