Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 52% (Critics) / 43% (Audience)
Directed By: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Written By: Andy Bellin
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard, Juno Temple and Sharon Stone
Studio: Radius-TWC

Synopsis:The story of Linda Lovelace, who is used and abused by the porn industry at the behest of her coercive husband, before taking control of her life. (Source)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vJADecKL-4
The Good:
Amanda Seyfried gives a really good performance in this film. She very convincingly portrays the transition of her character from the unsure and naive Linda Boreman to the poster child for 70s porn, Linda Lovelace to the battle hardened and regretful Linda Marchiano. In a supporting role, Robert Patrick also stood out as Linda’s father. It was Patrick, in a scene on the phone with Seyfried, that delivered the most emotionally truthful moment of the entire movie as he told his daughter about having seen her adult film. It was very powerful and most of that was due to choices Patrick made in that scene.

The Bad:
I am a huge fan of Peter Sarsgaard and while he gave a good performance as Lovelace’s first husband Chuck Traynor, the character was such an over the top slime ball that there was very little nuance to be found in what was written for him. Even an actor as good at mining the depths of the most reprehensible characters to pull out the sliver of humanity within, he was fighting an uphill battle with Traynor.
LOVELACE also suffered from bad production design. Everything from the 70s sets to the 70s costumes looked cheap and inauthentic. It was like this was a Lifetime movie of the week.
I also didn’t like the way the film was split into two different narrative sections. in one we got the rise of Linda Lovelace as a story of a small town girl “making good” as it were and the other half of the film depicted the horrendous treatment that Lovelace suffered at the hands of her controlling scumbag husband. The movie would have felt less unstructured if it had melded those two narratives instead of separating them.
The most intriguing aspect of Linda Lovelace’s story was her come to Jesus moment where she decided that porn was evil. Making the decision to end the film before truly delving into the anti-porn activism aspect of her life just seems like a bad one in retrospect.

The Ugly:
Sharon Stone overacts her heart out as the pious caricature of Lovelace’s mother. She was so hard to take serious because she reminded me too much of Mo Collins’ Lorraine character from MAD TV.

Final Verdict: LOVELACE is an episodic, uninspired and rote production that seems to want to appear like it’s an edgy and provocative film when it is really just a made-for-network TV-style movie with some nudity thrown in.
Seyfried does a good job with what she is given and Robert Patrick surprises with a nice supporting turn but the rest of the film is just lackluster.

Rating: C