Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 14-March-10
Spoiler Rating: High

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

Time travel is a subject to inspire deep thinking. Even the action flick in last week's Spotlight, the first in a series dealing with this topic, offered compelling ideas if you went looking for them. By contrast, the philosophy in this week's installment is evident from the first. Portrait of Jennie opens to a shot of the heavens and a stately voice intoning:

Since the beginning, man has looked into the awesome reaches of infinity and asked the eternal questions: What is time and what is space? What is life and what is death? Through a hundred civilizations philosophers and scientists have come with answers. But the bewilderment remains.

A story then unfolds in which religion and destiny emerge but bewilderment is ultimately banished by the power of love. For Portrait of Jennie uses time travel to maximize romance.

This theme notwithstanding, the action all takes place between 1934 and 1935. It revolves around a painter named Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) who struggles with a lack of money and inspiration. While wandering in Central Park one day he meets a schoolgirl who introduces herself as Jennie Appleton and drops references to events that occurred in 1910. The chance meeting, if that is what it is, fires Eben's creativity so that he manages to sell a pencil drawing to a pair of old art dealers. One of them (Ethel Barrymore) develops a spinster's crush on Eben, who is many years her junior. This introduces the key concept of potential lovers missing each other through the cruelty of chronology.

When Eben runs into Jennie a few weeks later she appears older, now in her teens. (Played throughout by Jennifer Jones, she undergoes careful changes of hair and clothing to denote different phases of her life.) They make a date to see her parents perform their trapeze act in the circus, but when Eben goes to the venue he learns that neither it nor the Appletons have existed for years. Shortly afterward he comforts Jennie on the night of her parents' death, and then, when he has grown obsessed with his mysterious friend, he finds her in his apartment as a young woman entering college. He begins to paint her portrait, which will become his masterpiece. When she returns for the final sitting she has matured into a college graduate. At last they profess their mutual adult love and start to plan a future.

All during this strange courtship Jennie seems to understand, or at least realize and accept, that she is not anchored in time as other people are. The few other characters who know her comment on the mystical, faraway look in her eyes, suggesting that she exists in all times simultaneously even beyond the normal terminus of death. As a child she recognizes a kindred spirit in Eben and translates this into a belief that they are meant to be together if he will just wait for her to catch up to him. He comes to believe this too. Yet just when he thinks he has a firm hold on her she slips away once more, leaving him desolate and driving him towards a final revelation on a stormy New England shore.

Portrait of Jennie is not exactly subtle, but neither is the notion that romantic love sustains life and vanquishes death. Cotten, Jones, and the rest of the cast imbue their characters with great earnestness, so the picture tempts a viewer to embrace the possibility of such a force beyond time.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.