The Truth is Always Beautiful

Ted: "Okay, if you want to know the truth, I think your hair is absolutely ridiculous."
Bob: "That's beautiful, man, just beautiful.  The truth is always beautiful."

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" is a funny movie.  It's also a painful one, and when I watch it I feel like it is true in a way few movies (especially comedies - especially ones from the 1960's) about the adult human animal and its endless pursuit of sex manage to be.

Bob, a documentary filmmaker, and his wife, Carol, a couple clinging to youth in the rapidly evolving Age of Aquarius, book a weekend retreat at a new-age spa that features nude sunbathing, primal scream therapy, and 24-hour marathon group therapy sessions designed to break down all of a person's walls through a cumulative effect of utter exhaustion.  Renewed and thrilled by their "breakthrough" at the retreat, Bob and Carol return to their daily lives newly indoctrinated prophets of free love and a single-minded pursuit of "the truth."  

Ted and Alice are the straight-laced friends of Bob and Carol who find themselves at first bemused by the stories and antics of their friends, and eventually rethinking their own positions on the virtues of marital fidelity.  As revelations mount and walls crumble, both couples will end up facing the naked truth about their "trips," their hang-ups, and the true value of absolute freedom.

The movie is immaculately acted all around, with the added eye-candy benefit of the immortally beautiful Natalie Wood displayed in her doe-eyed prime.  It is also a touching meditation on aging and finding ones place within a youth-oriented society that can often seem to be swiftly slipping from grasp.  The ending of the movie, a classic sequence in its own right, seems both honest and inevitable, and is touching in its simplicity.  

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" is a morality play from the wild and swinging 60's, a time-capsule full of love beads and bell-bottoms, that manages to carry enough timeless truth to make it worth watching well into the new millennium.