Cinema for the Infirm: Love Story
Love means never having to inconvenience anyone when you're sick.
(Cinema for the Infirm is a feature in which I, a person with a potentially life-threatening illness, discuss films that feature a seriously ill character, for better or worse [mostly worse]. Spoilers should be expected.)
Well, here it is, folks, ground zero for nearly every saccharine “dying young” cliche in film and television. 1970’s Love Story certainly wasn’t the first, but it was the best (or worst, depending on you look at it) at depicting a sick person as a sort of secular saint who accepts death with nothing less than quiet dignity and grace, while just looking like they’ve stepped out of a salon.
For a movie that most people probably haven’t thought about in decades, Love Story left a mark on pop culture that’s still felt today. If you’re of a certain age (old), it’s very likely that your mother owned something that played its maudlin theme song. It’s also why seemingly half of Gen X women are named Jennifer, after its doomed heroine. It’s also where we got one of the most horseshit, meant-to-be-profound lines of movie dialogue in “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” when in fact love means having to say you’re sorry a lot. And, of course, it’s what inspired Roger Ebert to coin the phrase “Ali MacGraw’s Disease,” an affliction that causes someone to look more attractive the closer they are to death.
“What can you say about a 25 year-old girl who died?” asks tragic hero Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal), as he reflects on his all-too-brief romance with Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw). They meet cute (if you want to call it that) at a college library, where Jenny gives Oliver a bunch of shit about being so rich that an entire hall at Harvard was named for his family, and he reacts to it with surly defensiveness. Though it’s presumably meant be flirtatious, it comes off as mostly just passive-aggressive, but they immediately fall in love with each other anyway, even when Jenny repeatedly refers to Oliver as “preppie1” in the same tone of voice that one would use to call someone an asshole.
The relationship deck is stacked against them from the start, and it’s not just because Jenny is a human woman and Oliver is a sentient canned ham. As is noted numerous times, Oliver’s family is obscenely wealthy, while Jenny is either middle class, or she grew up in a family that was so poor they had to split a single bean three ways to survive, it’s never entirely clear. She goes to Radcliffe (the sister school of Harvard) and has an opportunity to study music in Paris, so clearly she’s not doing too bad for herself either way. Nevertheless, upon first meeting Oliver’s parents look at this beautiful, smart, talented young woman with the same distaste as someone wearing polyester to the Met Gala.
When Oliver refuses to stop seeing Jenny, his father (Ray Milland, in full “whomst farted?” mode) cuts him off from the family’s wealth. That doesn’t matter, though, because all they need is love. Well, love, and for Jenny to give up her dream of studying in Paris so she can marry Oliver and be the sole breadwinner while he goes to law school. But it’s all worth it, because he graduates at the top of his class, gets a cushy job at a New York City law firm, and he and Jenny are able to move on up to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky, where they spend a long and happy marriage tog—
I’m sorry, I stand corrected, she almost immediately gets sick and dies.
Jenny is a real medical mystery, afflicted with a fatal “blood disease” that has no name, no symptoms, and doesn’t seem to affect her life in any meaningful way, except for when the script declares that it’s time for her to go. When she reaches her final days, if anything she’s even more beautiful than she was in the peak of health. Her skin is dewy, her glossy black hair is bouncing and behaving. Thanks to a perfectly placed lamp, the closer she gets to the end, the more she seems to be emitting an ethereal glow.
In keeping with that angelic appearance, Jenny’s first and only concern is how her death will affect Oliver. She laments nothing about her lost hopes and dreams, only expressing sorrow for what this will all mean for Oliver, reassuring him that dying isn’t so bad, and doing so quietly and off-screen.
For a movie that purports to be about a couple’s relationship from the very beginning to the very end, Love Story is bafflingly one-sided. Jenny seems to have no other identity beyond Oliver’s girlfriend and eventual wife. As far as Erich Segal’s script is concerned, she was hatched from an egg inside the library the same day Oliver met her. She doesn’t appear to have friends, and during the few times she interacts with her father, Oliver is always present. Jenny isn’t even there when the doctor breaks the news about her illness to Oliver. Every plot twist and turn is filtered solely through him and his perspective.
“What can you say about a 25 year-old girl who died?” Not a lot, apparently.
Maybe that would be easier to take if literally any other actor had been cast as Oliver. Though his character goes from a madly in love college student to a grieving widower in less than two hours, O’Neal seems constipated more than anything else. When Jenny recites her perfectly lovely wedding vows, he’s as impassive as someone forced to attend a timeshare seminar, and when he finds out that Jenny is dying, he can only muster up enough tears in his eyes to suggest that he’s gotten some dust in them2.
There’s a bittersweet irony in knowing that many years later O’Neal would experience an all-too-real version of Love Story, when his longtime on-again/off-again partner Farrah Fawcett died of cancer in 2009. By all accounts, Fawcett suffered greatly in the months leading up to her passing, and presumably did not spend her final days worrying about whether or not O’Neal was going to be okay.
A (wildly unflattering) Vanity Fair article published just a few months after Fawcett’s death noted that “playing a real-life deathbed scene proved a lot more challenging than [O’Neal] had anticipated,” with O’Neal himself attempting to make a joke about it before admitting “I thought it was just a part.” It’s a poignant coda to a film that (unintentionally, but regardless) launched one of pop culture’s most insidious stereotypes, that illness should be softened and made more palatable, even romantic, for others’ benefit.
Get used to it, because she calls him that approximately 150 times over the course of the film.
On the other hand, this also launched O’Neal’s career as a leading man, and got him an Oscar nomination, so what do I know?