Moment by moment paul brown2/7/2024 It’s a mark of imaginative direction when a film displays control of time-a sense that the drama itself walks on a tightrope, and that the actors and the characters are energized by a moment passing between them. When a sexual relationship develops between Trish and Strip-at her doing-Wagner evokes the erotic bond between them with ardent simplicity and intense restraint, quick but hungry gazes, sinuous moves, and slow caresses. Tomlin’s performance is altogether different from that of her sketch comedy, and, for that matter, from the theatricality of “Nashville.” She seems to glide through “Moment by Moment” with a bright-toned wistfulness, a luminous melancholy, and a quiet calm that registers emotional turmoil with the mere passing of a cloud, the dropping of a pause. There is a tonal ambiguity to the bumptious romantic pursuit that follows, a surprisingly tremulous and fragile air, which may be what dismayed critics who were expecting a more conventional drama. Noodgily, annoyingly, brashly, persistently, unmenacingly (though with a childishly flirtatious way that nonetheless reads now as somewhat creepy), Strip follows her from the pharmacy to another store and, from there, to her car, and then keeps turning up at the beach house, with his spotlight grin and street-abraded aw-shucks manner that blends naïveté with confidence, intensity with innocence. Trish is at the pharmacy ordering sleeping pills to tide her over during a long stay at her beach house, where she is taking refuge in anticipation of her divorce. He recognizes her: he once did valet parking for her and her husband, Stu (Bert Kramer), at a party at their home, and he remembers her as a sympathetic employer. The credit sequence is a long series of suave tracking shots of Tomlin’s Trish gliding down Rodeo Drive on a shopping expedition, followed by another series of Travolta’s Strip striding through Los Angeles streets with a strut and a bounce in his arm-swinging step, exactly as at the beginning of “Saturday Night Fever,” until the two converge by chance, at the counter of Schwab’s Pharmacy. From the start, “Moment by Moment” displays a distinctive, original, and enthralling style and tone, an intense and graceful physicality that also winks at its own provenance. “Moment by Moment” tells the story of the unlikely bond between Trish (Tomlin), a well-to-do Los Angeles woman nearing forty who’s going through a bitter split from her philandering husband, and Strip (Travolta), a good-humored and eagerly earnest drifter, nearing twenty, in search of an anchor. It’s a superb romantic melodrama that should have propelled Wagner into the front ranks of Hollywood directors and advanced its stars’ careers, as well. The film is nonetheless available in an imperfect but adequate transfer online, and, despite all suggestions to the contrary, it is well worth seeing. An upcoming series at Lincoln Center, “ Two Free Women,” celebrating the work of Tomlin and Wagner, partners in life and frequent artistic collaborators, isn’t screening it. Jane Wagner, who wrote and directed it, has never made another movie. ( The New Yorker simply ignored it.) It is widely considered a catastrophe of film history, and has been blamed for nearly sinking the movie careers of both Tomlin and Travolta. At the time of its release, the film received negative, even derisive reviews from a range of critics, including Vincent Canby, of the Times. So it is with “Moment by Moment,” the 1978 romantic melodrama starring Lily Tomlin and John Travolta. Criticism can be a lonely endeavor, in part because the enthusiasms and revulsions of other critics are sometimes unfathomably bewildering.
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