Taking Off (1971)

Directed by Milos Forman
Lynn Carlin, Buck Henry

Bearing evidence of an outsider’s inquisitive eyes, Czech director Milos Forman’s first American feature took an even-handed, humorous look at the parents of the Me Generation. Though the title ostensibly refers to the runaway teen plot that opens the film, its more accurate enactment comes much later when, after getting high at an SPFC (Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children) meeting, the home-again, gone-again girl’s parents play (and lose, horribly) a game of strip poker with another child-searching married couple (the husband of which is played by Paul Benedict, a tall, strong-jawed man whom observant viewers will remember as the guy who showed up in Blaine, Missouri instead of Mort Guffman near the end of Waiting for Guffman).

If the daughter’s (Linnea Heacock) stoic desertions and an inter-cut reel of folk music concert auditions establish the post-60s hippie-beat subcultural setting, most of that scene is gleaned at one remove, from the perspective of the bewildered parents (Carlin, Henry). In an agile balance of middle-class suburbanite parody (think Woody Allen in West Chester) and earnest mid-life crisis and parental distress, Forman (who subsequently blended comedy and drama so nicely in Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The People vs. Larry Flynt) humanizes the distraught adults, all the while mining their idiosyncrasies for laughs.

Addressing issues for youth and parents of the time, Taking Off is inseparable from its historical context, an eloquent time capsule for the movies and larger cultural trends on the threshold between the 60s and 70s. After the youth audience-tapping successes of Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, faltering studios saw the marketing potential in giving young, highly film-literate directors (Coppolla, Lucas and Spielberg among them) small budgets and total artistic license. As such, Taking Off is a market-conscious product, saturated with the music, lingo and recreational drug use of the youth movements, but seeing the lot from an outsider’s (we future movie-goers, parents, foreigners, studio execs, etc.) perspective.

Accordingly, fashion, music slang and drug paraphernalia appear as so many archeological artifacts, indecipherable to common adults and only intelligible with the assistance of a complicit youth – one incredible scene after a gaudy SPFC gala dinner features a suited beat teaching confused parents how to smoke a joint under the pretext that doing so will help them understand their runaway childrens’ thinking: “It’s like a strange,” muses Not Guffman, “a strange fuzzy.” Estranged from their kids as they are, the adults are the focus of the film, and Forman’s attitude towards the fuzzy and largely undeveloped youth characters is distinctly ambiguous. Still, there’s a clear fondness for the era’s music, as the recurring acoustic musical numbers (including Kathy Bates singing a nostalgic ode about unicorns) and a chance drink at an Ike and Tina Turner concert confirm. As a film about age, Taking Off’s cultural referents probably seemed dated within a few years of its release, yet its humor and psychological portraits have grown middle-aged very nicely.

Shorter versions of this review will appear in the June 17 issue of The L Magazine, and on the magazine's website.