June Gloom and Bloom

Tragedy, Too, Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Magnolia Pictures and Shoot the Moon Productions
A 1974 photo of Linda and Burt Pugach, the subjects of the documentary "Crazy Love."
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: June 1, 2007
Love is blind, and so too is Linda Pugach, one of the loony-tuners in the somewhat sickening, mildly gonzo documentary “Crazy Love.” In 1959, when she was 22, and known as Linda Riss, Mrs. Pugach opened the door of her Bronx apartment to a thug who claimed to have an engagement present for her and instead threw liquid lye in her face. Screaming tabloid headlines ensued, along with a sensational trial, a suicide attempt, an insanity diagnosis and finally the conviction of a jilted boyfriend, Burton Pugach, a Bronx lawyer turned Bellevue-certified nut job, who after the assault promised to buy Ms. Riss a seeing-eye dog for Christmas. Fifteen years later they were married. Crazy love? Try demented.
The couple had met two years before the assault, when Mr. Pugach, then 30, was chasing ambulances, raking in the dough and throwing his money around. Once he spotted her, he locked her firmly in his sights. She was young and lovely, if not exactly the Elizabeth Taylor look-alike claimed in the movie, with a coquette’s knowing smile and a virgin’s skittish caution. She liked the good times he gave her, the nights out at the clubs, the drives in his convertible. He met her for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, blasting her with attention. There was talk of marriage, but there was also a wife and a child, escalating melodrama and finally a wake-up call. Ms. Riss looked elsewhere; Mr. Pugach looked nowhere else.
When reporters have written about what happened between these two, they sometimes have used the phrase crime of passion, one of those slyly misleading idioms, like collateral damage, employed to paper over ugly reality. Crimes of passion have often been viewed as categorically different from other crimes because they supposedly originate in lust and desire, an argument that has been used historically and even legally to rationalize violence against women, including rape. What is odious about the notion of so-called crimes of passion is how the phrase necessarily implicates victims, because it is the very desirability of the victims, after all, that provokes their assailants to madness (passion). All of which makes the image of Mrs. Pugach standing by her man squirmingly uncomfortable.
Directed by Dan Klores, “Crazy Love” takes a mildly hyperventilated approach to its subject; there’s a hint of tabloid sensationalism, a splash of kitsch sentimentalism. It moves fast, if predictably so, with the usual mash-up of talking-head testimonials (family, friends, Jimmy Breslin), faded family photographs, blurred home movies and generic stock footage meant to evoke specific times and places. An opening quotation from Jacques Lacan makes you think you’re headed for deep waters, when all that’s in store is a frolic in the shallows. The overall vibe is morbidly entertaining, though something of a downer, partly because it’s unclear if Mr. and Mrs. Pugach know that they are such sick puppies, partly because it’s unclear if Mr. Klores cares that they are.
In some respects “Crazy Love” belongs to that class of documentaries that might be called the family freak show. (Think of “Capturing the Friedmans.”) But it also belongs to the more familiar category of the misery documentary, those nonfiction works that poke into the ghastliness of other people’s lives like a finger rummaging inside a wound. Misery documentaries exist because sometimes other people’s pain is deemed newsworthy and because sometimes the people who make them sincerely want to inspire change. Mostly, though, they exist because watching other people suffer has always been a favorite human pastime. In ancient Rome spectators flocked to the Colosseum to watch the bloodletting; now we watch it on screen.
That’s fine, I guess, and “Crazy Love” is certainly perfectly fine. But it also raises more questions than it answers, including the moral responsibility a documentary filmmaker assumes when his subjects seem so eager to exploit themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Pugach have never shied away from attention. In the 1970s they helped write a book about their life together called “A Very Different Love Story.” In the 1990s, when a woman accused Mr. Pugach of threatening to kill her if she broke off their affair, Mrs. Pugach testified on his behalf, calling him a “wonderful, caring husband.” Later, after the charges against him were dismissed, Mr. Pugach said of his wife, “She’s stuck with me.” Ew, ew, ew.
Mr. Pugach’s creepy comment about his wife brings home just how thoroughly unfunny and awful his obsession was. I wish there were something half as disturbing and sinister about “Crazy Love,” which far too readily tends to play this pathetic story for laughs. At 22, years before the women’s liberation movement could have presented her with viable alternatives to marrying her assailant — by then the only man left in her life — Mrs. Pugach was thrown into a darkness that enveloped her. For a while she hid behind sunglasses and her flamboyant beauty, pursuing a social life without sex. She seems to have been terribly, terribly alone. She’s married now, of course, but given her husband, it’s easy to believe she still is.
“Crazy Love” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There is blunt language.