I realized something in writing this Highs & Lows piece: I don't think I'm much of an Adrian Lyne guy. I've got nothing against him, I just don't vibe with most of his movies. That said, he's an important filmmaker, particularly when it comes to the 1980s and '90s, and his work deserves an appraisal. Here are some of his best and worst movies.
High: Foxes (1980)
Lyne's first narrative feature film may have been released in 1980, but it's got the '70s all over it. The coming of age story of teenage girls is basically a Dark Hangout movie, less focused on plot than on character and emotional experience. Four friends exit the disco era (era) and enter a new decade with various problems, be it body image, sex, substance abuse (in the case of Runaways frontwoman Cherie Currie, making her acting debut), or just trying to keep everyone safe and together, the plight of the Jodie Foster character at the center of the film. Lyne's approach is more intimate here than in his later work, digging into characters and their psychologies the way he only would in his best films. The rough edges present in Foxes would more or less vanish by his next movie, but they help give the film a rawness and charm that no amount of producer-driven slickness can replicate.
Low: Flashdance (1983)
Speaking of producer-driven slickness. I know this will not be popular, but Flashdance -- for all its stylish photography, its great music, and the star-making turn from Jennifer Beals -- remains a bad, hollow movie. Lyne draws much more on his commercial background here than he had on Foxes and helps define what would come to be known as the Simpson/Bruckheimer aesthetic, which would later give rise to the careers of filmmakers like Tony Scott and Michael Bay. It's also the start of his "high concept" run, during which he made almost exclusively movies with easily digestible elevator pitch loglines like "welder by day, dancer by night" and "affair that turns deadly when the mistress goes nuts." Flashdance is slick but surprisingly sloppy, too, especially when it comes to Beals' dance doubles. The romance doesn't land and the drama doesn't work. Even the rules of this reality -- ostensibly our own -- don't totally make sense. Sometimes, when critics accuse movies of feeling like music videos, they mean it in a bad way. That's Flashdance.
High: Fatal Attraction (1987).jpg)
It's hard to remember a time when the words "Fatal Attraction" weren't in our cultural lexicon, but it doesn't get there without Adrian Lyne directing the mother of all "__________ from Hell" thrillers. Michael Douglas, the most Flawed American Man ever to appear on screen, cheats on wife Anne Archer with Glenn Close; when he breaks things off, Close does not take it well. This is one of Lyne's best movies not just because it attempts to actually address some of the questions it raises but because it does so by leaning into its thriller elements above all else. He was able to truly tap into some Boomer fears in a very real way, striking a nerve with audiences everywhere. It helps that Douglas, Archer, and (especially) Close are so totally dialed in and give great performances; both women received Oscar nominations, as did Lyne and the film itself, which is wild to think about because the movie is essentially genre pulp, the kind of thing the modern-day Academy frowns upon for the most part. Would this movie have been even better if the producers had allowed for the original ending and not re-shot the much more audience-friendly (and bloodthirsty) climax that appears in the finished film? Yes, probably. But it wouldn't have been as big a hit, writing Lyne the blank check to make Jacob's Ladder. This way we got two good movies.
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Low: Indecent Proposal (1993)
This movie and its massive box office success confounds me. Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore play a married couple having money problems that could vanish when rich, handsome sleaze Robert Redford offers them $1 million for one night with Demi. The screenplay by the great Amy Holden Jones wants to ask provocative questions but really just asks the one (What Would You Do?) and doesn't seem particularly interested in the possibilities of the answers. What's worse is that Lyne chooses to position the whole thing as a romantic fantasy. He has a good eye and the stars are all attractive so it looks very glossy and pretty, but it's about as a stupid and hollow as a movie like this can get. This is my least favorite entry in Adrian Lyne's mixed filmography.
High: Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Lyne's lone horror effort feels like a total departure from the rest of his work and manages to be one of the best and most original horror movies of the 1990s. Tim Robbins plays a Vietnam vet who begins experiencing nightmarish hallucinations that are growing increasingly worse and more frequent, leading to a startling discovery that blew my mind as a kid. While I'm not always one for trippy and hallucinogenic mindfuck horror, it's hard to deny the power of Jacob's Ladder in large part thanks to Robbins' performance and Lyne's atmospheric direction that goes for the throat both visually and emotionally. This is one of the only times I feel like the director's visual invention (honed during his background directing commercials) pays off. Apparently, 20 minutes had to be cut out after test audiences found the film too intense. I'd love to get my hands on that version.
Low: Deep Water (2022)
Lyne's return to cinema -- to the erotic thriller, no less -- after a 20 year absence was a welcome one, though the results were a letdown. Ben Affleck plays husband to Ana de Armas in a unique marital arrangement, but his increasing jealousy may or may not have driven him to murder. It was a bummer when it was announced that this was going to straight to streaming, but, having seen it, Deep Water feels exactly like a streamer, vanishing from memory even as it unfolds. Lyne's direction is flat, the stars generate little heat, and sex has been bled out of cinema to such a degree in the 2020s that even this "erotic thriller" feels sexless and chaste.
High: Unfaithful (2002)
This was Adrian Lyne's last movie before Deep Water and it's the much better version of Deep Water. In fact, it's one of the director's best. A woman (Diane Lane in a career-best performance) has an affair and compromises her marriage to a nice but kind of dull man (Richard Gere). That's the setup to Unfaithful, but it doesn't tell the whole story, which I don't want to spoil here by going into details for those that haven't seen it. Like in his best work, Lyne invests in the emotions and interior lives of his characters in real and grounded way -- substance over style -- and Unfaithful begins as a very strong marital drama before taking a sharp turn into ThrillerTown. It remains one of my favorite Adrian Lyne movies.
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