strongest and weakest aspects

Strongest: Definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, Linda herself. I just thought it was impossible not to develop a real affection for the woman. What did she do wrong, really? You have to think about her as a product of her time, how women generally attached themselves to men, or allowed men to attach themselves to them, because surely you had to have a man and you had to do whatever it took to keep one. Given that standard, what did she do? She wasn't loose, didn't sleep around, was properly skeptical about whether Burt was just feeding her a line, so she was smart--and she followed through on it, and busted him. She struck me as peculiarly tough, level-headed, and a really remarkable survivor.

I just thought it was tremendously sad, her whole life, what could have been, and her saving what remnant is left, although she herself would never look at it that way, I think, because she doesn't strike me as the kind who sits around worrying and self-reflecting herself to death. She was indeed a really attractive girl who got pursued by this obsessive guy, caught him in a lie, and then went on to what seemed like a better guy. Then, after the crime, even _that_ guy dumped her. Did you see one moment of self-pity in her about that? Or about the other guy, later on, who dumped her after he saw her eyes? This is a woman who kept on going to work after she got out of the hospital, "every day," as one of her friends described it. Just tremendously sad, unbelievable rejection, unbelievable violence, and she's still strolling around like she owns the place. There's something about her beyond her beauty as a young woman that makes you know why somebody would have been really attracted to her--and I don't mean a psycho like Burt.

And honestly, it seems to me she has the upper hand now. I know people think she was nuts for agreeing to marry Burt. I don't know how nuts she was. I wish she would've had better options, is what I wish. What other options did she have? What had she learned, from the way other men had treated her? It seems to me she figured he owed this to her, and so it became a radical solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem, at least from her point of view. So she made the leap to try to make that radical solution work, and maybe it has, as much as anything could have worked at that point.

It also seems to me that there must have been at least some element of knowing that Burt was about the only guy around in her life who remembered her the way she was when she was young. In a really twisted way, being around him may have given her back her history from before 1959 and made her life feel whole in a way. It wouldn't have been like meeting somebody new and having to explain the whole thing, and knowing that guy could never understand what she'd been through, and would never know her as anything other than a disfigured middle-aged (and later elderly) woman. That's not who she was, or is, really, and she knew it. Burt knew it too. Who else would have?

But anyhow...yeah, she was the reason to see the film, as far as I was concerned.


Weakest: Mainly the structural oddity of having tons of exposition about childhood, etc., in the first third of the film, without the average viewer knowing why any of it was supposed to matter. Unless you were already familiar with the Pugach case (I was), I would think that somewhere around the eight-to-ten-minute mark, you'd be thinking, "OK, so he had a mom that beat him, and she was a flirt but not easy, and and and....so I had a dad who whacked me more than once, too, but nobody's making a movie about me, chrissakes." You know what I'm saying? Honestly, I'm not even sure why the filmmaker wanted anything much more than basic factual material during that stretch anyway. Particularly with Burt, it just wasn't all that interesting to watch him get intensely and even narcissistically self-reflective (his reflexively fundamental mode of operation, I think) about all the ills of his childhood and such. Not that I'm not sympathetic to a guy getting beaten, but I have to admit, since I already knew what the guy had done, I was really squirming in the chair throughout this section--like, shut UP, you freakin' psycho, stop looking for reasons to explain yourself.

Anyway, I do think just a brief opening statement would have contextualized a lot of that material, if the director just had to include it in the first place. Like this: "In June 1959, successful New York attorney Burt Pugach paid to have lye thrown in the face of the beautiful woman he said he loved. It blinded and disfigured her forever. Fifteen years later, after he was released from prison, she married him. This is the story of how such a thing could happen."

Also, one factual deficiency that's like a rock in my damn shoe: How come we didn't find out what Larry Schwartz's excuse was for dropping her once she came home from the hospital? Maybe there's not an answer, but knowing the interviewer at least asked the question, and nobody knew the answer, would be more meaningful than not knowing whether there might have been a reason at all, but the interviewer failed to ask.