Baby It's You

The Sheik just stood there in the hall, like some mythical icon. Didn't say a word. He saw her, books clutched against her chest as she giggled with her friends among the swirls of all the other high schoolers. She went by, and he just watched her. Mesmerized. Did he know that she had eyed him as well?

Of course, that wouldn't be difficult to believe. Not too many public school students, even in mid-60s New Jersey, were clad in shark skin jackets and carefully starched slacks. As slyly played by Vincent Spano, Albert "The Sheik" Capadilupo, is like some vaudeville wraith stalking the collegiate campus in disbelief as he searches for a reason for his existence. He obviously emulates the lifestyles of the more contemporary Rat Pack, the group of martini swilling lotharios who snap their fingers and always get the best table. Dolled-up dames with gams like gazelles on their arms. Albert doesn't quite find this atmosphere in his working class neighborhood. His own father is certainly no Sinatra as he sits in his Lazy Boy, berating the kid, and berated back by Albert and his mother alike for his own lack of ambition.

Jill (Rosanna Arquette) is a middle class Jew who at first resists the advances of the Sheik. She finds him obnoxious and inappropriate. But he's persistent. He borrows his friend's hot rod and takes her for a spin, over her initial objections. The arrogant manboy eventually grows on her. But he's an alpha male who will just as soon as ignore her on a date as he will try to cop a feel in a movie theater. Perhaps just like Sinatra or Dino woulda done (wink wink, nudge nudge). That's how Italian men are supposed to act, no? Against any semblance of judgment, she falls in love. But I challenge the reader to state otherwise how sound reasoning and matters of the heart can delineate themselves in these circumstances. It tends to get messy.

It gets worse after high school. Albert doesn't actually graduate, as he was forced to blow town after committing a petty robbery. Jill is accepted to a prestigious all-girl university, a place where her instilled conservatism will eventually be challenged in a free-thinking, feministic environment of the psychedelic late 60s. She will transform, primarily after she takes a detour visit to Miami Beach, where Albert has landed a gig requiring him to lip synch Sinatra tunes for retirees at a supper club.

Up to this point, Jill thought she was still in love. He had dazzled her with his rebel without a cause posturing. Standing up to the nazi of a vice-principal in the cafeteria. Cavalierly whisking her away from her classes. She even forgave him when he slept with one of her friends. But then he screwed up a bit too much, and had to run away. Even now in her unease at Sarah Lawrence College, she thinks about him. Is it love? A flirtation with life on the edge? Schoolgirl curiosity/foolishness?

Her visit to Miami is a sad one. It's clear that Albert continues to live in a world of which only he understands. The high life of the ballad crooner to which he aspires, always out of reach. He's doomed to be a wannabe. He can't sing, but what hell, he looks the part anyway. He finally tells her the reason why he bills himself as the Sheik (think prophylactics). He takes her to the Fountainbleu, a night out that he undoubtedly had saved up for for months. They go back to his gloomy apartment and consummate whatever sort of relationship they had. The deal is sealed. Jill will leave and move on. Albert will eventually track her down at college. Reality will finally be acknowledged. The stylus will be knocked off the record once and for all.

I hope I haven't made writer/director John Sayles' 1983 BABY IT'S YOU sound like a bad Saturday afternoon Lifetime network flick. It's far too thoughtful to suffer such a fate. With Sayles at the helm, how could it be otherwise? What could've been a maudlin exercise in nostalgic bathos has instead become an effective story of the sorts of growing pains that define you. A focused look at how one, willingly or not, has to accept that the dream will not come true.

Albert won't go quietly, though. He clutches his cuff links in derision, damning the realization that he won't be Frank Sinatra. He won't even be a low rent Frank Sinatra. He won't have Jill by his side, either. In a painful showdown in Jill's dorm at the end, these two will scream and destroy and settle down. High school long over, a reconciliation Jill has already made, and one Albert is just finally realizing. His face registers defeat, and something far more disturbing-a questioning of what to do next, a fearful, exhausted expression of confusion into a hazy future.

Sayles evokes 1966/'67 Jersey with great care. Period music is of course, used expertly. But Bruce Springsteen anthems also punctuate this soundtrack. Songs that were recorded a decade after the events of BABY IT'S YOU. But, it works. The street poetry of the Boss really underlines the dim life of a character like Albert. All flash but no hope. No consideration of the future. Just the bright sparkle of the present, short lived in the blinding wave of the inevitable, unforgiving tomorrow. That tomorrow doesn't seem to have any place for a would-be lounge lizard.

Note: Check out this this webcast featuring interviews with Sayles, writer/producer Amy Robinson, and Spano and Arquette. Very enlightening discussion of this fine film.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Back-By-Midnight/2008/08/15/Baby-Its-You