Rachel Cameron is a shy, 35-year-old, unmarried schoolteacher living with her widowed mother in an apartment above the funeral home once owned by her father in a small town in Connecticut. School is out for summer vacation, and Rachel anticipates a typically boring summer at home with her mother. Fellow unmarried teacher and best friend Calla Mackie persuades Rachel to attend a revival meeting, where a visiting preacher encourages Rachel to express her need for the love of Jesus. Rachel is overwhelmed by the experience, expressing so much suppressed emotion that she is embarrassed. Calla tries to comfort Rachel and suddenly kisses her passionately. Rachel is shocked and runs home and then begins to avoid Calla.
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Nick Kazlik, Rachel's high-school classmate who now teaches at an inner city school in the Bronx, arrives for a short visit. Nick's first appearance in the film happens in a flashback to Rachel's childhood, when he and Rachel talked right after his dead twin brother was carried into Rachel's father's funeral home in a basket.
Upon first seeing the adult Rachel many years later, Nick makes a crude pass that Rachel rebuffs, but after the episode with Calla, she succumbs to his charms and has her first sexual experience. Mistaking lust for love, she begins to plan a future with Nick, who tries to rebuff her gently by showing her a photo of a young boy who looks exactly like him that Rachel thinks is his son. Through a telephone call to Nick's mother, Rachel later discovers that he never married. The child in the photograph who looked exactly like Nick must have been Nick's twin brother, and he must have carried the loss with him into adulthood, perhaps keeping him from having close relationships.
Believing that she is pregnant, Rachel plans to leave town and raise the child. With Calla's assistance, she finds a teaching job in Oregon, but before the summer ends, she learns, to her great disappointment, that she is not pregnant and that her symptoms are the result of a benign cyst. After undergoing surgery to have the cyst removed, Rachel tells her mother that she is moving to Oregon (where her sister lives with her husband and children), and that her mother may accompany her if she wishes. Her mother reluctantly agrees to accompany her. Rachel sets out with hope for the future, having learned that she has choices, that she is able to give and receive sexual pleasure, and that it is possible for her to actively embrace life rather than waiting for it to find her. On the bus ride she fantasizes about walking along the beach holding the hand of a young child.
The film marked Paul Newman's directorial debut. It was filmed in August 1967 in various Connecticut locations. including Bethel, Danbury, Georgetown and Redding.
Newman and Woodward's daughter Nell Potts portrays Rachel as a child in flashback scenes.
Reception
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Renata Adler called Rachel, Rachel "the best written, most seriously acted American movie in a long time" and wrote "The direction is mainly sensitive and discreet, but now and then the whole thing goes awash in excess of sentimentality or even ambition. You cannot convey the quality of life in this sort of town, through Rachel's perspective, without losing proportion in melodrama and glop. Petty tragedies, faithfully portrayed, are a little embarrassing...If this were a less ironic age, it might work seriously and completely—like a kind of American cinema Balzac."[4]
Time wrote: "Stewart Stern often gets too close to the novel, adopting where he should adapt. Rachel is shackled with prosy monologues that should have been given visual form. Despite its failings, Rachel, Rachel has several unassailable assets...It is in the transcendent strength of Joanne Woodward that the film achieves a classic stature. There is no gesture too minor for her to master. She peers out at the world with the washed-out eyes of a hunted animal. Her walk is a ladylike retreat, a sign of a losing battle with time and diets and fashion. Her drab voice quavers with a brittle strength that can command a student but break before a parent's will. By any reckoning, it is [her] best performance."[5]
Variety called Rachel, Rachel an "offbeat film" that "moves too slowly" and added "There is very little dialog—most of which is very good—but this asset makes a liability out of the predominantly visual nature of the development, which in time seems to become redundant, padded and tiring...Direction is awkward. Were Woodward not there film could have been a shambles."[6]
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 92% of 12 critics gave a positive review of the film, with an average rating of 7.1 out of 10.[7] On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 74 out of 100 based on nine reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[8]
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