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Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) is well-made and acted and sometimes emotionally effective. Its trouble is a fundamentally not that interesting premise, and characters not interesting enough to make up for that. Some version of its narrative has existed in some form or another for what feels like forever. A troubled, rebellious fill-in-the-blank grows up by joining a strict fill-in-the-blank that teaches him discipline and respect. In this movie’s variation, the young man in need of some order is a 20-something named Zack (Richard Gere) living restlessly and aimlessly with his womanizing dad (Robert Loggia). At the beginning of the movie, Zack secretly enrolls in an aviation officer school based near Port Townsend, with hopes of becoming a Navy jet pilot.

Zack quickly befriends another candidate, Sid (David Keith), who comes from a military family. He also starts dating a local working girl, Paula (Debra Winger), with a seriousness suggesting he needn’t worry much about the much-warned-about-by-superiors “Puget Sound Deb” phenomenon — the historical trend of young women chasing after the school’s male students more because they want to live overseas than find true love. 

The happy developments in Zack’s life, buttressed by how he starts off his training doing pretty well, are threatened by the stern drill instructor with whom he starts off on the wrong foot (a great Louis Gossett, Jr., who wound up being the first Black man to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar because of the movie) and by how he’s illegally selling uniform accessories to his financially unsound co-trainees so that they can pass their inspections without any trouble. Sid is himself threatened by his romance with Lynette (Lisa Blount), a friend of Paula’s who might actually just be a Puget Sound Deb who seems like more than that. (The place that subplot eventually goes is the film’s nadir, so misogynistic when arriving at a meant-to-be-gratifying tell-off you can’t quite believe what you’re hearing.)  

Sealed by years of living with an emotionally unavailable father, and never quite getting over his mother’s suicide, Zack is so reticent that it’s complained about, early on, by a wanting-more Paula. But there’s a momentary break when, mid-movie, he frantically pleads to stay in the program when Gossett’s character threatens to kick him out. It’s there that his own worries about his lack of prospects feel the most touchable to the viewer — where we can almost see the extent to which he’s been keeping things bottled. Gere here suggests someone who avoids open vulnerability, who avoids putting too much on the surface, because the spiraling might not find an easy stop once it’s been started.

An Officer and a Gentleman is best in the moments when Zack is reveling in rare intimacy with Paula. You can feel him softening as the film goes on. Gere also has strong romantic chemistry with Winger — surprising, since much of the movie’s lore has to do with them not getting along much during shooting. Winger has the sort of natural radiance that makes certain frames seem like they’re glowing. That’s one reason why you might have more affection for Paula than for Zack. Winger fully realizes Paula’s feelings of small-town claustrophobia; you sense how much this smart young woman yearns for a life far bigger than the small-town one she has but has little means to move toward. Both Paula and Zack are generically written, though; they aren’t a lot more than the character types they represent in the story. If they ever feel alive, it’s only because Gere and Winger are playing them.

The ending of An Officer and a Gentleman might now be its most enduring trait. Its central image has Gere, sharp his officer’s uniform, whisking Paula off her feet during a shift at the factory job she so desperately wants to leave and carrying her out through the doors, presumably toward their life together. Taken on its own, this concluding image does have power. But in context it comes across as little more than forced — as if this was one of the first scenes written and the movie’s screenwriter, Douglas Day Stewart, had to figure out a way to make it smoothly segue from what happens before. (Something devastating occurs not much earlier: a suicide both Zack and the viewer don’t see coming.) This ending is meant to soar in the way you’d expect 1940s-era war propaganda to; it here evokes a movie, as Pauline Kael noted in her review of An Officer and a Gentleman, that Tyrone Power might have starred in. But that sort of thing felt too easy in the 1940s, in 1982, and still.