[In the following review, Newey questions the reality behind Forman's “softening” of Larry Flynt's character in The People vs. Larry Flynt.]

From the opening credits of The People vs Larry Flynt, it is clear that the real hero of this film is the American flag. The stars and stripes form a near-constant backdrop to Milos Forman's biopic of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, the king of blue-collar porn; the New York Times has even described the film as “the most patriotic movie of the year.”

Forman's aims are straightforward enough. By painting his film in red, white and blue, he hopes to rehabilitate Flynt as an all-American hero and to replenish America's faith in the values enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is no easy task, because, even by Hollywood's standards, Flynt's life has been a bizarre one. After establishing a small string of strip joints in the Midwest in the early 1970s, he began publishing the Hustler Newsletter as a way of increasing the clubs' clientele, but soon realized there was a huge gap in the magazine market. By avowedly catering for a readership that found Playboy too challenging, Flynt amassed a fortune with Hustler magazine and became one of America's most reviled citizens.

Along the way, he also served sentences for pandering and obscenity, had a Damascene conversion aboard his private jet, was shot and paralysed by a white supremacist who objected to Hustler's portrayal of miscegenation, ran for president on the slogan “a smut-pedlar who cares,” and lent his name to a landmark legal ruling by the Supreme Court. Given such material, it is a pity that Forman has decided to rely so heavily on the stock-in-trade of love story and courtroom drama. Through most of the film, Flynt's relationship with his wife (a former stripper called Althea Leasure, wonderfully played by Courtney Love) is interwoven with his various brushes with the law. Flynt's motivation to keep chipping away at America's sexual taboos, both personally and professionally, is underwritten by Althea's unquestioning admiration. So, while their outward lives contain all the trappings of the 1970s counter-culture, the subtext is that their values—sexual, moral, cultural—are just one set of choices from among the broad range of lifestyle options that modern America has to offer the ethical consumer.

Herein lies the fudge: Forman's film purports to show that the freedom of the press is a sufficiently important commodity to make the occasional abuse of that freedom a price worth paying. This is why it leans so heavily on the symbolism of the flag. At the same time, the film wants to suggest that all Flynt is guilty of is “bad taste.” The screenwriters' approach to characterization makes the task of rehabilitation much easier. Forman's Flynt is more likeable and self-parodic than his real-life counterpart (a highly engaging performance from Woody Harrelson helps); and the stuffed shirts who try to close Flynt down, from the Ohio financier and moral crusader Charles Keating to the “televangelist” Jerry Falwell, are, here at least, bigoted caricatures. Yet there are serious objections to Hustler and to its publisher. It is a peculiarly unpleasant product, even of its type. What freedom, after all, is there to defend in a magazine that has featured a naked woman being fed into a meat-grinder on its cover? Is Flynt a hero because of, or despite, the fact that he pushes the bounds of tolerability? Forman never quite makes up his mind, and is therefore unable to tackle the idea that publishing a magazine like Hustler might actually be wrong, whatever the law says.

Forman is on surer ground in delineating the gravitational pull that a publicity-hungry individual like Flynt exercised on his colleagues and on American society. With his Bel-Air mansion under siege from federal marshals and press helicopters hovering outside his bedroom window, Flynt exclaims ecstatically: “I'm turning the whole world into a tabloid!” This episode, which has its real-life corollary in the chase and arrest of O. J. Simpson, is a useful reminder that tabloid “infotainment,” like pornography, blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. But by the same token, glamorizing Flynt's life on film inevitably accords the man a greater measure of purpose and self-knowledge than he in fact possesses. That we are invited to collude in this deception is the real disturbance at the heart of Forman's polished, often very funny film.