Login
You can look at me like I’m crazy all you want, but I find Harold and Maude to be an utterly charming picture of unconventional love. Granted, it’s unconventional love story is really a device used to tell us that life is worth living, and to do what makes you happy while you’re living it. How anyone could not be completely charmed by this strangely whimsical story of a young death obsessed boy and an elderly woman with a lust for life?
Director Hal Ashby and writer Colin Higgins are non-judgmental in presenting both of these individuals and exploring their relationship together. Essentially presenting a generational conflict and finding the ones in power to be suffering from a type of emotional malaise. Harold may be obsessed with death and prone to theatrical displays of this obsession, but at least he isn’t his mother so enamored and slavish to bourgeois comforts.
Our empathy lies perfectly square with Harold and Maude, a yin and yang if there ever was one. And much of the genius lies in the casting of Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. Cort’s wide-eyed stare perfectly encapsulates the winking suicidal tendencies of Harold. Even when smiling, which is only in brief moments, Cort appears to be frowning internally, and constantly appears to be marching towards an unseen funeral. Whereas Ruth Gordon, who quietly steals the movie which is only fitting given her character is a kleptomaniac, is pure energy and sunny disposition. Here is woman who can stare life and/or death in the face, and greet it with a big smile.
The two of them meet up while crashing a funeral, and their strange friendship blossoms from there, slowing turning from a meeting of kindred spirits and polar opposites, at the same time. There human connection is the very heart of the film, underscored by Cat Stevens score. A collection of pop songs which work in much the same way as a regular orchestral score would, Stevens uses his pop songs to underline the drama, or to add some levity to an otherwise macabre world.
While the world of Harold and Maude may be a strange one, there is still a shimmering innocence and sense of hope, a longing to make a connection. This idealism is what I think makes the movie so lasting as a cult film. Here is a film which doesn’t judge its two characters, and even presents them as the happiest and most normal person in the entire thing. Harold’s mother is obsessed with him repeating the process of marriage and middle-class domesticity, and his series of dates frequently culminate him staging a new bizarre death and his mother’s indifference to his neurosis, viewing it more as a nuisance than anything else. Ashby clearly wants us to understand that this lifestyle isn’t for Harold, maybe it isn’t even for you, and that’s fine. This is a fable of love and death which tells us happiness is a personal thing, and however you chose to define it is something worth fighting for.
