BY TODD GARBARINI
Natalie
is a homely and painfully shy young girl with an overbite who hides under her
bed when boys disparage her looks, going so far as to knocking their teeth out
with a shovel when they, no pun intended, mouth off to her about her
less-than-spectacular looks. She constantly needs assurance from others that
her plain appearance will one day segue way to something attractive enough to
command the attention of members of the opposite sex. The person she looks up
to the most, Uncle Harold, is a sweet man who refers to her as “princess†and
assures her that she will blossom into a butterfly from the cocoon she has
wrapped herself up in. Her “knight in shining armor†fantasy of him is
shattered one evening at dinner when Uncle Harold (Martin Balsam) brings his
girlfriend, an attractive middle-aged stripper, to dinner and announces that
they are engaged. Uncle Harold passes sometime later due to an undisclosed
illness, and his fiancé confides to Natalie that life isn’t always as wonderful
as it appears to be. This truth is later confirmed when her attractive best
friend marries a “regular guyâ€.
The
late Patty Duke, who tragically lived a life as a manic-depressive and even
wrote a book about it, gives a performance as the titular heroine that wavers
between pathos, tragic-comedy and self-pity. Ms. Duke is arguably best known
for her work in The Miracle Worker (1962) in her portrayal of Helen
Keller, and then again in the 1979 television adaptation, this time as Anne
Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher. Natalie lives with her overbearing parents
(character actor Philip Sterling as her father and Nancy Marchand best known
for television’s Lou Grant and The Sopranos as her mother) who
set her up with a doctor (Bob Balaban, who also played John Voight’s date in
John Schlesinger’s Midnight
Cowboy (1969), the interpreter in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of
the Third Kind (1977), and Thora Birch’s father in 2001’s Ghost World)
in the hopes of seeing her married. Eventually, she musters the courage to cut
the umbilical cord and strike out on her own, leaving the confines of Brooklyn
for a Greenwich Village flat when such a decision was affordable for a single
person. She throws herself into her new life with zeal and gusto, repainting
her drab new apartment with bright colors and decorative knick-knacks, and
finds inventive ways of moving in through the dumb-waiter she shares with other
tenants, one of whom is a painter, David Harris (James Farentino), whose
apartment she mistakenly enters while he’s painting a nude model. Unlike Edouard
Frenhofer, Jacques Rivette’s protagonist in La Belle Noiseuse (1991) who
puts Emmanuelle Beart through the ringer to get to her quintessence, David is a
painter second to being an architect, though he would like to paint full-time. Natalie
initially regards him with disdain, interpreting his bohemian “profession†as a
poorly chosen excuse for bedding unsuspecting and attractive muses. Her throwing
rocks at the floor in moments of anger, sending plaster onto his head or waking
him early in the morning, is a gag that wears out its welcome. David soon falls
for Natalie, and once she achieves happiness with him her world comes crashing
down once again when she discovers a truth about him that leads to a failed
suicide attempt that is both tragic and comedic.
