You Light Up My Life

There are some movies out there that aren't very good, but that TCM could use in 31 Days of Oscar because they received a nomination for Best Original Song. I've already done posts on Endless Love and Ice Castles. Another movie n that category is one that I had wanted to see for a long time until TCM finally programmed it for 31 Days of Oscar: You Light Up My Life.

Anybody who is at least a certain age will remember the Debby Boone (yes, the daughter of Pat) song, which was a massive hit at the end of 1977. Debby doesn't actually sing the song in the movie, although it's definitely not the first time somebody other than the person who performed the song in the movie would have the big hit with it. Actually singing it -- well, doing the dubbing -- is a relatively unknown singer named Kacey Cisyk who would die fairly young.

Looking like she's singing it is Didi Conn, whom you might best remember from the sitcom Benson. Conn plays Laurie Robinson, who is the daughter of Si (Joe Silver). Si is a comedian, who thinks that Laurie would make a great comedian, and always has. Indeed, when Laurie was a kid, in an opening scene that made me think of the pre-credits scene of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, we see juvenile Laurie doing a comic act with a ventriloquist's dummy, dressed as though she should be on Hee Haw.

Laurie, however, doesn't want to be a comedian, in no small part because she knows she's no good at it, regardless of what Dad keeps telling her. She instead would like to become an actress, although to this point she's only good enough to do commercials. She sings some of the jingles, and she's probably got more talent for that, as well as for writing songs.

Laurie has a complicated personal life. She's engaged to tennis coach Ken (Stephen Nathan), who doesn't seem to get what the acting community is all about. And as for that wedding, Laurie feels as though her father is trying to organize it, with the result that it looks like a profoundly tacky 1970s wedding, complete with the bridesmaids and groomsmen (the aforementioned Cisyk apparently plays one of the bridesmaids) carrying the couple up to the altar in a giant clam shell. I'd seriously think about eloping instead.

As for Laurie, she goes out for a drink, which is where she meets would-be director Chris Nolan (Michael Zaslow). They proceed to have a one-night stand, which as you can guess is a big problem considering that Laurie is supposed to get married in a couple of days. On the bright side, it gets Laurie an in for some possible dubbing work of her own.

At the audition, Laurie performs one of the songs she's written, the titular "You Light Up My Life", and it's clear that Didi Conn is being dubbed because she and Kasey don't have similar voices at all. Everybody loves the song, and it gives Didi the hope that perhaps she can give singing a real try. But Nolan complicates her life by suggesting she might be up for a bigger role in the movie he'll be directing, and leading her on to think that the two really could be romantic.

The resolution of all those problems is where the movie hits a giant wall even if it hadn't already. It took me a while to figure out what other movie I had in my memory as I was watching, but it finally hit me that I was thinking about the scenes in Annie Hall where Diane Keaton goes out to Hollywood and Woody Allen follows her, noticing the artificiality of it all. Keaton as an actress has some acting chops and was able to pull it off, helped by the fact that most of Annie Hall is set in a Woody Allen New York that sees itself as urbane and sophisticated, in stark contrast to Annie Hall's perception of Hollywood. You Light Up My Life has none of that, and on top of it Conn just can't get the right emotions for the big climactic scenes, especially the confrontation with her father.

And if that's not bad enough, the movie makes a bigger mess by treating Laurie's musical career as a montage of her big song moving up the charts, much the way Lady Sings the Blues glosses over the last decade-plus of Billie Holliday's life through a montage of newspaper headlines. It doesn't work here either, turning the movie from marginally passable to a hilarious misfire.

But if you can find it, watch You Light Up My Life just once, to see what that segment of America that made the song such a huge hit was thinking. You might get a few laughs, too.