The People Vs. Larry Flynt

Woody Harrelson has a way of starring in high-profile, controversial movies that split me right down the middle. There was Natural Born Killers, which I’ve seen five times, and I still haven’t decided whether it’s brilliant or abhorrent. Now comes The People Vs. Larry Flynt, which I’ll be glad to see another four times, because it’s funny and absorbing. And also slippery and superficial. It has moments of greatness and power, and moments of shameless preaching-to-the-converted. In other words, it’s an Oliver Stone movie — except that he only produced it. Milos Forman got the directing job, which he carries out with minimum flash. Or flesh, either: this biopic about a porn king is less erotic than Jerry Maguire. Forman’s heart is in the legal issues of Larry’s life, and he delivers a lively thesis on First Amendment rights.

Larry Flynt (Harrelson), the scurrilous publisher of Hustler magazine, is painted here as an ironic American hero — a scumbag forced into political awareness by his legal battles. The Moral Majority try to jail him for obscenity; his straight-arrow lawyer, Alan Isaacman (Edward Norton), is driven to distraction by Larry’s buffoonish antics in court. A parody ad in Hustler is the last straw: its target, Reverend Jerry Falwell, sues for $40 million, and Larry takes it to the Supreme Court. We know what happened: Flynt, by then paralyzed from the waist down by a sniper’s bullet, won his case and made it safe for the press to lampoon public figures.

Yet the real hero of the movie isn’t Larry. It’s Alan Isaacman, who catches the smug Falwell in a contradiction on the stand. For Larry, it’s a pyrrhic victory. When he gets the news, he’s staring at a video of his wife Althea (Courtney Love), who didn’t live to share his triumph. Addicted to painkillers and stricken with AIDS, Althea had drowned in her bathtub eight months before. I wanted to see more of Larry and Althea, who enjoy a loving but open marriage (they both sleep with other women). Their romance is both perverse and innocent. Vulgar, vivid, and always touching, Courtney Love’s Althea is a rich creation, and Harrelson does some of his most tender work opposite her. The strange and affecting bond between these doomed soulmates is the heart of the movie, providing its beats of true greatness.

The movie’s flaws, I think, can be traced to the script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also wrote Ed Wood. Both movies look at their disreputable subjects with rose-colored hindsight: Ed Wood was a nice guy who loved making movies (not a talentless hack), and Larry Flynt was a freedom fighter (not a sleazeball). The movie congratulates us for snickering at Larry’s prudish enemies, as if only censors would be put off by what’s actually in Hustler (ever flipped through it?). The People Vs. Larry Flynt, at its best, is a rambunctious American saga. It gives us Larry the pig, the public clown, the rebel. But only intermittently do we find Larry the man. Maybe we’re meant to think that the man is less important than what he represents. Unfortunately, that cuts both ways.

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