When does pornography become abuse? This is the question I suspect this film wanted to provoke and its pre-determined answer is as predictable as any tale that begins with ‘Once Upon a Time…’. I’m not calling it a fairy tale, it’s certainly not; but the same way that a bad 70's soft porn film blurs the edges of reality with a little Vaseline and soft focus, this movie succeeds in doing the same to the Linda Lovelace story. Even the domestic violence and abuse has an ethereal, unreal tone to it.

 

Is there anyone left out there who doesn’t know this story? It’s one of the great unresolved mysteries of our time: who killed JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald? What happened at Roswell? Was Linda Lovelace coerced into making Deep Throat? As Amanda Seyfried's character says, ‘I spent 17 days in the porn industry’ and yet Linda Lovelace’s entire life seemed to be defined by that one experience. Yet isn’t that to be expected? Linda Lovelace was an adult movie star. Linda Boreman/Traynor/Marchiano was the woman behind the name, and it is her story that this film should tell. Sadly, all it seems to do is exploit her from another angle.

 

Whilst, superficially, this movie seems sympathetic to Lovelace, even casting the wide-eyed Seyfried to play the title character, so that her very face seems to scream ‘ingenue’, superficial is all it remains. Admittedly the first half is clearly intended to paint an optimistic picture: the public face of Linda Lovelace.

 

However, even when we return to have the tale retold through Linda’s own eyes, there’s something distant and surreal about the whole thing. The characters have as much depth as those seen through a peephole in a Victorian Gentleman’s Theatre, so that it’s hard to feel strongly for them, in spite of the bad guys being played in an almost farcical manner. Sharon Stone does a superb job of being a heartless disciplinarian who fails to see her vulnerable child asking for help, and Peter Sarsgaard is so much the unpleasant exploitationist that it feels like a paint-by-numbers parable.

 

What’s more, being familiar with the tale from previous exposes, the film clearly avoids the more dubious aspects of Lovelace’s biography, choosing instead to lead you forcefully down a very specific path with no room for ambiguous conclusions.

 

The problem is, it’s so caught up in the glamour of the heroine herself, and the movie/act responsible for rocketing her to infamy, that it fails to tell the story of the human characters themselves, so that they remain two-dimensional and difficult to empathise with. What this film wanted to be was What’s Love Got to Do With It, the award-winning biopic of Tina Turner. What it becomes instead is…well, pornography.