Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(February 2009)

Director: William Sten Olsson
Writer: Alex Metcalf
Starring: Gretchen Mol, Cameron Bright, Noah Wyle, Perrey Reeves, James Rebhorn.

Set in the Washington, D.C., of 1963, An American Affair's opening scene throws the audience into Adam Stafford (Bright)'s racially integrated Catholic school. With the unfortunate pacing of a stage play, Affair builds on the premise of this sexually curious adolescent's interest in his sex-bomb of a neighbor, Catherine Caswell (Mol), whose mailbox enjoys very personal invitations from the likes of JFK, and with whom Stafford seeks personal interaction by soliciting chores. The boy's mild interest morphs into obsession, expressed partially by a paparazzo-like passion for long-lens photography and the subsequent pawing of a young female in his class.

Ms. Caswell's past is well-known fodder for this community's social small-talk. And the black cars that pull up late at night deliver to her doorstep none other than the three-lettered president himself.

The interplay of the boy's sexual learning and his infatuation with Caswell set against the secretive spirit of the administration solidly evokes the atmosphere of the period. Originally titled Boy of Pigs, the film showed at the Zurich Film Festival in 2008 and opens in the U.S. on February 27, 2009. 

That there is nothing wrong with the film is not to suggest that anything is absolutely right, either. Mol is a class act, riding the rollercoaster of her role with powerful appeal. While the other characters exist and experience life, lust and loss in their own ways, and all leads provide performances paced well-enough for the piece, there seems to never be any real risks taken, no rewards sought. The major problem is that most characters are fixed in roles as observers and are simply not the pioneers that provoked the occasions around which the film is fixed. For a time in American history that represented such turmoil and turbulence, such political point and counterpoint poised on the precipice of a sexual revolution, An American Affair is just a little too... fair. -MPM

Images © Screen Media Films; top: Gretchen Mol.