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Love and Pain and
the Whole Damn Thing (1973)

Rate: 3
Viewed: 7/25

7/25: Timothy Bottoms once said in an interview, "I do not consider myself that good of an actor. I take dialogue and direction given and try to make choices that pleases the director."

It shows in Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing. This is the best anyone is going to get from Timothy Bottoms despite appearing in The Last Picture Show and The Paper Chase. As a result, Maggie Smith was left foundering for herself while he fell off the map for good.

Timothy Bottoms plays a hopeless, immature loser who gives off heavy vibes of a rapist. Maggie Smith's klutz character has no inkling of how potentially dangerous he is. That one night at the hotel in Spain is a good glimpse, but it doesn't matter anyway because she'll pass away shortly from an undisclosed illness.

To make matters worse, the film is full of clichés, having been covered so many times like Love Story, Harold and Maude, and Bobby Deerfield. The photography of Spain is okay considering it was handled by Geoffrey Unsworth. It's keen that, at one point, a tour guide mentioned King of Kings was filmed up the hill. At the beginning, the two leads were revealed to be learners of Spanish at the beginning stage, but there are almost no subtitles to show what they were saying. Not long after, they've completely stopped playing around with the language.

All in all, it's uncomfortable to watch Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing because of Timothy Bottoms' character.

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