Director: Elia Kazan
Year Released: 1961
Rating: 2.0
As an examination of sexual mores of the late twenties, Splendor in the Grass comes across as being half-baked, puritanical and redundant. When I say redundant, I mean it: every single scene has something to do with sex - it's whispered about, alluded to, shouted about, symbolized, referenced, hinted at. While I'm the first one to admit that sex is a cornerstone of civilization (it has to be), this grows tiresome. The plot's "unraveling" basically has a sexually frustrated Natalie Wood actually lose her mind and end up in a blooming mental institution because ... well ... I'm guessing it has something to do with her inner circle of company: the closet-lesbian mother, the subdued father and hyper-horny football star boyfriend Warren Beatty, who goes far on looking confused. Anyway, as soon as prudish Wood discovers Beatty's been tooling around with the class slut, she finds a telling message in a poem by Whitman (where the movie's title is lifted from), and gets loopy in a bathroom scene that's funnier than it should be. Beatty's sister in the movie, who can be considered the exact opposite of the Wood character, gets to misbehave in the most flamboyant fashion at a party, grabbing this guy, kissing that, much to the shock of everyone nearby (she also loses her grip on reality, but does so off-screen). All the while, neither Wood nor Beatty seem to make up their mind about exactly what they want, and their ambiguity causes our concern to slip. A lot of Inge and director Elia Kazan's finger wagging is at the bi-polar parents (Wood's: silence and shame, Beatty's: obnoxiousness and promiscuity sans commitment) and the gossip-mongering of society in general. Whether or not that's the case, the film still fails, and amounts to nothing but a tearful mess hardly worth the time investigating.
