In the latest installment of "80s movies I was too young to have seen in the theater when they came out", it's time for one that I hadn't heard of until it showed up on TCM: Just the Way You Are. The synopsis sounded interesting enough, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it so that I could schedule the post on it here.
Kristy McNichol stars as Susan Berlanger, a flutist with the orchestra of the local ballet company with a good friend in ballerina Lisa (Kaki Hunter). Susan's got a complicated love live in that she's got someone she's kinda-sorta with, banker Frank (Tim Daly). The problem is, Frank is gay and this would be a marriage of convenience, so while the two are friends, an actual marriage isn't on the cards because ultimately each realizes it would be bad for both of them. Meanwhile, Susan has someone she's never seen hounding her, in the form of Jack, the man at her answering service she usually deals with as he answers her professional calls and takes the messages to deliver to Susan. Nowadays, everything would just go to voice mail.
But there's another problem. Susan suffered from viral encephalitis as a kid, with the result that it left one of her legs lame and her needing to wear a brace on it. Everybody naturally thinks polio even though she'd be a bit too young to have had polio, and takes pity on her. They may be well meaning, but if you have to go through your life getting this from everybody, it gets tired fast. At least she's trying not to let it limit her life, as her rich parents with some sort of connections have been trying to get her on a concert tour of Europe.
So after we've been introduced to this complex personal life of Susan's, the movie ditches all of these characters to send Susan to Europe. And then one of her concert dates in Europe gets cancelled, leaving Susan with some spare time in the dead of winter. Susan comes up with an interesting idea: she gets a doctor to agree to take off the leg brace and put a traditional plaster cast on the leg instead. Susan's plan is to go to a ski resort with the cast on and pass herself off as somebody who had the bad luck to break the leg skiing. People may still pity her, but at least it will only be temporary, and they don't have to know about the true leg injury.
Except, of course, that things aren't quite going to go that way. First is that Susan's room hasn't been cleared out yet and the one she wanted was going to cost more anyway because she mixed up the prices for the high season. So she doubles up with a nice enough young woman who's the mistress of a rich married man, waiting for that man to ditch his wife. And then Susan gets the attention of multiple men: American photographer Peter (Michael Ontkean) and ski equipment scion François Rossignol. Both of them pursue her, but what's going to happen when it's time to reveal that Susan has a different leg injury?
Just the Way You Are is a mess of a movie for multiple reasons, the biggest of which being that it feels like two separate movies since everybody from the American half save McNichol gets ditched once the movie goes to the Alps. The material also feels like it's being glossed over in TV Movie of the Week-style, or perhaps even worse, like an after-school special that tries to handle some sort of big issue but does it in a horribly superficial way.
As a result, it's no wonder that I hadn't heard of Just the Way You Are until it showed up on TCM. But as always, watch and judge for yourself.
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