Harold And Maude (1971)

As with many cult films, there are a group of people that connect with them and another who do not. With 'Harold and Maude', I feel that I fall in the latter category of the two. 'Harold and Maude' is advertised as a dark-humor romantic comedy where Harold, a young man far too obsessed with suicide that it becomes overplayed, is ultimately changed by meeting Maude, an abstraction of exuberance, that he begins to see the positive side of life. It most definitely plays to this genre, starting with a well-shot cold open to introduce the eponymous Harold, an eccentric twenty-something with an obsession of death. Suicides played for laughs never work for me and this film really pushed the boundary for the number of times it could use the same joke. I feel as though the third time would have made me laugh more had it not been for the two previous times where we had already witnessed the relationship between Harold and his mother, which was plain indifference on repeat. One slight annoyance of the film for me is that I was unable to invest in the story as it did not allow me to decide how I was meant to feel, and instead told me how to react either by the inclusion of Cat Stevens' soundtrack provided for the film or by specific shots aimed at drawing my attention to a particular theme. Another issue I took with this film was the characters. The entire time i was watching, I knew how I was meant to connect with them but I just didn't. Maude as a character seemed to be more of an idea than a person as although her darker past was hinted at, it was never a theme explored as to how she became the fun-loving and metaphor-quoting old woman who Harold becomes attracted to. Harold's tale is very simple and it is clear he is meant to be changed through his relationship with Maude but I do not feel this is depicted well with the ending as his time with Maude is cut short and I feel the aftermath of the film, showing Harold as changed could have been further explored. There is a significant point in the film, which I will not spoil, that could show Harold to change for the better, both improving his relationship with his mother (a very one-dimensional character who has obviously suffered an abundance of trauma at Harold's expense but we are distinctly meant to dislike her because of it) and life itself, which is the main message of the film. However, it rapidly moved to become a cutaway gross-out gag that meant Harold's progression as a character to me did not seem to take flight. I understand this to be an unpopular opinion of a film from 1971 that has now become a cult movie, it is just my opinion that the film had the right ideas but not the execution to allow me to connect with each character. In the end, I feel as if the characters were ideas more than they were human. Shamefully, there were other things that did not work for me, such as the film's representation of therapy, the odd time frame surrounding the events depicted in the film and whether Maude was supposed to have helped Harold at all by the end of the film as it appeared he was still on the same track as we first saw him on. It is clear why the film has reached cult status, being an emotional look at how one character's actions and life can positively influence another's but I just failed to connect with this message by the end.