Straight Time (1978) starts at a new beginning. Max (Dustin Hoffman), our protagonist, has just finished up a six-year prison sentence for an armed robbery. Wanting to put his lifelong criminal career behind him for good, he’s decided officially to go straight. Now unmoored in Los Angeles, he has designs to get a job anyplace that will take him and make an honest living. And when he catches up with old friends — ones who have been trying out the straight life for a while now themselves — it’s purely for catching up and not criminal plotting.
Things are moving in the desired direction not long into Straight Time. Max gets an unappealing but good-enough-for-now gig at a cannery. He also takes up with the pretty receptionist (Theresa Russell) who helped get him the job at an employment agency. But after his power-tripping parole officer, Earl (M. Emmet Walsh), pettily pushes Max back into jail on a bogus drug charge (Max had simply been in the same room while a buddy used), he’s again jobless and without secure housing — a reality that pushes him back into the transgressions he wasn’t so long ago determined to move away from.
Straight Time is among the most empathetic movies about criminal life I’ve seen. It’s the rare version of one that doesn’t myopically suggest the majority of criminals are just born that way, addicted to self-destruction and breaking laws just because it’s something innate. It instead considerately gets at how the financial desperation brought on by a societal structure that makes it nearly impossible for those in Max’s situation to get a job or receive a deferred education only leads those wanting to go “straight” back to where they started.
Some reviews still frame Max as a hopeless-against-himself anti-hero enslaved by his worst impulses. That’s somewhat true, especially in later scenes where he acts irrationally and crudely to heat-of-the-moment frustrations, with grave consequences following suit. But this movie isn’t so much a study of a man’s inherent shortcomings and more how larger institutional failings can impact a person who concludes, after their livelihood is literally destroyed in an instant, that simply sitting around and taking it won’t do any good. Ulu Grosbard’s direction is congruously unlacquered and frank. Screenwriters Alvin Sargent, Edward Bunker, and Jeffrey Boam cook up a screenplay that, though not particularly novel and struggling to build much dramatic velocity, has a humane touch. Straight Time is at its best when unflashily dwelling in the contours of daily life and in the friendships providing Max an emotional lifeline.
Despairing and sometimes heartbreaking in a movie he was initially supposed to direct, Hoffman is excellent in the part. He has sound support in Gary Busey and Harry Dean Stanton (who even manages to get a song in), former partners who since Max’s initial sentencing have settled into domestic routines but get roped back into crime by him. With her distinctively baritone voice and discerning eyes, Russell is the kind of actress that always seems to command her parts; I’m almost always glad to have her around. But though good with what she’s given here, the romance angle in Straight Time is its biggest disservice, affecting how we look at her in the process. We’re never quite convinced this seemingly level-headed young woman would so quickly hitch herself to this in-trouble man she’s only just met, and the screenplay is so unconcerned with her inner life that she feels mostly like a mystery or, more detrimentally, a placeholder filling in a requisite love-interest role the writers didn’t think about developing. Though when it comes time for Max to choose the fate of their relationship, the narrative development it brings feels exactly right.
Peterson Reviews 