Movie Review: Fatal Attraction (1987) directed by Adrian Lyne
Dan Gallegher (Michael Douglas) has a pretty comfortable life. He loves his wife Beth (Ann Archer) and daughter Ellen (Ellen Latzen) and has a well-paid job as the house lawyer for a publishing firm in New York City. Things are going so well that the family is thinking of moving to a bigger house in the suburbs. But Dan has a touch of arrogance and is about to make a very bad decision that puts everything at risk.
By chance, Dan has to stay in town one weekend for urgent work while Beth and Ellen are away visiting relatives. He meets a woman named Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) at a book launch party on Friday night. She’s very attractive and flirtatious but as far as Dan is concerned, nothing comes of it. Except that the next morning, he meets her again at the urgent work meeting as she’s a new hire at the publishing company that has information he needs to prepare a case. Alex turns up her sexual advances, and Dan decides that since he has the opportunity and Beth will never know, he can indulge himself in a one-night stand.
The sex is hot, if a bit clumsy, and Alex is fun to be with despite some clear abandonment issues…until Dan tries to leave to do his actual work, at which point Alex turns clingy and demands more time. Dan eventually manages to leave, thinking the affair is over. It isn’t.
Alex is emotionally unbalanced, and now believes that Dan secretly loves her and they are meant to be together. She becomes a stalker, following Dan around, calling him at all hours, and even claiming that she’s become pregnant with his child. (Whether the pregnancy is real is one of the few things the movie leaves vague–but Glenn Close was actually pregnant at the time.) When Dan isn’t won over by these tactics, Alex escalates, and her attraction becomes fatal.
This movie did very well at the box office and got several award nominations. It’s quite well directed, has good costume and set design, and is indeed pretty good as a thriller.
Dan isn’t a very sympathetic protagonist. He falls easily for Alex’s charms, and has no compelling excuse for cheating. While the particular consequences of this action are disproportionate, he should have known going in that he was incurring risks ranging from disease to divorce. And he makes matters more difficult for himself by not fessing up when Alex starts stalking him. On the other hand, once Alex does start stalking him, there isn’t much he can do to stop her. The same police indifference that helps endanger female stalking victims works against him, and is exacerbated by sexism; as a man he should be able to handle this, right?
Alex is pretty clearly not right in the head, and the system has failed her by not getting her the help she needs long since. But her actions quickly turn from sad to horrendous, and after a certain particularly monstrous act, it’s no surprise that test audiences wanted her death to be a punishment rather than part of her plan as in the first-filmed ending. Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” is a leitmotif for Alex, as she clearly identifies with the tragic heroine Cio-Cio-san. But unlike Pinkerton, Dan has never lied to Alex or pretended that he feels anything towards her than a temporary lust. He’s baffled when she directly accuses him of thinking exactly what he was thinking about their one-night stand, as she delusionally has attached much more weight to the relationship than ever existed.
The sympathetic people in this movie are Beth and Ellen, who didn’t do anything to bring about Dan’s infidelity or Alex’s wrath, and don’t know why they’re being endangered.
Content note: Violence, some lethal. Discussion of suicide (and actual suicide in the alternate ending.) Death of an animal. Extramarital sex (on camera, no genitals) as well as marital sex (likewise). A bit of nudity. Child in peril. Rough language, ranging from Ellen innocently repeating a naughty word she overheard to Alex using a homophobic slur in a scattershot attempt to find the worst insult she can use for Dan. This one’s a pretty nasty “R” so approach with caution for younger viewers.
Some of the cultural assumptions that make up the background of the movie have changed drastically in the last four decades, while others have remained intact. Since it’s well made, Fatal Attraction would make good viewing to spark discussions on cheating, casual sex and stalking. Recommended most for thriller fans.
