Rumor Has It... - A Sexy Movie without Sex

The movie Rumor Has It...,
staring Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner, is a delightful comedy
about love and sex.  However, even though the central theme is sex, the
movie not only artfully has the characters tiptoe around discussing the
subject, it also has only two bedroom scenes that are sexually charged
but lack any on screen depiction of sex.  Like the 1968 movie, Prudence and the Pill, staring David Niven, the viewers know what is going on in the bedroom but have use their imagination to visualize the action.Sarah Huttinger
(Aniston) and her boyfriend, Jeff, fly from New York to Pasadena for
her sister's marriage.  Sarah has finally agreed to marry Jeff, but
insists on not announcing the marriage to her family.  As she tells
Jeff, she doesn't want her news to take any glory away from her
sister's big day.  But her real reason is more complex and that is she
is one mixed-up young lady when it comes to men and sex.  She loves
Jeff, but is afraid of commitment.  She also loves her family but feels
somewhat estranged from them because she feels she is so different. 
She feels more like a free spirit from the 1960s while her widowed
father and sister are solid middle class suburbanites.  Then there is
the mysterious past of her now deceased mother and her, still living,
grandmother (played by Shirley MacLane) who is another free spirit
type.  Upon arriving in Pasadena, her confusion and curosity
bubble to the surface to the extent that, for a while she is not
certain that her father is really her father.  First of all, rumor has
it and has had it for years, that her grandmother was the model for the
character played by Anne Bancroft in the the 1967 movie The Graduate. 
The book upon which the movie was supposedly based was written by a
young man from Pasadena and this young man supposedly based the book on
the actual experiences of a friend of his who went to high school with
her mother.  Of course, this is all rumor that has been floating around
the community since the The Graduate was
released.  The fact that her father was definately not the young man
played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie, gave credence to those who have
argued all these years that the rumors were unfounded and just
malacious gossip.  However, Sarah still feels like an outsider and
cannot reconcille the fact that she is more of a 1960s person than her
conservative middle class father and sister.  Sarah's
confusion is increased when she learns that her grandmother did have an
affair with a young man from her mother's high school graduating class
and that this young man, Beau Burroughs (played by Kevin Costner), was
good friends with the author of the book upon which The Graduate
was based.  Further, just before her mother married, she suddenly
disappeared for a week - she supposedly went to Mexico - and Beau
Burroughs at that time was staying at his family's beach home in
Mexico.  Burroughs is now a wealthy and successful leader of a group of
venture capital investors specializing in high tech companies and Sarah
quickly tracks him down via the Internet.  Discovering that he is
speaking at a convention in San Francisco, she flies up and confronts
him after his speech.  He is very gracious and admits that her mother
did spend that week in question having an affair with him at the beach
house. However, due to a high school football injury which left him
sterile, he cannot claim to be her father.  He does take her to dinner
and, when sparks fly between them, takes her home and to bed with him. 
After spending the night and following day with Burroughs, Sarah (along
with the audience) sees that while he is charming, kind and a man who
sees life as an adventure and lives it to the fullest, he is also a
shallow person who drifts through life without leaving any lasting
legacy.  He has been married three times and has an adopted son, whom
he and one of his wives adopted (it was her desire to have a child and
he did it to please her) but really never took the time to know his,
now grown son.  Having spent the night with Sarah, Burroughs has now
made love to the grandmother, daughter and granddaughter - all three
generations.  But, as he is quick to point out, all three came to him
and he accomodated them - he didn't persue them or seduce them.  
However, as anyone familiar with religion knows there are two types of
sins - sins of commission where you deliberately do something wrong and
sins of omission where you stand by and do not do the right thing. 
Based upon the movie The Graduate,
the Dustin Hoffman character allowed himself to be seduced by the
girl's mother so, for the first generation, the female was the agressor
(as well as the older adult) and bears a larger share of the blame. 
But Hoffman's character was not forced to accept, so we see the start
of Burroughs lack of character in his simply going along with this. 
With regard to the mother and Sarah, both were cases of young women
(much younger, but still an adult, in the case of Sarah) coming to him
in a time of distress and his taking advantage of their emotional
condition to have sex with them.  They were not blameless, but
Burroughs is definately not the type one can depend upon to do the
right thing.  Character does count and Burroughs comes up short in this
category.Still confused, Sarah returns to her father's home
and, over a cup of coffee in the kitchen, finally has a heart to heart
talk with him.  In a scene lasting only a minute or two, the exciting
freewheeling life style of the 1960s comes head to head with the far
more mundane middle class values and comes up short.  Yes, her father
admitted he knew right from the start that Sarah's mother had spent
that week in Mexico having an affair with Burroughs.  Why did he still
marry her?  He loved her and, besides she chose to come back and marry
him and not stay and live with Burroughs.  But why did she choose to
come back.  Again, Sarah's father had the answer, given to him by her
mother and that was that while a life with Burroughs would be full of
adventure and excitement there was no foundation, while with her
father, Sarah's mother had the opportunity to build a life and family. 
Finally, the question that had bugged Sarah all of her adult life.  Why
does she drive a car with abandon, unconcerned with speed or safety ,
while every time she rides with her father he always stays at or below
the speed limit and is obsessed with safety?  The answer again is
simple, he drives that way whenever Sarah or her sister are in the car
because he didn't want anything to happen to them - when driving alone
his style is more relaxed like Sarah's.  At heart he has always been
the same free spirit that Sarah is, it was only out of love for her and
her sister that he puts that part of himself aside and puts their needs
and well being ahead of his own.Fast paced and laced with humor
and humorous situations, this movie is both an entertaining comedy and
a feel good film without the tears.