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| The Geffen Company | Release Date: February 5, 1982 |
Starring:
Emily Dole, Jim Moody, Jodi Anderson, Kari G. Peyton, Kenny Moore, Maren Seidler, Mariel Hemingway, Martha Watson, Patrice Donnelly, Scott Glenn
Summary:
The intertwined lives and loves of three highly-ranked athletes striving for the national team; Chris bounces between the beds of male coach Terry and her female friend, competitor, and role model Tory.
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What distinguishes Personal Best is that it creates specific characters--flesh-and-blood people with interesting personalities, people I cared about. “Personal Best” also seems knowledgeable about its two subjects, which are the weather of these women's hearts, and the world of Olympic sports competition.
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What advance publicity has been powerless to suggest is that
Personal Best is an exceptionally well-crafted, thoroughly accurate,
emotionally galvanizing piece of filmmaking, easily one of the most
intelligent explorations of competition on cinematic record. What's best
about Personal Best is a lot more than just personal .[5 Feb 1982]
Splendid film...Just as the recent "Chariots of Fire" did, Robert Towne's Personal Best takes the world of track and field as a microcosm for the ecstasies and pains of self-striving. And it dares, with great delicacy and insight, to show a loving sexual relationship between two young women, not as a statement about homosexuality but as a paradigm of authentic human intimacy. [8 Feb 1982, p.60]
Neither slick nor glib, they all suit a film that may finally disarm everyone with its full-frontal naturalness, its unsmirking bawdiness, its obvious liking for athletes as people, and its refusal (most of the time) to poeticize sport. Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.
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The leads are convincingly athletic, the characters well drawn. Where director-writer Robert Towne stumbles is in his portrayal of the ritual of athletics. [4 Feb 1982]
It's also full of lyrical slow-motion footage of women athletes' training - jogging, sprinting, running the high hurdles, throwing the shot, broad jumping and high jumping. These sequences are accompanied by not-great pop music that has been poured over the images in a way that suggests fudge sauce on top of fried chicken.
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