HOTEL MOVIE CLUB: Portrait of a Lady

On "Somewhere in Time," B-movies, quantum gaslighting, Gilded age gaslights, the summer season, catamarans, schmaltz, and fudge.

Hello Valued Guests,

Tonight, we watch the gauzy, sentimental, and altogether bonkers time-travel romance 1980 film “Somewhere in Time” starring a young and almost violently handsome Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour in flouncy period costumes, and Christopher Plummer doing what Christopher Plummer does best (giving stentorian speeches that involve at least one bracing inhale through his teeth). Discord here, if you need it.

I do not invoke the word “bonkers” casually when referring to this film, which has a wackadoo, convoluted, only-in-the-movies premise that makes me laugh just thinking about it. Universal Pictures put this movie out into 369 theaters across America in early October of 1980, and it ended up being the number two film at the box office (right behind a George Burns comedy called “Oh God! Part II”...) and turned a $5 million profit, so someone obviously knew what they were doing. But nothing about this film, from the plot (we’ll get to that) to the filmmakers at all guaranteed that it would be a success. To be fair, Christopher Reeve’s face is a golden ticket. That’s a given. But the rest of it was a real nail-biter. 

The film’s writer, Richard Matheson, was an author of pulp sci-fi paperbacks who had moved into campy genre television starting in the late 1950s. He wrote for “The Twilight Zone” and “The Night Gallery,” “Lawman, “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” and “Shoestring Theater.” One of his dimestore hits, “I am Legend,” was adapted into the corny 1971 Charleton Heston vehicle “The Omega Man.” (Matheson did not get to adapt his own novel at the time, but later corrected this when he wrote the screenplay for the Will Smith reboot in 2007). In 1972, he created “Circle of Fear,” a horror anthology series for NBC that brought the chaotic energy of the midnight drive-in movie to primetime, with episode titles like “At the Cradle’s Foot” and “Cry of the Cat.” Perhaps Matheson then got sick of working with fake blood, because in 1976 he took a bit of a hard left turn and wrote a novel called “Bid Time Return,” an unabashed work of schmaltz about two lovers who find each other through the magic of astral projection. This book would become two things: the basis for “Somewhere in Time,” and also the basis for a feel-good news story about a man who stole a copy from the Great Falls Library in Great Falls, Montana and returned it thirty-five years later with an apology note and a $200 check to cover the late fees. 

The director of “Somewhere in Time,” the Paris-born Jeannot Szwarc, had been working in a similarly B-movie/popcorn TV milieu as Matheson. Szwarc was a showbusiness jobber who directed several episodes of “Marcus Welby, MD,” “Baretta,” “Kojak,” and “The Rockford Files” throughout the 1960s.  His film forays were not much more prestigious – before “Somewhere in Time,” his big screen releases included “Jaws 2” “Extreme Close-up” (an early Michael Crichton script about a reporter who takes to an assignment about home surveillance with a little too much gusto), and “Bug,” an aggressively gross 1975 thriller about mutant cockroaches that can start fires with their minds (come for the barmy premise, stay to have your nightmares forever peppered with roaches dropping from chandeliers). 

So, this is the crackerjack team that came together to make the grand, sweeping romantic hotel epic of 1980. Was there any other way for “Somewhere in Time” to turn out than absolutely mad? But just how mad it is still takes my breath away. 

