California Dreaming

I'm fairly tolerant of even some of the worst movies of the late 1970s.  This is because I have always been fascinated with that era.  As I've previously covered, it is also because my film awareness and appreciation (read: obsession) took root in those days.  I absorbed the Palm Beach Post and New York Times movie listings.  The ads.  On Fridays and Sundays especially.  In the Times, sometimes one movie would get a full page.  Only the big time features, not an American International Picture like 1979's CALIFORNIA DREAMING, one of several youth culture pics aimed at those of a similar age, but often popular with younger ones seeking a thrill and older ones lamenting their lost halcyon days (and perhaps libido).

I remember seeing that colorful poster, a silhouette walking into the sunset.  Or is it a sunrise? I was ten and had no chance of getting to see this movie to find out.  Cable was still a few years away.  I was left merely to wonder about it, conjuring pre-teen imagery that is thankfully lost in my recesses.  Cringeworthy, I would guess.  And unfortunately, that word describes a lot of CALIFORNIA DREAMING, another coming of age story with a fairly predictable character arc.  That this is also a fish of water tale only adds to the contrivance.  But I'm sure only pretentious film critics gave a damn about such quibbles.

Dennis Christopher, who would go on to some acclaim later in the year in the wonderful BREAKING AWAY, plays T.T., a gawky kid from Chicago who lands in a Southern California beach town after his brother, a jazz artist, passes on.  We don't learn much else about T.T., other than he is an obnoxious geek who often seems as if from another planet.  One of the major problems with this movie for me was my lack of sympathy and interest for him.  Clearly we're supposed to be rooting for his success.  Want him to find acceptance and maybe even love among the too cool for words surfer and volleyball crowd, who, to the movie's credit, are even more obnoxious and vapid than him.  But his character is such an unrelenting doofus that the film was nearly over before I could muster some positive emotions.

Maybe it's not the actor's fault.  Ned Wynn's (who co-stars) script paints T.T. broadly and vaguely.  The young man rarely acts like a human being.   His eventual love scene with heroine Corky (Glynnis O'Connor) is one of the oddest attempts at capturing teen awkwardness I've witnessed.  I have to also blame director John D. Hancock.  Often, his direction is ineffectual and lazy, though he still manages to capture time and place quite nicely.  That alone absolves many a bad '70s film, invisible audience.

Seymour Cassel plays Duke, a middle-aged bar owner who more or less adopts T.T. and spends his days telling tall tales and explaining why handling a volleyball is like touching a woman.  As always, he's quite wonderful and even though his final scene is questionably handled (especially that slo-mo), it was very effective.  In fact, the last several scenes of CALIFORNIA DREAMING are dramatically satisfying, mostly free of the liberal amounts of dumb humor and body ogling (female and male) we saw earlier.  It is a shame that much of the film resembles MEATBALLS more than an Eric Rohmer film, or even JEREMY.  Nearly every time the film threatens to be perceptive and worthwhile, some bad line of dialogue or juvenile attitude sours the moment.  There is also some OK surfing footage.

For a really righteous slice of  late '70s SoCal surf culture, read Kem Nunn's novel Tapping the Source, with which this movie has a few things in common.

P.S. Beware of any scene featuring Marshall Efron as a wildly stereotypical Mexican named Ruben.  I was laughing in disbelief over this caricature.