Eric D. Snider
Eric has been a film critic since 1999, and a beard wearer since 2008. He holds a degree in journalism and used to work in "the newspaper industry," back when that was a thing.
Eric’s DVD Time Capsule: 9 1/2 Weeks (Feb. 21, 1986)
Eric D. Snider February 17, 2009
If Mickey Rourke wins the Oscar this Sunday for his performance in The Wrestler — and he would if I were the only one voting — the man who approaches the podium will be practically unrecognizable compared to the man who starred in 9 1/2 Weeks. He’ll be collecting his statuette exactly 23 years and one day after that notoriously steamy film was released, but it might as well have been a hundred years ago. It might as well have been a different actor altogether.
Look at Rourke in 1986, when he was 34 years old. He was handsome. In 9 1/2 Weeks, he hardly ever stops smiling — a smug, irritating smile, owing to the nature of the character, but an attractive smile nonetheless. He could play leading men. Now look at him in 2009. Years of hard living, boxing, and goodness know what else have given him a face with a lot more, shall we say, “character.” The only film he could play the romantic lead in now is Beauty and the Beast.
I say this not to insult Rourke, whose recent work I admire deeply, but to point out how an actor’s fortunes can change over time, and often for purely physical reasons. The man who once played dashing young lovers eventually finds himself being cast as fusty fathers or portly comic-relief figures. The ingenue whose face appeared on a thousand glossy magazines sooner or later becomes matronly and plump — the wisecracking best friend or the boozy mother-in-law.
How must that feel to an actor, to realize one’s days of youth and beauty are gone, and with them the plum movie roles? It’s harder for women, who have a harsher standard of beauty imposed upon them in Hollywood, but it’s no picnic for men, either. Even a man who takes care of himself, as Rourke did not, can only do so much after 50.
9 1/2 Weeks (whose onscreen title is Nine 1/2 Weeks, which is all kinds of wrong) is obsessed with sex and other physical endeavors, though it pretends to be interested in psychology, too. Roger Ebert noted in his review that it arrived “in a shroud of mystery and scandal, already notorious as the most explicitly sexual big-budget film since Last Tango in Paris.” Yet to endure the film today, in all its dull, stultifying badness, is to wonder what the big deal was. It has relatively little nudity and only a scene or two of sexual congress, all of which occurs mostly clothed. It’s “erotic,” in the sense that the characters are always talking about sex, and playing sexual games, but I don’t find it the least bit titillating.
The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called it on the spot: “To be perfectly honest, 9 1/2 Weeks looks as if the director intended for the film to be somewhat more bold than it finally is,” he wrote, adding that the film “is pricelessly funny without having many laughs.”
To get anything out of this other than pure sadomasochistic pleasure, the viewer would need to be informed on John and Elizabeth’s psychologies, but the film adamantly refuses to tell us anything. Instead, it comes across as a lush, soft-core waste of time, something you’d see late at night on Cinemax.
It may be no surprise that it was directed by Adrian Lyne, whose career has been marked by films about sexual politics — Foxes and Flashdance before this, and then Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, Lolita, and, most recently, 2002′s Unfaithful.
Rourke had already had roles in 1941, Heaven’s Gate, Body Heat, and Diner, and a year after 9 1/2 Weeks he starred in Angel Heart — another movie that’s infamous for its allegedly steamy sex scenes. Basinger, meanwhile, had already done her share of naughty business. She played a naive young model in the 1978 TV movie Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold, and a prostitute in a 1979 miniseries version of From Here to Eternity. When she played a Bond girl in 1983′s Never Say Never Again — her breakout role — she posed nude in Playboy to help promote it. Yet strangely enough, most of her nude work in 9 1/2 Weeks was done by a body double.
The legacy of 9 1/2 Weeks is perhaps best summed up by The Onion A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin in his review of the film’s even-worse sequel: “In addition to pushing the limits of how much sex mainstream Hollywood movies could get away with, [9 1/2 Weeks] was an enormous international hit, grossing over $100 million worldwide and becoming one of video’s first blockbusters.” If the emerging technology of VCRs needed a selling point, being able to watch a dirty movie in the privacy of your own home — and skip right to the best parts — was it. 9 1/2 Weeks was a perfect candidate, too, since getting through it requires a lot of fast-forwarding.
FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When 9 1/2 Weeks was released, 23 years ago this week, on Feb. 21, 1986…
• The only new wide release that weekend was slasher flick The Hitcher. 9 1/2 Weeks opened on just 28 screens, but all of those theaters were packed, giving it one of the highest per-screen averages of the week. Sex sells!
• The top films at the box office were Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Wildcats, and The Color Purple.
• On TV, Valerie (later called The Hogan Family) and Perfect Strangers were about to debut.
• Was there ever a worse time for popular music than the mid-’80s? The top Billboard hits so far in 1986 were “Say You, Say Me,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” and Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know.” Thank goodness “Rock Me Amadeus” was about to come along and liven things up.
• On the “New York Times Best Seller List” were such books as Lie Down with Lions by Ken Follett, The Mammoth Hunters by Clan of the Cave Bear author Jean M. Auel, and Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days.
• The first observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday had taken place a month earlier.
• The Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy, which killed all seven astronauts, was still fresh in people’s minds from three weeks before.
• Mischa Barton was less than a month old, and singer Charlotte Church was born on this very day. Brittany Snow and Jamie Bell were nearly done gestating. At the other end of the spectrum, Donna Reed and L. Ron Hubbard had recently passed away.
“Eric’s Time Capsule” appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, though he’ll thank you to leave the hot chilies at home.
Tags: 9 1/2 weeks, mickey rourke, the wrestler
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