The critics in 1970 were right to adamantly reject Zabriskie Point, the American-made Michaelangelo Antonioni film.  It is dumb, anemic and ill-structured.

Signore Director believed the alienation of young people in the 1960s, and of the New Left, was as significant an alienation as that in such earlier Antonioni films as L’Avventura and La Notte.  But ZP fails to convince us of that.  It has no sophistication whatsoever.  Indeed, the straightforward lovemaking between hippies in the desert (presented in a dream sequence) goes on for so long—and ends with a long shot that makes the hippies look like insects on sand banks—that it turns distasteful.  Yes, visually the film is often impressive, but junk is junk.

Zabriskie Point is a free-love, essentially anti-cop movie, and so we can hardly help realizing just how right it seems for our shoddy times.

I have never seen the David Mamet play, Oleanna, on stage, but surely the next best thing is watching Mamet’s 1994 film of it.  William H. Macy is true and affecting as a college professor accused of sexual harassment, and Debra Eisenstadt is mesmerizing as the girl who has accused him.  Mamet’s directing is satisfyingly competent.

Carol, the girl, understands nothing but believes she understands everything—except the lessons presented in John’s—Macy’s—class.  She is academically sinking there, almost frantic about it.  But she starts to think she can read her professor, and to discern oppression.  John’s easy cynicism about higher education only makes matters worse.  Carol resents that John possesses power of a sort, and goes so far as to deem him a rapist (!)

Mamet’s achievement is disturbing as it concentrates on the utter failure of human communion and on Carol’s use of radical sentiment, or political correctness, to defeat John.  (But is she really a radical?)  Near pleadingly at one point she tells him, “I’m bad!”  The utopia that Oleanna‘s title refers to is not exactly beckoning in the university.  This is a sadly dark opus.