The Look of Love

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, The Look of Love tells the true-life story of Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan) – an ambitious entrepreneur who parlays his gentleman’s club into an empire of smut and sex. The Look of Love comes off as an extremely standard biopic that seems to have emerged directly from a template for such films, with the movie establishing its less-than-creative sensibilities right from the get-go – as the story transpires almost entirely in flashback as Raymond remembers his life as an old man. The movie is, admittedly, kind of watchable for a little while, as the period atmosphere has been suffused with intriguing little details that go a long way towards buoying one’s precarious interest. And although Coogan is awfully good here, The Look of Love suffers from a dearth of compelling figures that slowly-but-surely proves disastrous (ie the absence of engaging characters ultimately exacerbates the film’s conventional and run-of-the-mill atmosphere). There’s little doubt, too, that Matt Greenhalgh’s cookie-cutter script plays a significant role in the movie’s downfall, as the narrative, for the most part, unfolds exactly as one might’ve expected – with Raymond’s fractured relationship with his children, including his drug-addicted daughter, certainly the most egregious example of this. One finally can’t help but wonder just what drew Winterbottom to this hopelessly stale material, and it does go without saying that some lives simply aren’t compelling enough to warrant a biography of their own.

*1/2 out of ****