Let’s just look at the plot, briefly: A playwright named Richard Collier (Reeve) who is struggling with writer’s block takes himself on a vacation to a glamorous hotel on Mackinac Island in the middle of Lake Huron (as one does), and while wandering the “hall of history” at the hotel stumbles upon a 1912 photograph of a stage actress named Elise McKenna (Seymour). He becomes unhealthily obsessed with the woman in the picture, and then realizes (and stick with me here, this is where it tries to shoot the absurdity moon) that she has the same face of an old woman who attended one of his plays eight years earlier and gave him a vintage pocket-watch while imploring him to “come back to me.” He throws away the logical explanation – that she was someone’s sundowning grandmother who had wandered away from her guardian – and concludes that naturally, this crone was Elise, and that in some past reality the two of them had been in love. Elise is now dead, of course, so he cannot fact-check his delusion, but he does visit her former housekeeper and discovers that she has a music box that plays Rachmaninoff. And wouldn’t you know it, he ALSO loves Rachmaninoff! A coincidence???? Fat chance!!!!! Is Richard…unwell? Most definitely! But he has no time now for trivial matters like maintaining one’s sanity; he’s too busy *checks notes* tracking down an old college professor who assures him that oh yes, you can totally time-travel, and all you have to do is hypnotize yourself using cassette tapes and guided meditations. Richard is like, great, okay, sure, I’ll do that, that does seem like a completely normal guy thing I would do. The tapes don’t work at first, but in a very “The Shining” turn (see you in two weeks for that one!), he discovers that he already signed the hotel guestbook way back in 1912, so at some point he must have been able to leap across decades into seersucker suiting. Men will literally do hypnotherapy to sleep with a dead woman in an old-timey snapshot rather than go to actual therapy, etc. He ultimately does do enough transcendental meditation to will himself into a boater hat, and voila! Reeve has made it to the Gilded Age, baby! Where his Whartonian cheekbones belong! And Seymour is into it! She falls head over heels for this dashing stranger even though he sings songs that have not been written yet (whoops!). Meanwhile, Elise’s manager (Plummer) is not so into this cross-temporal love affair. He thinks that the romance between Richard and his client will stunt her acting career and in so doing kill his meal ticket. Still, despite many gruff Plummer monologues, Richard continues to court Elise by being the worst time traveler ever, constantly dropping coy little hints about things that haven’t happened yet. All of this gives Seymour the cultural bends (she doesn’t know that Rachmaninoff tune yet! Don’t CONFUSE HER!) and she starts to believe that maybe she is losing her mind. Richard may be the only man to ever gaslight someone across the space-time continuum. And they said it couldn’t be done! 

A great many more things happen, including a mixup involving souvenir tchochkes and a passionate round of love-making, and I can assure you that it does not get any more sensical than what I have described. I will leave the most delicious joys – and the weepy, Nicholas Sparksian ending – for you to discover in the viewing.  I do wonder what the logline for this film might have been – I would now describe it as “‘Back to the Future’ but make it a Merchant-Ivory production,” but “Back to the Future” would not happen for another five years. Did Bob Zemeckis see “Somewhere In Time” before writing “Back to the Future?” It’s hard to say, though he does make sure to note Marty McFly’s moral clarity while conducting his time experiments (Marty does not, for instance, choose to sleep with his own mother). This is quite the improvement over Richard Collier, who plays so fast and loose with his quantum leaps that he inflicts lasting metaphysical trauma on most anyone who interacts with him. Toxic across the decades! Truly something to behold. And yet…this film still has a vice grip on my tearducts, despite all of its foibles. It hits you right in the throat at the end, and in that way where you feel totally emotionally manipulated but also like you wanted to be topped by the Kleenex corporation, if that makes sense? The last shot of this film belongs in a canon with that moment in “Titanic” where Rose jumps back off the lifeboat, or the Gena Rowlands reveal in “the Notebook.” A gut punch, albeit one dripping with melted American cheese.

Anyways, this would not be a HOTEL movie club if we did not discuss the film’s shooting location, the legendary Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Mackinac (pronounced Mackin-aw) an 18-square-mile island in the middle of Lake Huron, was a thriving indigenous community before French fur traders swept in around the 1680s in hot pursuit of beaver skins and buffalo pelts for “sleigh blankets.” The French and British fought over the place that should never have been theirs for a while, but ultimately it ended up as a free-floating extension of Michigan that still boasts less than 600 year-round residents and does not allow automobiles. In the winter, Mackinac is a strange place out of a zombie Hallmark movie, where the quaint Main Street looks even more like a potemkin Disneyland because all of the buildings feature antique gaslights and horse carriages pull people through the snowy lanes. You cannot stay at the Grand Hotel in the winter, even if you wanted to, because it is closed. It is one of the rare luxury hotels that still maintains a staunch seasonal schedule; they open it every year in May with fanfare, and close it every October with a somber party. They made a video of the most recent close last week:

