"Shampoo" (1975)

Something rarely commented upon is how old movies act as cultural artifacts of the time they were made in. But seldom are films actually intended as cultural artifacts as Shampoo is. The film is a cultural artifact about another cultural artifact. Made in 1975 but set in 1968 in the days leading up to and after Richard Nixon’s election, the film is attuned to the jaded, frustrated American zeitgeist of the post-Watergate years, where everyone was deeply disillusioned by their government. 

The film tries to use that foreknowledge of what was to come against its characters, who are blithely oblivious to the devil hiding in plain sight. It is a nice little conceit that Shampoo doesn’t really take full advantage of. The election is background noise for the exceedingly self-involved drama of the characters. But the film’s real flaw is that the deep, dark strand of bitterness doesn’t read as fully as it ought; Shampoo is a silly, loose, farcical comedy, and the darkness just doesn't bleed through that warm, swinging appearances like it ought to. It's all so very miscalculated.

Warren Beatty plays male hair dresser George Roundy, who has chosen his profession to pick up chicks. He is currently in the middle of a byzantine web of affairs, and he is leading on all of them. The naïve, doe-eyed Jill (Goldie Hawn) is his live-in partner but George is disconnected and distant from her. Then there’s Jackie Shawn (Julie Christie) Jill’s close friend who is possibly the person George should be with but he can’t bother to commit. Finally, there is Felicia Karpf (Lee Grant), a wealthy socialite. She convinces her husband Lester (Jack Warden) to pay for George’s new salon business. And as if that weren’t enough wrinkles in the story, Lester is having an affair with Jackie. 

If that feels unnecessarily complicated, well, that’s because it is. Most of this intricate plot is almost an afterthought. Besides George, Jackie is the only character given enough screen-time to feel meaningfully developed. This is a film where (the guise of) sex positivism is filtered through a male point of view and it feels clumsy at times. All of the characters matter only in so far as they relate to George and his growing deceit catching up to him. George, in some ways, stands in for the American government and Nixon’s infidelities. But the pathos of George’s existential, Don Draper-like burden over the hole he is filling never completely registers. The script, written by Beatty and Robert Towne, doesn’t earn the moment and it isn’t tight or savvy enough to take advantage of the underlying cultural and political meanings at work. Shampoo may have been timely in its own time but that has prevented it from being timeless.

Grade: C