Pssst, want to check out Butterflies Are Free in our new look?
Information
- Year
- 1972
- Runtime
- 109 min.
- Director
- Milton Katselas
- Genres
- Drama, Romance, Comedy, Music
- Rating *
- 7.2
- Votes *
- 4,070
- Checks
- 305
- Favs
- 29
- Dislikes
- 2
- Favs/checks
- 9.5% (1:11)
- Favs/dislikes
- 15:1
Top comments
-
Siskoid
When a film is based on a play, it very often shows, and it shows with Butterflies Are Free, essentially a three-hander with Goldie Hawn, Edward Albert and Eileen Heckart. But I don't mean that as a knock. I really like plays-to-film, or at least, the good ones, which very often have the wonderful dialog I crave. Albert plays Don, a young blind man on his own in the big city for only a month, over the protests of his mother (Heckart) who of course will come crash the party practically the second he makes a meaningful connection with Freedom's avatar, Jill (the irrepressible Hawn). Some parts of this can seem a little After School Special, but there's such charm and humor in the budding relationship that what seems like old-fashioned explanations of how a blind person lives their lives actually plays well enough. The character turns are, on the other hand, quite adult. The two women in his life representing freedom and dependence, Don AKA Donnie AKA Donnie Dark (any relationship to Donnie Darko?) will eventually see that there's a mixture of both in each situation, and that's dramatically presented in their shifts of attitude. If this is a crisis point in his life, it is also one in theirs. The mother having to cut the umbilical. The young girl whose fear of commitment is inadvertently a prison. I laughed often. It touched me. But more than anything, I felt like I was hearing truth. 3 years 8 months ago -