In the summer, Mackinac explodes. Michigan mainlanders (and a lot of rich Chicagoans) crowd onto ferries and private catamarans and crawl all over the island in Vineyard Vines polos buying several varieties of fudge and eating burgers at The Chuckwagon. The Grand Hotel, on the island’s Southern tip, is the social hub of the summer season, and has been since it opened its doors in 1887. The hotel is a Gilded Age creation through and through: opulent jewel-toned interiors, busy rugs, indoor palm trees, striped awnings, lots of kelly green, frescos on the walls. The building itself resembles a sprawling, one-tiered wedding cake; pure white, plain and yet fussy at once. The covered front porch is one of the longest in the world. The sand on Mackinac’s beaches is the color of oat milk, while the water is a foamy slate blue; the color palette is very Pottery Barn kitchen. You can imagine heiresses carrying pink parasols along the beaches once, in uncomfortable boned corsets. Mackinac was, in its heyday, the Midwestern Newport, with slightly less old money at play. It was a place for wealthy (mostly white) people to put the leisure in leisure class, to take constitutionals in the salt air, to renew themselves with a brandy by the beach and perhaps an afternoon croquet game on the great lawn (see also: Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Kennebunkport). There is a Tea Garden and a private four-bedroom cottage that is so expensive they won’t list the rental price online. First ladies often stayed here, and the management went all in on this fact, naming several suites after former Flotuses; the Nancy Reagan suite sure looks haunted to me! Every room in the hotel has a different decor theme, thanks to eccentric designer Carleton Varney, and, as an extra fun fact, no room had air conditioning in it until 2007. I do think you have to hand it to a place that for 120 years said to patrons “Just open a window! The seabreeze should be enough!” They still do not technically allow tipping on hotel grounds (a holdover from the days when railroad tycoons would settle their tabs in private rather than do anything as gauche as touch a greasy nickel). 

One thing you should know about Grand Hotel is that is has an in-house historian named Bob Tagatz who has a delightful YouTube channel where he does little lectures about Mackinac’s past. Here he is doing a parody of Vogue’s 73 Questions, but about hotel history. I told you, delightful!

Another thing you should know is that you can find vintage Grand Hotel merch if you dig around online, and honestly, it bangs. I want this mug, and this mug, and this plate and this hypebeast-adjacent Grand Hotel sweatshirt and this lot of random hotel room amenities, and this Cupola Bar matchbook, and this normcore hat.   

The last thing you should know is that “Somewhere in Time” tourism still constitutes a not-insignificant chunk of Mackinac Island’s economy. At the tail end of every summer season, the Grand Hotel hosts a “Somewhere in Time” weekend that books up months in advance. The weekend, as you might guess, requires its participants to attend in costume. People plan all year for this and have dresses and waistcoats made. It is LARPing with watchfobs and Edwardian bouffants, and I imagine that some of the hotel staff is like, “oh brother, not the arm-length gloves people again” when every October rolls around. But it is big business for the island, after the summer throng has scattered back to work and school, and I imagine that they must be grateful to Matheson and Szwarc for creating a film with such a cult-following that they have guaranteed cold weather bookings. This year’s SIT-fest featured an extra-special treat: Jane Seymour herself made an appearance. Here she is announcing her surprise attendance and also promising that she will bring a merch table:

I’ll leave you with this: “Somewhere in Time” is a film about a man so obsessively drawn into the past that he drags several other people down with him. It may seem romantic at first, sure, and if you just want to enjoy the soft focus lens and the lilting flute of John Barry’s score, please, by all means, enjoy the vibes:

But if you tilt your head another way, you will see that this is also a film about the malevolence of nostalgia. It can be harmful and solipsistic, this need to go back, to pause time, to bathe yourself in the old ways. There is a beautiful love story here, but, just as a beautiful old hotel gussies itself up with fresh paint every summer, it is covering up for something more sinister lurking beneath. The Grand Hotel was never for everyone. The yearning to dress up in linens and cosplay a simpler time is not so simple. I encourage you to listen to the brand new season of the brilliant podcast “Articles of Interest,” Avery Trufelman’s exhaustively researched investigation of fashion lore, which is all about the history of Preppy style. In this new season, Trufelman attempts to peel back the layers of WASP clothing and culture, and gets to the heart of dangerous sentimentality more clearly than I ever could. A nice companion piece to this film, I think.

See you in a few hours.

-The Management