Capturing the anger and confusion of a historical
moment when the “generation gap” was at its widest—the dawn of the 1970s—Joe
is an unquestionably powerful film. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good
film. The narrative is awkward and contrived, the title character doesn’t make
his entrance until the 27-minute mark, and the infamous ending is predicated on
a silly plot twist. So to characterize Joe as an incendiary statement
would be to overreach considerably. Nonetheless, there are good reasons why the
picture enjoyed substantial box-office success during its original release, and
why it has retained some degree of notoriety since then. Written by Norman
Wexler, Joe is about a middle-aged New York ad executive named Bill
Compton (Dennis Patrick), who has become estranged from his twentysomething
daughter, Melissa (played by Susan Sarandon in her debut film appearance).
Living with a drug dealer in a grimy Greenwich Village flat, Melissa is a
counterculture idealist who’s gotten dragged into her boyfriend’s dangerous
world. When Melissa ends up hospitalized after an overdose, Bill tracks down
and kills the boyfriend. Rattled after the crime, Bill stumbles into a dive bar
where Joe Curran (Peter Boyle) is giving a drunken monologue blaming all of
society’s problems on hippies and minorities (“Forty-two percent of all
liberals are queer, that’s a fact!”). In one of the film’s least believable
moments, Bill confesses his crime to Joe. Thus begins an unlikely odyssey
during which Joe leverages the dirt he’s got on his new “friend” to force his
way into Bill’s rarified world. Later, when Melissa flees from the hospital,
Bill and Joe search for her in the drug underworld, a quest that culminates in
an orgy where compliant hippie chicks service Bill and Joe while the ladies’
longhair boyfriends steal personal items from the “straights.” Revenge follows,
as does tragic irony.
As directed by the capable John G. Avildsen, who found
tremendous success a few years later with Rocky (1976), Joe is
probably a better-made film than the sketchy storyline deserves. The acting is
uniformly good, with Boyle the obvious standout as a lout given license by
circumstance to manifest his latent psychosis, and Avildsen does a fine job of
defining spaces, from the crisp perfection of Bill’s Central Park apartment to
the dirty chaos of hippie flophouses. But the story simply doesn’t work as
anything except cheap provocation. It’s never totally clear what Joe wants from
Bill, or why Bill tolerates Joe’s threatening proximity, and the idea that
these two men eventually form true friendship stretches credibility to the
breaking point. Worse, the Melissa character exists merely as a set-up for the
ending, which doesn’t resonate anywhere near as strongly as the filmmakers presumably
hoped it might have.
Joe:
FUNKY