The Look of Love is a biopic about Paul Raymond, the richest man in the United Kingdom, starring Steve Coogan and directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a fast paced tale of how he rose from burlesque shows to skin magazines. Winterbottom may have been aiming for a mash of up of Citizen Kane while using the casual and seemingly spontaneous, but actually highly stylized The Trip franchise as narrative inspiration.
Let’s make a long story short! Raymond’s Rosebud is his daughter, and The Look of Love’s lesson is if you love your daughter, don’t party with her, and definitely don’t snort coke with her or else she may end up messed up. If you’re looking for deeper insight, keep moving, but if you want to see Coogan frolic with a bunch of hot chicks while playing the big man, go for it!
Winterbottom appears to have a bit of a man crush on Coogan, who seems to be his muse. I actually like Coogan. He has a sneaky way of endearing himself to viewers, but Winterbottom seems to take it a step further. I have concluded after watching five of Winterbottom’s films that he is particularly invested in the idea that Coogan is a highly desirable man. While I’m not saying that he is unattractive, I am saying that they are from the same country that produced Daniel Craig, and Craig wasn’t always James Bond. Hell, he isn’t Bond now, and apparently you may be able to get him to star in your movie at a discount rate because he was in the worst movie of 2018, Kings. I’m not saying that Craig is right for this particular role. Maybe Coogan is perfectly cast. I actually know nothing about Raymond (before or after watching The Look of Love), but I do know that Winterbottom seems to love him disproportionately to anything based in reality and sets him as the focal point for all the movies that I’ve seen so far. Do they look alike? Do they have similar personalities? This professional relationship goes beyond Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, David O. Russell and Bradley Cooper/Jennifer Lawrence. All these professional pairs work on incredibly different projects together whereas Winterbottom and Coogan keep making the same movie.
The Look of Love is just another brick in the wall of Winterbottom focusing on Coogan as the admirable and winning every man achieving everything while still vaguely feeling loss and just missing connection. There is a lack of capacity to form anything substantial and nourishing with a woman regardless of the type of relationship. Apparently Sean Connery impressions are required and essential. While it is a visual, technical achievement for changing the shooting style of each era to resemble each time period’s film technique, the actual story substitutes movement for exploration, which may mirror its protagonist’s life, but makes for a monotonous viewing experience.
I hope that drug-fueled sex orgies are less boring in real life than film because I threw The Look of Love into a pile of movies that bored me with its chronicles of excess. Literally the most interesting part of the movie was when he suddenly became blonde and preened proudly in front of a mirror. That moment of vanity told me more about his insecurity, malleability and conviction that reinvention is the key to success than any amount of sex scenes. He is like a shark in the sense of movement, not as a predator. “I never beg” was another. His reflection on his ex-wife’s desire to appear as the centerfold in one of his magazines shows that he definitely can provide a psychological profile of himself, but skates away from it and plays showman. Also his boasts to the press during moments of loss if those losses were quantifiable seemed less like flash, and an engaging reversal into gratitude—when younger, this loss would be a victory. Coogan attempts to inject some gravity into his performance, but Winterbottom seems less interested in nuance than dwelling on the prurient. Perhaps he took to heart Raymond’s key to success: naked girls.
Other than his daughter and occasionally his wife, The Look of Love flounders in its efforts to establish memorable characters for Raymond to bounce off of. Quirky subordinates or bawdy ministers are introduced, and there is no clue whether they will be crucial to the narrative or not until the end of the film. I’m specifically thinking of Chris Addison’s performance as Tony Power, which seemed to be more important than it was in the final cut. When they are dispatched, the offense seems sudden and indiscernible instead of it feeling like a payoff to growing tension or having a deeper significance. It is almost as if there are a list of events that must be chronicled, so Winterbottom depicts them, but has no emotional insight to how they fit in the overall tableau even with the benefit of hindsight. It does not appear that he really has something to say about what interests him in particular about Raymond’s story over other people because every moment should contribute to the overall message, but it largely feels like empty spectacle.
The Look of Love is a prurient glimpse into the debauched life of a wealthy man so you can live vicariously through him while simultaneously feeling superior for not making the same glaring mistakes as Raymond and feeling better about your lower financial station in life. I don’t need 101 minutes to do that, especially if Tony Curtis isn’t hosting Hollywood Babylon. Unless you are a huge Winterbottom or Coogan fan or just want an excuse to see a bunch of hot naked women, skip it, especially since the movie ends on a particularly mournful note that seems way heavier and sudden than anything that came before.