7/3/2023 0 Comments Roth portnoy's complaintThe casting of Richard Benjamin as Portnoy is not inspired, but I suppose it was inevitable. This is the way he handles the celebrated encounter with the Portnoy family's liver dinner, and I suppose we should all be relieved that we didn't have to watch them sit down to that particular meal. Maybe that's why the best moments in the movie come when Lehman simply has his hero repeat Roth's dialog from the book, verbatim. Movies are terribly literal and can't get away with flights of fancy the way novels can. But it's hard to show fantasies in a movie. It has been written, produced and directed by Ernest Lehman as a sort of expedition with gun and camera into the untamed jungle of Alexander Portnoy's fantasies. In any event, the movie version of "Portnoy's Complaint" is a true fiasco. This was no doubt to protect those under 18 from exposure to a subject about which, of course, they have no knowledge. That is apparently what the little old ladies on the Chicago Police Censor Board have decided, since they ignored the R rating and made "Portnoy" adults-only in Chicago. When you try to handle bad taste in good taste, you almost always wind up with something truly obscene. It was something like two of my favorite comedies, " The Producers" (1968) and " Where's Poppa?", which had the courage to face their subjects forthrightly and go for belly-laughs instead of embarrassed snickers. To be sure, Roth's subject and approach was in bad taste - but in magnificently bad taste.
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