Beaches Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Beaches Blu-ray Movie Review

You gotta have friends. . .

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 25, 2013

We’ve become a peripatetic society and one of the results of that trend is a dearth of lifelong relationships. My wife had the good fortune to grow up in one small town in Wisconsin and therefore has the luxury of still knowing a lot of people that she met as early as preschool. My own boys still have friends they initially made as toddlers since my wife and I have been in and around Portland for so long, but I fear these family members are the exception rather than the rule. My own history is much more full of moves from school to school and city to city, meaning I have absolutely no long lasting connections to anyone I knew as a child or went to school with through my adolescence and beyond. I frankly believe part of the seemingly ineluctable allure of Beaches, albeit something that I’ve rarely seen discussed in much detail, is the perhaps idealistic longing to experience a friendship that weathers the vagaries of time, beginning in childhood and lasting until death do them part. Is Beaches a great film? Hardly. It’s formulaic, predictable and unabashedly sentimental to the extreme. But as countless fans have proven, the film, like the friendship at its core, has stood the test of time and it continues to be a favorite, especially among women. And while a lot of the film kind of lurches from cliché to cliché without much finesse, there’s no denying that on a very basic level Beaches is often quite enjoyable if taken on its own terms. Bette Midler had had her first big starring role in The Rose in 1979 after several bit and smaller parts in other movies (you can clearly see her as a young girl, where she looks amazingly like Mayim Bialik, the actress who would play Midler as a young girl in this film, in a quick shot onboard the ship in Hawaii). But Midler’s post-Rose career had stuck mostly to over the top comedy roles, so Beaches returned the popular singer-actress to an at least ostensibly slightly more dramatic role, albeit with some pretty broad comedic touches. The film also came at a rather interesting time in director Garry Marshall’s career, toward the end of his dominance on television courtesy of such long running series as Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, but before Marshall really erupted into phenomenal success with Pretty Woman.

Remember all those hoary “classics” of yore where a character would start to remember and suddenly the screen would go all wavy and we’d be privy to the sight of pages flying off of calendars? Beaches may not exactly traffic in those particular clichés, but there’s no question that the film is a patchwork quilt of melodramatic tropes knit together in an admittedly artful way to generate copious crying in the more sensitive viewer. We meet firebrand singer C.C. Bloom (Bette Midler) as she’s preparing to do a show at the Hollywood Bowl. A troubling message is delivered to her, one which obviously upsets her greatly, and she drops everything to try to get a flight out of La-La land. That gambit fails, and so C.C. is forced to drive south, giving us ample time to catch up on a lifetime’s worth of memories.

In the first of many flashbacks, we visit the boardwalk in Atlantic City, decades before its gentrification (and if, as some sources suggest, this is supposed to be taking place in the late fifties, the use of 1964's "Under the Boardwalk" is glaringly misplaced). Young girl C.C. (Mayim Bialik) “meets cute” with another young girl named Hillary (Marcie Leeds). C.C. is a “star in training”, that training coming courtesy of her overbearing mother (Lainie Kazan), while Hillary is from a well to do family who can pretty much write her own ticket to do anything she wants to for the rest of her life. C.C. and Hillary become an (to utilize the title of another long running Marshall sitcom) “odd couple” of sorts, keeping in touch through the years and forging an ever deepening bond.

The rest of Beaches plays out like a cut and paste construction where virtually every plot point can be predicted. Hillary (Barbara Hershey) and C.C. become roommates in their young adulthoods and eventually vie for the same man (John Heard), something that tests their friendship in earnest for the first time. Both of the women do stupid things, make poor decisions but continue to drift in and out of each other’s lives in the way that seemingly only ever happens in movies. And then of course we get the final act, where C.C.’s distress in the opening scene is clarified and has a none too surprising connection to Hillary.

Beaches is by its very nature anecdotal in structure, lurching fitfully from sequence to sequence (and flashback to flashback), gliding along on Midler’s omnipresent wisecracks and the kind of Jewish-goyische dialectic that is a somewhat unspoken subtext of the women’s relationship. Though Hershey is given co-equal billing to Midler in Beaches, there’s little doubt that the film exists mostly as a showcase for Midler’s patented brand of brassiness. Hershey does rather well with a much blander and more amorphous role, but this is Midler’s show from start to finish (Midler also co-produced the film).

You’d have to be heartless not to get at least a little lump in your throat as Beaches winds its way to its bittersweet finale, but it’s emotion culled from manipulation rather than something more organic. In that regard, it’s perhaps instructive to compare another somewhat similar film dealing with the tempestuous relationship between two women which is colored by a tragic death. Terms of Endearment may have not been about “friends”, per se, but it arrives at its tears in an arguably more natural fashion than Beaches does.

Beaches Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Beaches is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Disney/Buena Vista with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Disney/Buena Vista has a mostly very good record with its catalog releases, and has even been known to recall product it has realized is substandard ( Arachnophobia). Disney/Buena Vista is touting this release of Beaches as having been "digitally restored", but this is far from the sharpest looking transfer the studio has released in high definition. I'm not that ashamed to admit I never saw Beaches theatrically, but I've certainly seen it in various home video incarnations, and there's no denying that this new Blu-ray offers better saturated color and at least decent fine detail in extreme close-ups. But this is pretty soft looking overall and even minor opticals, like segues between scenes, are littered with so much dirt and extra grain that it verges on digital noise at times (this may actually come as good news to those who fear over aggressive digital noise reduction). Contrast is pretty iffy at times, especially in darker interior scenes, leading to some substantial loss of shadow detail. This is a step up from DVD, but it's a rather small step.

Beaches Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Beaches' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is pretty front heavy, to the point where surround channels only really kick in when Midler sings. There is some occasional noticeable surround activity (the boardwalk scene is a good example), but even then, the bulk of the mix is tilted toward the front channels. There is also widely differing reverb and ambient recording effects quite noticeable in some of the post-looped material, with the van scene with Midler and Hershey (when Midler is in the bunny suit) one of the more obvious examples. In scenes like that one, the dialogue sounds overly tinny and boxy compared to the bulk of this track. Fidelity is generally very good, especially in the musical sequences.

Beaches Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director Garry Marshall. Marshall is always fun to listen to, and he's quite funny through large swaths of this commentary. Marshall is quite gracious in doling out accolades to various people involved in the film. Marshall makes nonstop fun of some of the plot machinations, and that actually helps to make some of the more saccharine elements in the film go down a little easier.


• Beaches Bloopers (480i; 6:59)


• Mayim Remembers Beaches (480i; 12:06) is a sweet reminiscence by the current day star of The Big Bang Theory.


• "Wind Beneath My Wings" Music Video Performed by Bette Midler (480i; 4:32)


• AFI's 100 Years. . .100 Songs With Bette Midler (480i; 1:17) is the segment of this special devoted to "Wind Beneath My Wings".


• Barbara Hershey Screen Test (480i; 6:18)


• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 2:12)


• Info is the first time in my recollection that there has been a menu choice which takes you to the exciting "disclaimer" screen which notifies you that no one at Disney/Buena Vista has anything to do with any commentaries or supplements.

Beaches Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Beaches has a huge fan base, so who am I to argue with its overly lachrymose qualities? There are fitful pleasures to be had here, mostly coming from Midler's inimitable style, but the film is a pretty tepid affair, marked by predictable plot machinations and too much melodrama for its own good. In any case, this Blu-ray may not be enough of an upgrade for longtime fans to consider trading in their old DVD.