STRAIGHT TIME Directed by Ulu Grosbard Screenplay by Alvin Sargent, Edward Bunker and Jeffrey Boam
It takes guts to make a movie as bleak and uncompromising as this new Dustin Hoffman vehicle—misplaced guts. The story of a compulsive small-time crook with a lousy past and a doomed future, Straight Time makes a fetish of refusing the audience any frills. The movie aims only to describe its unappealing protagonist as coolly as possible—without tears or laughs or passion. This it accomplishes, but at a very steep price: while Straight Time offers a convincing portrait of a loser, it never gives us any reason to care whether the portrait is genuine or not.
The fault lies not with Hoffman's performance, but with the movie's narrow, spartan script. The screenwriters are so eager to avoid sentimentality that they turn journalistic objectivity into a form of dramatic Novocain. As we watch Burglar Max Dembo doggedly pursue his career of luckless crime, it is impossible to feel anything but numbness. Apparently the writers believe it is enough to demonstrate that Max is a classic recidivist, trapped forever in a cycle of antisocial behavior, but they can't get off so easily. A character as alienated as Max, however realistically drawn, becomes compelling only if he is rooted in a larger psychological or intellectual context.
There is no context to Straight Time; the movie is all matter-of-fact incidents. Max gets out of jail on parole, breaks parole, commits burglaries and awaits certain reincarceration. While one is grateful that the script does not explain Max's self-destructiveness with handwringing, Freudian sermons, Straight Time might at least have explored the existential meaning of his criminal joyrides. The movie chooses instead to rub our noses in the sad predictability of Max's life, as if sheer gloom were its own reward.
An innovative director probably could have reshaped this material; in the hands of Jean-Luc Godard or Terence Malick, Straight Time might even have been a fascinating variation on Breathless or Badlands. Ulu Grosbard, who did direct, is but a journeyman film maker. He substitutes slow pacing and dour photography for style. Only the action scenes get him moving: when Max and his cronies stage their robberies, Straight Time actually manages to work up a little sweat.
Given the limitations of the screenplay, the cast flesh out the characters as much as humanly possible. Harry Dean Stanton, M. Emmet Walsh and Gary Busey all create idiosyncratic lowlifes out of drab dialogue. Theresa Russell (The Last Tycoon), playing Max's all too obligatory love interest, is powerfully sexy. As for Hoffman, he works hard and well to create a man who lives in a state of constant punishment. It's an admirable job, but one sadly wasted in a film that punishes the audience almost as much as it does the people onscreen.