Lovelace (2013) review

"Shy," relatively "innocent" Linda Boreman (Amanda Seyfried) gets dragged into the world of pornography by her initially kind, later unfathomably abusive husband Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), eventually starring in the notorious Deep Throat and proving to the world she can swallow a large penis. Sarsgaard is so seething, creepy and soulless as Traynor he almost takes the movie away from Seyfried, who is relegated to The Doe-Eyed Victim role - the second half of this is, sadly, Lifetime material fodder, as it's close to 40 minutes of Lovelace being beaten, pimped out and exploited in scenes carefully excised from the first half of the narrative and later 'recollected' by Linda. So many real-life voices have expressed doubts about the exact nature of What Truly Happened (though few dispute that Traynor was a horrible person), but this hardly the story of corrupted beauty that Bob Fosse's Star 80 pulled off, which has the darkness and sleaziness this only wished it did.