The Travolta/Cage Project #10 Moment by Moment

John Travolta had such an extraordinary run of successes early in his career in film (Carrie, Saturday Night Fever, Grease), television movies (The Boy in the Plastic Bubble), sitcoms (Welcome Back, Kotter) and even pop music (five top 40 singles during his teen dream peak, one more than one Alfred Matthew Yankovic) that it was inevitable that he would eventually fall, and with an immensity and intensity commensurate with his historic triumphs. 

The film that brought Travolta’s soaring career crashing down to earth was a notorious 1978 critical and commercial bomb that intriguingly but disastrously brought together Travolta in his sex bomb prime with an astonishingly and uncharacteristically terrible Lily Tomlin in a star-crossed romance so sleepy and glaringly, surreally unconvincing that it seems more intent on gently lulling audiences into a deep sleep than entertaining them with anything that might conceivably pass for human behavior. 

If audiences fell so in love with the idea of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John as a couple that four decades later a reunion photo of them in their old costumes went viral and produced worldwide shivers of delight because it fed into our perversely universal cultural fantasy conception of the pair as the ultimate couple, audiences were not able to buy Travolta and Tomlin as lovers for even a single goddamn second. 

Twinsies!

Moment by Moment is a powerful tranquilizer in cinematic form, with a string-intensive score that implicitly beckons to us, “Sleep, sleep, my precious little angels, you won’t miss anything if you let my gently soothing music lead you tenderly into dreamland” so it’s appropriate that the very first line of dialogue is Trisha Rawlings, Lily Tomln’s unhappy lady of leisure asking a clerk at Schwab’s drugstore, “What about the sleeping pills?” 

But before this sad, suffering, deeply unpleasant soul can ask about her beloved sleeping pills with an urgency and desperation that betrays a distinct possibility of abuse and dependence writer-director Jane Wagner first establishes our unhappy anti-heroine’s social class by having her stride down Rodeo Drive, the camera taking special care to push in on the names of all the luxury stores she passes. These designer labels make up the white noise of her privileged and empty existence. These are the fancy names Tomlin wears in place of having a soul. 

At Schwab’s Drugstore, Trisha re-meets painful with Travolta’s Strip, who asks the clerk about his buddy Greg, only to have the cashier suddenly turn angry and accusatory, hissing, “I don’t suppose that it will come as a surprise that we found him with his hands in the cookie jar!” 

Sexy street urchin Strip recognizes Trisha from a party at her house where he worked as a valet and she did not frame him for dinging her car even though she could have, as he was very stoned at the time. From the way Strip talks about the incident, this is the greatest, and only act of kindness he has ever experienced in his entire Dickensian existence. The lost young hustler consequently feels that he owes the much older woman a debt he can never repay. 

The more he talks, the less attractive Strip becomes. Unfortunately, his defining characteristic is a predilection for banter as fast and relentless as it is utterly banal. Not even an actor as charming and charismatic as Travolta can make this character remotely appealing. 

Moment by Moment gives us a frequently nearly nude, twenty-six year old John Travolta we would collectively DEFINITELY kick out of bed for eating crackers on account of being maybe the most annoying character this side of Jar Jar Binks. Moment by Moment proves that there were definitely cinematic forces powerful enough to defeat a force as volcanic as Travolta’s natural magnetism. Little did we realize how often Travolta would entrust his peculiar gifts to these charlatans, incompetents and crackpots in the decades to come. 

Strip’s initial appeal to Trisha, an icebox of a protagonist who is as cold and unappealing on the inside as she is as on the outside, is understandably downer-based. He tells Trisha that he knows that she loves sleeping pills so he can definitely hook her up with some Reds so that she can “sleep” (wink, wink) no problem. 

Trisha responds to this offer, and the entirety of Strip’s sexy, stupid existence, with explicitly class and age-based disdain and disapproval. She is the Mercedes-driving wife of a wealthy, powerful man in the process of divorcing her after the requisite adulterous fling; he’s a borderline feral street kid who occupies a place on the socioeconomic ladder only slightly higher than that of a hobo or rodeo clown. She has a Mercedes and a beach house. He has a backpack and an address book.

Yet Trisha’s haughty condescension and complete lack of positive qualities somehow does nothing to curb Strip’s intense carnal desire for her. In Strip’s juvenile, classless mind she’s Audrey Hepburn, not a depressed, aimless, pill-popping housewife about to lose her existential identity in tandem with her status as a married woman. 

