Oliver's Story

I'm a huge fan of love story and I only found out that there is a sequel last week. So I have ordered Oliver's story dvd and watched it. I was so curious at the end of love story to know what happened to Oliver since the departure of Jenny, so I was so excited to watch the sequel. The beginning (funeral part) was amazing, But the rest of the film was not really the best as Oliver seems lost and confused. The best thing was that finally he reconciliate with his father and started to run the family business, I also enjoyed the end as I felt it was an open end which I was so pleased with as I can't imagine oliver being with someone else apart from Jenny. Overall it's a good film not the best, maybe it could of been better if they used old footage of Jenny and Oliver together.

18 months after the death of his wife Jenny to leukemia, Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O'Neal) has thrown himself into his work leaving his personal life largely neglected as he still hasn't fully recovered from losing Jenny. Oliver maintains close contact with his ex-father-in-law Phil (Ed Binns) and a small social circle who try to encourage Oliver to play the field. It isn't until he meets Marcie Nash (Candice Bergen) in the park that Oliver begins to feel perhaps there could be a chance again for love, but the two's differing outlooks regarding their social and financial status becomes a point of contention.

Love Story despite its low budget became a sleeper hit in 1970 becoming the highest grossing film of that year eclipsing films such as Airport, M*A*S*H, and Patton in box office receipts and even managed to earn a number of Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Paramount had been interested in doing a sequel following the success of Love Story but the nature of follow-up rights was messy behind the scenes with writer Erich Segal having penned both the screenplay and the novelization and while Paramount did own rights on a film sequel and commissioned Edward Hume to write the a draft that ultimately wasn't used, Segal had publishing rights on his novel leading to the publication of Oliver's Story which was eyed by producer Lew Garde's ITC entertainment for possible acquisition prior to Paramount executing their right of first refusal and purchasing the rights. The movie also had yet another hang up in that Ryan O'Neal didn't like Segal's screenplay and turned down a $3 million offer to reprise his role as Oliver. Following John Korty's considerable re-write of Segal's screenplay that earned him a co-writing credit this proved to be enough to win O'Neal back. John Korty had previously directed smaller scale films including his Academy Award winning documentary "Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?". Korty was not a fan of the original Love Story and saw the sequel as an opportunity to develop and analyze Oliver Barret as a character rather than the archetype he was in the original film and sought to make the wealthy young people focused upon in the film more real and believable. Korty's ambitions are certainly admirable in trying to take something like Love Story that was primarily based on emotion in place of substance and try to add substance to it and I do prefer Oliver's Story slightly over Love Story, but only slightly.

With Oliver's Story the film starts off from Jenny's funeral which kicks off Oliver's arc through the film. With his lingering grief from the death of his wife, Oliver has thrown himself into his work taking on cases for tenants on New York's Lower East Side and really only maintaining any regular contact with Jenny's father Phil who tries to alleviate Oliver's guilt by telling him it's okay to move on. There's a refreshingly awkward frankness to the opening scenes in the movie with Oliver shown trying the various scenes such as a singles bar with his father-in-law or his college friend and his wife trying to setup Oliver with a potential prospect, and we also see Oliver going to therapy where he discusses his feelings with a psychiatrist who tries to help him get perspective on things. I think O'Neal is good in the role especially since Korty does give him more meat to chew on characterwise as the first movie didn't really have much to the characters and really coasted by more on the chemistry between Ali MacGraw and O'Neal so Korty is giving an earnest attempt at actually diving into and understanding grief at the death of a loved one.

What doesn't work as well is the actual love story with Candice Bergen's Marcie Nash who's real name is Marcie Bonwit and this is where I feel the movie begins to lose it a little. I never really resonated with her character in the film and some of the disagreements they have seemed really confused at parts and forced at others. We also have a very brief moment with Nicola Pagett of ITV's Upstairs Downstairs playing an initial prospect in Joanna who seems to have chemistry with Oliver but almost as soon as she's introduced she's gone from the movie never to be seen again. Apparently Bergen was an 11th hour casting decision as the production team scrambled to find a female lead. Bergen's a good actress but I don't think she was really able to work within this character or material and she feels ill defined as a result. Another unfortunate aspect of the film is John Marley being replaced (due to billing disagreements) by Ed Binns as Jenny's father Phil and that absence is felt as his Academy Award nominated performance was one of the few things I gave credit to the original film for and while Binns is trying he doesn't convey that sense of history you expect with O'Neal's character so it plays awkward especially if you remember the original film. After dealing with behind the scenes rights negotiations and Ryan O'Neal refusing to comeback, you get the sense Paramount just wanted the movie out the door and left Marley as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice to just put the film before cameras.

