Butley
Director: Harold Pinter
Year Released: 1976
Rating: 2.0
Monotonous adaptation of Simon Gray's enormously overrated play about a bi-sexual English teacher who treats everyone like garbage and then gets upset and angry when they don't want anything to do with him. It's a pulpit for the main character (played with gusto by the eternal Alan Bates), a human pun machine, who belittles his students, associates and friends, and who only learns at the very end that he should not carry on affairs with men younger than him. I suppose Gray found it fanciful to have this selfish, sexually ambiguous curmudgeon babble on in his own unique language, but the play/film almost asks that we side with him, which a major problem: he's not worthy of respect. Harold Pinter's attempt to keep things alive by shifting the camera around the office room is valiant, but he's ultimately left in a lurch by the material (lucky for Pinter that Joseph Losey handled the screen adaptation of his plays).
