Beaches Blu-ray Review
You gotta have friends. . .
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 25, 2013
We've become a peripatetic society and one of the results of that trend is a dearth of lifelong relationships. My wife
had the good fortune to grow up in one small town in Wisconsin and therefore has the luxury of still knowing a lot of
people that she met as
early as preschool. My own boys still have friends they initially made as toddlers since my wife and I have been in and
around Portland for so long, but I fear these family members are
the exception rather than the rule. My own history is much more full of moves from school to school and city to city,
meaning I have absolutely no long lasting connections to anyone I knew as a child or went to school with through my
adolescence and beyond. I frankly believe part of the seemingly ineluctable allure of
Beaches, albeit something
that I've rarely seen discussed in much detail, is the perhaps idealistic longing to experience a friendship that weathers
the vagaries of time, beginning in childhood and lasting until death do them part. Is
Beaches a great film?
Hardly. It's formulaic, predictable and unabashedly sentimental to the extreme. But as countless fans have proven, the
film, like the friendship at its core, has stood the test of time and it continues to be a favorite, especially among women.
And while a lot of the film kind of lurches from cliché to cliché without much finesse, there's no denying that on a very
basic level
Beaches is often quite enjoyable if taken on its own terms. Bette Midler had had her first big starring
role in
The Rose in 1979 after several bit and smaller parts in other movies (you can clearly see her as a young
girl, where she looks amazingly like Mayim Bialik, the actress who would play Midler as a young girl in this film, in a quick
shot onboard the ship in
Hawaii). But Midler's post-
Rose career had stuck mostly to over the top
comedy roles, so
Beaches returned the popular singer-actress to an at least ostensibly slightly more dramatic
role, albeit with some pretty broad comedic touches. The film also came at a rather interesting time in director Garry
Marshall's career, toward the end of his dominance on television courtesy of such long running series as
Happy
Days and
Laverne and Shirley, but before Marshall really erupted into phenomenal success with
Pretty
Woman.
Remember all those hoary "classics" of yore where a character would start to remember and suddenly the screen would
go all wavy and we'd be privy to the sight of pages flying off of calendars?
Beaches may not exactly traffic in
those
particular clichés, but there's no question that the film is a patchwork quilt of melodramatic tropes knit together in an
admittedly artful way to generate copious crying in the more sensitive viewer. We meet firebrand singer C.C. Bloom
(Bette
Midler) as she's preparing to do a show at the Hollywood Bowl. A troubling message is delivered to her, one which
obviously upsets her greatly, and she drops everything to try to get a flight out of La-La land.
That gambit fails,
and so C.C. is forced to drive south, giving us ample time to catch up on a lifetime's worth of memories.
In the first of
many flashbacks, we visit the boardwalk in Atlantic City, decades before its gentrification (and if, as
some sources suggest, this is supposed to be taking place in the late fifties, the use of 1964's "Under the Boardwalk" is
glaringly misplaced). Young
girl C.C. (Mayim Bialik) "meets cute" with another young girl named Hillary (Marcie Leeds). C.C. is a "star in training",
that training coming courtesy of her overbearing mother (Lainie Kazan), while Hillary is from a well to do family who can
pretty much write her own ticket to do anything she wants to for the rest of her life. C.C. and Hillary become an (to
utilize the title of another long running Marshall sitcom) "odd couple" of sorts, keeping in touch through the years and
forging an ever deepening bond.
The rest of
Beaches plays out like a cut and paste construction where virtually every plot point can be predicted.
Hillary (Barbara Hershey) and C.C. become roommates in their young adulthoods and eventually vie for the same man
(John Heard), something that tests their friendship in earnest for the first time. Both of the women do stupid things,
make poor decisions but continue to drift in and out of each other's lives in the way that seemingly only ever happens in
movies. And then of course we get the final act, where C.C.'s distress in the opening scene is clarified and has a none
too surprising connection to Hillary.
Beaches is by its very nature anecdotal in structure, lurching fitfully from sequence to sequence (and flashback
to flashback), gliding along on Midler's omnipresent wisecracks and the kind of Jewish-
goyische dialectic that is a
somewhat unspoken subtext of the women's relationship. Though Hershey is given co-equal billing to Midler in
Beaches, there's little doubt that the film exists mostly as a showcase for Midler's patented brand of brassiness.
Hershey does rather well with a much blander and more amorphous role, but this is Midler's show from start to finish
(Midler also co-produced the film).
You'd have to be heartless not to get at least a little lump in your throat as
Beaches winds its way to its
bittersweet finale, but it's emotion culled from manipulation rather than something more organic. In that regard, it's
perhaps instructive to compare another somewhat similar film dealing with the tempestuous relationship between two
women which is colored by a tragic death.
Terms of Endearment may have not been about "friends",
per
se, but it arrives at its tears in an arguably more natural fashion than
Beaches does.
Beaches Blu-ray, Video Quality
Beaches is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Disney/Buena Vista with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1.
Disney/Buena Vista has a mostly very good record with its catalog releases, and has even been known to recall product it
has realized is substandard (
Arachnophobia). Disney/Buena Vista is touting this release of
Beaches as having been "digitally
restored", but this is far from the sharpest looking transfer the studio has released in high definition. I'm not that ashamed
to admit I never saw
Beaches theatrically, but I've certainly seen it in various home video incarnations, and there's
no denying that this new Blu-ray offers better saturated color and at least decent fine detail in extreme close-ups. But this
is pretty soft looking overall and even minor opticals, like segues between scenes, are littered with so much dirt and extra
grain that it verges on digital noise at times (this may actually come as good news to those who fear over aggressive digital
noise reduction). Contrast is pretty iffy at times, especially in darker interior scenes, leading to some substantial loss of
shadow detail. This is a step up from DVD, but it's a rather small step.