Strip comes on like a freight train, offering himself to the depressed older woman as an indefinable, unpalatable, impossible cross between a drug connection, friend, son and lover only to have her shut him down in no uncertain terms as being unworthy of her affection. 

In a sense, it’s easy to see why Trisha rejects Strip for reasons beyond worrying what the neighbors will say and the fact that she’s old enough to be his mother, and, for extra ickiness points, very much looks like she could be his mother, to the point where I wondered if that was the twist the first time I suffered through Moment by Moment. 

For starters, Strip is fucking annoying. Obnoxious. Then there’s the potent anti-chemistry of Tomlin and Travolta as two of the least plausible lovers in the history of film. It’s tough to see what Strip sees in Trisha in the first place, let alone what makes him desire so strongly that he’s more than willing to put up with an endless series of rejections and insults for the reward of being in an impossible relationship with a charmless woman who seems ashamed of him. 

Oh my God. That magazine you’re reading: it’s unbelievable!

For forty interminable minutes Strip hits on Trisha awkwardly and is rejected in just as clammily uncomfortable a fashion. Then Strip’s never seen but often discussed buddy and partner in crime Greg dies and Trisha’s hostility towards Strip is instantly replaced by overpowering love and lust. 

This shift from hate to love is so bracing that it reminded me of similarly stark shifts in affection in Tales From the Crypt but there they at least had the decency to establish that a shift this severe can only realistically be facilitated through some manner of magic love potion or voodoo priestess’ curse whereas Moment by Moment asks us to imagine that it happens organically. 

In Moment by Moment’s second half, everything reverses for no discernible reason. For example, Strip spends much of the film’s first half pointlessly bragging about his familiarity with, and access to drugs and alcohol to Trisha in a way that’s supposed to make him seem cool and worldly and fails miserably. 

Yet after they make sweet, passionate, hard to watch love and Trisha, in perhaps her first act of spontaneity, proposes that they smoke pot, something that, if history books and films of the period provide any indication, was most assuredly NOT a big deal to people who lived in Southern California in 1978, he snaps, “No. I don’t want you doing drugs. That scene is nowhere!” and she happily acquiesces because she’s suddenly overcome with all-consuming desire for a dude she has treated like an unbearably uppity pool boy all film long. 

In the film’s first half, Strip is the dogged aggressor seemingly overjoyed if Trisha treats him like a human being, and not something gross she has to scrape off her shoe. In the second half, Strip stridently informs her that it’s real love and an intense emotional and romantic as well as sexual relationship with him or it’s nothing. A confused stud who has chased after Trisha like a lost puppy all movie long now demands a real relationship from a place of unearned power. 

Trisha, however, is not about to let her Harlequin romance with a hustler who is street dumb where his savvier peers are street smart keep her from keeping up appearances. So when one of her rich, snobby friends sees Strip come back to the house with groceries, Trisha panics and pretends he’s a delivery boy, and not the kind that delivers the kind of powerful sexual satisfaction her estranged husband hasn’t been able to give her in years. 

Strip and Trisha share the weakest, least plausible romance in film history. It’s not equipped to overcome ANY obstacles, let alone its star-crossed lovers inhabiting different worlds and different demographics. 

On paper, Moment by Moment looks like a quintessential 1970s character study about two very different outsiders leading lives of quiet desperation and finding temporary solace and escape with each other. In actuality, Moment by Moment combines the worst of both worlds; it’s at once a florid melodrama and a painful, failed attempt at an art movie. 

Moment by Moment suggests what would happen if Tomlin and Wagner took one of the satirical characters from their acclaimed one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, and decided to make an entire film about her, but only after forgetting everything they knew about human behavior, acting and emotion and also losing all of their talent in a freak accident. 

How can a virtuoso who can flawlessly, convincingly play a dazzling array of wildly different people play one character as ineptly as Tomlin does here? How can a man who looks as good as Travolta does here be so unappealing and unattractive? 

Travolta failed big time with Moment by Moment. Forget sing-alongs: it’s never even been legally available on home video, something nobody seems particularly upset about, for very good reasons involving the movie being bad and also perversely uninteresting.

Travolta flopped big time with Moment by Moment. Needless to say, it would not be his final calamity of this scope and infamy. Perhaps more than any actors other than Nicolas Cage, Travolta has become synonymous with bad movies, with flops, with failing miserably with the whole world watching and jeering. And it all began here, with an abomination that kicked off Travolta’s prolific career as the King of Flops on an audacious, borderline unwatchable note. 

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