It's almost thrilling to watch Towne dare himself in several ways. First, by making a picture centered on the world of women's track and field events not one of America's great spectator sports. We see a lot of pounding feet and pumping leg muscles, a lot of sweat, a lot of doggedness, as Mariel Hemingway, Patrice Donnelly and their Cal Polytech teammates drive themselves past their limits, competing with themselves as much as other athletes, honing their skills, chopping off hundredths of a second here or there to excel. It's a microcosm in which everything is heightened, with a palpable physical component.
The physicality in which the film is immersed you can almost hear the adrenaline rushes and the slosh of hormones -- provides the underpinning for the double-edged meaning of the film's title. Much was made at the time of the film's release of its lesbian love story between Hemingway's Chris and Donnelly's Tori. The latter is more seasoned, more focused, more competitive. She not only recognizes the potential in Hemingway's raw talent, but is physically attracted to her protégé-to-be. She talks Scott Glenn's tough coach into giving the newcomer a shot at joining the team after he had passed her by. And Personal Best in the stadium and workout field also becomes Personal Best between the sheets for the two women. Can they juggle the fact they they're on-field competitors and just the opposite in bed?
There's a real sensuality in their bedroom scenes, a heightened sexual tension, a sense of genuine pleasure as they touch one another lightly in a room lit by multiple candles. Coming, as it did, early in the climate of Hollywood films made with a sense of sexual freedom not seen since before the Production Code, it allows us them to seem immersed in pleasure, not tormented by deviance. When Chris is tormented, it's because she worries about how the moody Tori is feeling. Meanwhile, as Chris's athletic skills become more apparent, there's some reservation that she lacks the killer instinct. We also begin to wonder how the power dynamics of the personal relationship are playing out. Even before a bad piece of advice from Tori leads Chris to injure her knee, we wonder if Tori isn't playing mind games with her.
How much is tough love? How much has competitiveness invaded love? How much has love diluted competitiveness? The questions play out on a secondary level when we realize Glenn's coach has his own agenda and that it supersedes what any of his athletes may be feeling. As Chris begins to come of age, she begins to toughen up inside as well as outside. It's no accident that Chris's best event is, metaphorically, running the hurdles. As she vaults over one after another, knocking down a few en route, she gains confidence and self-acceptance. One of the strengths of Hemingway's performance is her ability to make us feel Chris discovering things about herself as she stumbles forward.
All this proceeds in oblique ways, conveyed in shards of conversation, embedded in the laid-back style that goes with California campus life, even when in the hothouse training camp leading up to international competition. Slowly, gradually, Chris gains poise and toughness. So much so that she may be capable of winning while deliberately renouncing the killer instinct motivation with which Tori and the other athletes pump themselves up. Towne has obviously thought about what goes into athletic performance, the zen of it all, the harmonies, inner and outer, the balances. It's a complex mix, and he does a superb job of rendering it in all its problematic emotional and hormonal complications. He's too good a writer to write speeches and climaxes and showdowns. The characters here are fumbling their way to growth, making their lives up as they go along, and Towne respects the process and its messiness and lack of neat, definitive climaxes or linearity.
Driven by the vitality and responsiveness in the performances of Hemingway and Donnelly, the film is frank but not sensationalized. The sexuality is always connected to what we're convinced are real feelings. Personal Best also contains some of the best sports photography, camera placements and editing since Leni Riefenstahl wrote the book on filming athletic events in her Olympiad, focusing on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. There's more than a bit of resonance between Riefenstahl's militaristic wedding of bodies, athleticism and politics and Towne's removal of geopolitics from the picture (the US team boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, making the athletes' feats here strictly for personal fulfillment, not gold medals). But then Towne's way of keeping the emphasis on the personal and even the mutually supportive here is one of the things that makes Personal Best the sweetly iconoclastic, sweat-soaked genuflection to human effort and the human heart that it is. Towne wrote 16 films before he finally directed one here, and he never puts a foot wrong.
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by Jay Carr
