Amanda Seyfried delivers the performance of her career as 70s porn star icon Linda Lovelace in a biopic set to blow open preconceptions of the blue movie industry. Based on the true stories of Linda Boreman, Lovelace contains two contrasting accounts of a naive girl in her early twenties, inadvertently caught up in the turbulent world of pornography.
After escaping a semi-oppressed life under her mother (played by an unrecognisable Sharon Stone), Linda moves in with her husband Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard). The downhill spiral that ensues seems partly blamed on financial difficulties and, before a year of marriage is up, Linda is introduced to the world of porn as the star of Deep Throat.
Linda’s juxtaposing stories have caused much deliberation on the actual truth behind Lovelace and this film explores both concepts so convincingly that the viewer is none the wiser. At first, Linda is introduced as a sexual liberator: the poster girl for the sexual revolution, carefree and with the aspirations of a real actress. In love with the limelight and under the protection of her husband, the scenario is controversial but palatable.
This is soon replaced by Linda Lovelace as a victim of domestic abuse: she is beaten, raped, degraded, but utterly dependent on Chuck since her mother’s assertion that a woman’s role is to obey her husband.