Continental Divide (1981) – DVD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B
starring John Belushi, Blair Brown, Allen Gorwitz
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Michael Apted

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The broad outline for Continental Divide is so suggestive, at least by Hollywood standards, that I wish I liked the movie more than I did. As the story of a city-slicker misogynist transformed by love for a bush-roughing woman, it's surprisingly progressive: when the annoying city mouse/country mouse gimmick falls away, we have a story of two lovers trying to reconcile their disparate lifestyles without costing one or the other their independence. As this topic seldom comes up in serious movies, it's doubly refreshing to see it in a cheesy romantic comedy, and had the production team been up to the challenge this could have been one for the genre-studies books. Unfortunately, the film is so lacking in nuance and conviction that one never quite believes what is going on; the dialogue is so tin-eared and the direction so listless that they trivialize the story's implications and squander a golden opportunity.

The aforementioned misogynist is Ernie Souchak (John Belushi), a city reporter for the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES with a nose for a scandal and a habit for making enemies. Roughed up by the police on one of his exposés, his editor decides to send him out of town until things blow over, assigning him the apparently unenviable task of interviewing nature-bound eagle conservationist Nell Porter (Blair Brown). At first, Ernie doesn't care for his subject's independence and brands her "frigid," while Nell is generally disdainful of publicity and resents the unwanted intrusion. But once Ernie acknowledges his total helplessness in the wilderness, he begins to respect her–and as he changes, Nell meets him halfway and they both fall in love. This presents a problem: how do the city boy and the mountain girl live together when their chosen professions tear them apart?

To recap: we have a film in which a man changes his sexist ways for a woman and spends the rest of the movie trying to reconcile their lives without sacrificing her independence. It doesn't exactly return the male gaze, but it's pretty damn good for 1981 Hollywood–or 2003 Hollywood, for that matter. So how could I be dissatisfied? For one thing, there is the considerable stumbling block of Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay, which rings true in none of the particulars. Ernie Souchak is one of those movie reporters whose powers extend beyond the police, the government, the laws of time and physics… He's so omnipotent in his muckraking that by Continental Divide's midpoint, they're bombing his apartment, pushing his saintliness factor well past the legal limit. And Nell Porter's conservationist ways are never adequately fleshed-out: it's obvious that minimal research went into this script, as Porter never interacts with other conservationists or does anything with the information she collects. So right out of the gate, the characters are sketchy and caricatured, seriously damaging the film's credibility.

But nothing could damage its credibility as much as Michael Apted's deadly direction. If Kasdan is at least conscientious in his cornball fantasizing, Apted is an oblivious hack with one eye on the clock and the other on his paycheck. His visuals are both sloppy and conventional, with no eye for the beauty of the outdoors that occupies so much of his film. And his approach to dressing the actors is disgraceful: for Nell, the costume department has created a Jane Fonda Workout parody of an assertive nature lover, reducing her to an Eddie Bauer clerk; so pathetic are the attempts to soften her that her hair is always perfect and her clothes are always neatly pressed. It's not just shoddy, it's weak-kneed, as if Apted was terrified by what was in his Pandora's box of a screenplay and did everything in his power to keep it inoffensive. What was needed was a director with the guts of the leads; instead, we have one who dishonours everything honourable about them.

THE DVD
Universal presents Continental Divide on DVD in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer with far more lustre than a Michael Apted film deserves. Bright colours jump out at you, as is the case with Belushi's comical climbing gear, and the muted tones of the mountain scenes are rendered without undue muddiness. Detail is very good, as should be the case with a film with such varied textures (pavement, hiking trails, etc.). The Dolby 2.0 mono soundtrack is somewhat less robust, but there are no bars to comprehension and it does the job more than adequately. The only extras are an amusingly long-winded trailer (which relies heavily on the latter part of the film) and a suggestions page recommending 1941 and The Blues Brothers. That's fine for Belushi fans, but rom-com lovers who follow such a lead are in for a rude shock.

103 minutes; PG; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono); English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Universal