Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

The Rachel Papers Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson October 27, 2024

Damian Harris's THE RACHEL PAPERS (1989) makes its global debut on Blu-ray courtesy of MGM. In English, with optional English SDH. Region free.

Dexter Fletcher was an up-and-coming British actor in the Eighties who appeared in bit parts before landing a supporting role as Al Pacino's son in Hugh Hudson's underrated Revolutionary War film, Revolution (1985). (Fletcher's mature performance sadly didn't earn him any headway in Hollywood. The movie was a major box-office flop.) Fletcher perhaps got more notice in his native land when he played the teenage version of the title character in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986). The young actor had had a small role in John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980). It's perhaps that picture where Bob Hoskins remembered him because he cast Fletcher as the lead in The Raggedy Rawney (1988). The WWII drama probably caught the eye of Damian Harris (son of the late, great actor Richard Harris), who cast Fletcher as the male lead in his screenwriting and directorial debut, The Rachel Papers, which is based on a 1973 novel by Martin Amis. Ione Skye was chosen to play Fletcher's romantic hopeful. Skye also was an up-and-comer after appearances in Tim Hunter's great teen dramedy River's Edge (1986) and as John Cusack's love interest in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything (1989).

Charles Highway (Dexter Fletcher) is a smart and goofy 19-year-old whose ambition to attend Oxford gets sidetracked by the computer profiles he compulsively maintains of young women that he hopes to make love to. Charles catalogs the ladies he either goes out with or spots from afar on a Commodore Amiga A500 using a program called Conquests and Techniques. He is starstruck with Rachel Noyce (Ione Skye), a beautiful American doing social work at a UK prep school. Charles arrives uninvited to a dance party hosted by Rachel and tries to court her without success. When Charles persists, he learns that Rachel has a boyfriend, Deforest (James Spader), who also came from the US.

It would seem from its first section that The Rachel Papers would be about a competition for Rachel between Charles and Deforest but James Spader's part is too underwritten for that subplot to fully materialize. It is clear, though, that Harris is performing a class critique of Rachel/Deforest with Charles and also contrasting their lifestyles. Rachel and her beau dress like aristocrats with their expensive clothes while Charles dons much more casual apparel. Gordon Highway (Bill Paterson), Charles's businessman father, also dresses as one of the upper class. He's successful in business (the film never explains his occupation), but does his son want to follow in his footsteps?

Checking out the paintings.

Fletcher was a terrific teen/young adult actor but he's miscast here. Part of the problem lies in how Harris writes the Skye character, who receives a videotape from Charles with funny testimonials from friends and a teacher. Dialogue is missing from Rachel after she watches the video and then decides to join Charles at a museum exhibit of erotic artworks. Is Rachel flattered that Charles tries so hard to win her over? The looks of the characters and words they exchange give the audience nebulous signals. The second half of The Rachel Papers turns into a more traditional teen sex comedy with some lingering overhead shots of lovers in a bathtub. Overall, the film boasts a solid cast of good actors but they are let down by undeveloped ideas.

The Rachel Papers had a very brief theatrical run in the US but received some good press. Hal Hinson of the Washington Post declared: "this is a film that rides on its spiffy cleverness, its swift wit and smart talk." Betsy Sherman of The Boston Globe called it "a cut above the average teen picture." Jerry Roberts of the News-Pilot (San Pedro, CA) described it as "a deft, pleasing, frank and funny movie....It has a charm all its own." In a mixed review, Patrick Taggart of the Austin (TX) American-Statesman described Harris as "a new­comer of remarkable technical skill...a superbly directed film." The film also got some positive notices in Canada. The Toronto Star's Henry Mietkiewicz wrote that the picture "exudes maturity without sacrificing playfulness, and it revels in the young hero's sexual yearnings while emphasiz­ing his artistic and intellectual pur­suits."

I haven't read the Amis book that the film is based on but critics in the UK who did read it singled out how much Harris deviates from the original material. The Sunday Telegraph's Christopher Tookey observed: "Harris has changed so much of Martin Amis’s 1973 novel that he might as well have junked the original story and written an entirely new screen­play." An unsigned review in The Independent read: "Dexter Fletcher — making the best of a bad job — hardly resembles the bow-legged, bespectacled and asthmatic Lo­thario of the book: with his full, fleshy lips and bulbous eyes, he is more as one imagines Amis (who has mildly disassociated himself from the film ) a few years ago."

The Rachel Papers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Twenty years elapsed between the time MGM released The Rachel Papers on DVD and Blu-ray but for fans, the long wait was worth it. The picture appears in its original theatrical exhibition ratio of 1.85:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. The R1 DVD had an anamorphic widescreen presentation on one side and a 1.33:1 transfer on the other. I watched the BD and DVD twice apiece and have made a number of comparisons using identical frame enlargements from each. The first third of the SD transfer is beset by excessive video noise. The image becomes clearer starting with the scene where Rachel rides with Charles on his Vespa scooter (see Screenshot #33). But the improvement isn't dramatic for the rest of the runtime. Fortunately, the Blu-ray isn't really noisy at all. It sports more pure and natural film grain. (There's at least one scene late in the picture where grain is more chunky.) The color correction is even more apparent between the two. On the DVD, skin tones are either warmer or look like they've been baked in the sun. By stark contrast, facial tones on the 1080p are whiter and much more natural in appearance. MGM has encoded the feature at an average video bitrate of 28741 kbps.

Screenshot #s 1-18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, & 40 = MGM 2023 Blu-ray
Screenshot #s 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39 = MGM 2003 DVD

MGM has provided eleven chapters for the 95-minute film.

The Rachel Papers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

MGM has supplied a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo mix (1988 kbps, 24-bit). I also listened to the lossy 2.0 track on the DVD and compared the two. Both sound similar but there's a little more pump and pop on the lossless track. Spoken words are often soft and relatively quiet on the front channels. The sound track has an eclectic mix of genres: dance-pop and pop rock, new wave rock, indie folk, and jazz. Ballads are performed by Shakespears Sister, Difford & Tilbrook, Michelle Shocked, and other artists. Some of the tunes remind me of those by the British pop rock band, Fine Young Cannibals. Several of the songs deliver some nice reverb on the surround channels. I could also hear the sound of the tube train on the satellite speakers when Charles rides it to the north London suburb of Cockfosters.

MGM has done an excellent job with the optional English SDH. Not only is the transcription of dialogue accurate and complete, but the track also frequently identifies music artists in brackets along with the words they sing.

The Rachel Papers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Extras are nil. The DVD only had a theatrical trailer.

The Rachel Papers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's hard to believe that the author of the The Zone of Interest also penned a bildungsroman about a British male teen's romantic conquests but that's what Martin Amis wrote about when he was 24. Damian Harris's film is supposedly a loose adaptation and should have been titled The Rachel Files or The Rachel Floppy Disk (as one critic suggested at the time). The movie is a decent teen sex comedy with a very good group of British and American actors who deserved a better screenplay. MGM's Blu-ray is night and day superior to its DVD from two decades ago. The lossless stereo mix is very front heavy with occasional reverbs. I RECOMMEND both the film and this disc.