Oliver's Story is slightly better than Love Story as Korty replaces the overwrought maudlin tone of the original film with an attempt at being a more substantive character piece and you can see flashes of a good movie trying to get out but held back by Segal's writing style that clashes with the more grounded approach by Korty. I will say the ending is a MASSIVE improvement from the one in the book and there is a sense of optimism from Oliver for the future which I did appreciate, but in the end Oliver's story is Korty attempting to get a purse from a sow's ear and only just barely not quite succeeding.

The (belated) sequel to "Love Story", "Oliver's Story" was rejected by audiences at the box office, and it's all but forgotten today, even with it being released on both VHS and DVD. Watching it, it's pretty easy to figure out why. For one thing, it's hard to sympathize with Oliver; while he has lost his wife, he is rich and with a good job, and he just silently mopes around instead of expressing anguish or sadness. Not surprisingly, O'Neal performance is lacklustre. While Candace Bergman actually give a better performance than most of the other movies she made in the '70s, she lacks spark and spirit. What on earth do these two people see in each other? And the end of the movie is very unsatisfying, leaving the characters' plot threads in the air. The only real good thing about the movie is Ray Milland, though he only makes a few brief appearances.

If love really does mean never having to say your sorry, then the producers of Oliver's Story should consider themselves lucky, because otherwise they'd have a lot to apologize for. Banal, melancholic and tepidly shallow, Oliver's Story is of all things a complete antithesis to Hiller's infinitely superior Love Story. Where Love Story was a celebration of life in the midst of death, Oliver's Story is narratively lifeless, so wallowing in death that in retrospect makes the finale of the first film seem like Laugh-In. In Love Story, Arthur Hiller was able to capture the optimism, vitality and spirit of its youth subjects, providing its flower children audience with a moral center to believe in. Here was a couple, Jenny and Oliver, who overcame class, religious and parental boundaries to create a marriage based on love over money or politics or heritage. Love Story was the penultimate baby boomer picture, a movie for youth the world over to celebrate their liberal optimism and flower power innocence.

In Oliver's Story these characters have grown tired, and so has the first film's spirit. The motivated, liberated youth from the first film become the self-centered, pouty aristocrats that populate this sequel. The hippie sensibilities of the first have been replaced with yuppie complacency, as Oliver goes on a journey discovering that hey, plant ownership ain't so bad after all. The "love story" in this film is pointless, since both characters care too much about themselves to ever come close to capturing the shared bonding between Oliver and Jenny in the first film. Marcie fills her life with recreation, be it tennis, fancy dinners or overseas photography. Oliver starts off a lawyer with a social concern, but ends up accepting his position into land-owning bourgeois society all because, you guessed it, Jenny would want him to do so. Please.

The movie is called Oliver's Story, and if it is to be about Oliver's soul searching, it is the most passive and empty searching as I've ever seen. O'Neal, who can be great when he wants to be, is reduced to pouting while looking onto open landscapes. While the film covers a span of two years, the dreary setting remains a constant winter, and the trees are as dead as the emotion in this film. Some will call it smart for eschewing the standard romance plot, as Bergen's character becomes a write-off after an abrupt confrontation two-thirds in, but it is just arrogant writing. Writer Erich Segal (who also penned the first film), seems determined to breakaway from seemingly low brow romance conventions, but in so doing he has created a totally stale and empty film. What is a romance film without any romance? Even the brief sex scene between O'Neal and Bergen is so truncated and undeveloped that it amounts to all the eroticism of a loaf of bread. Stale.

The film veers from being a love story to being an empty film on just how oh-so-tough it is being bourgeois. The first film worked so well because Ali MacGraw brought a spunk to her lower class Jenny, who in turn was able to free Oliver from his upper class conceits. Without Jenny, Oliver is just another pouty aristocrat, and nobody wants to see a movie about the wealthy complaining about how hard off they are. Sorry, but tennis matches, overseas trips and countryside dinners do not strike me as a particularly sympathetic lifestyle, widower or not.

The whole film is an insult to the original, embracing money over love, individual self-pity over altruistic compassion, and pouting over pleasure. It's one big melancholic bore, where we spend ninety minutes waiting for Oliver to come to the conclusion he should have reached at Jenny's funeral, and that is the need to move on. What does he move to? The comfort of his father's wealth. For those two lovers in the first film, who needed only love to make it, such a conclusion is particularly disheartening. Those who wish to preserve their love for the first film and its characters are best to avoid this sellout Love $tory.

Love may mean never having to say you're sorry, but death means not having to be in the sequel to Love Story. In this one, Ryan O'Neal has to struggle with being a rich, idealistic attorney in an affair with fabulously wealthy Candace Bergen who treats him to a trip to Hong Kong.

Life is not what it should be, however, since rich father Ray Milland wants him to take over the family business and Candace Bergen actually thinks that her job running Bonwit Teller is more important than paying constant attention to O'Neal.