[In the following excerpt, Westerbeck offers a negative assessment of Taking Off, noting that the film's ending is “completely arbitrary.”]

Like most films about the youth culture, Taking Off should be called Ripping Off. Director Milos Forman doesn't seem to have been satisfied with the usual cynicism of exploiting teenagers merely as paid admissions to his film: he's also exploited them as extras in the film. Taking Off begins in a rehearsal hall where some impresarios of rock are auditioning hundreds of spaced-out, untalented teeny boppers. As the more pathetic auditions were interspliced through the first part of the film, I began wondering how Forman tempted all those girls to make fools of themselves this way. Did he perhaps lead them all to believe these filmed auditions would be their big chance to take off? That's ordinarily how this kind of thing is done, and this kind of thing is the lowest.

One of the girls is Jeannie Tyne (Linnea Heacock). While Jeannie is standing dumbfounded before the microphone, her absence from home is causing her mother (Lynn Carlin) to become hysterical and her father (Buck Henry) to get drunk. When Jeannie finally does return home, it is only to find her parents auditioning their respective neuroses. This sends her right back on the road for two or three months. But she makes the mistake of returning once again, this time to find her parents playing strip poker with some fellow members of the S.P.F.C. (Society for the Parents of Fugitive Children). During the interval Mr. Forman has, as they say, cut to the chase.

The film works toward a belittling accommodation of child and parents. The most obvious features of the youth culture are all reflected by the parents as if in a fun-house mirror. Trying to give up smoking, Mr. Tyne seems as susceptible to cold turkey as any addicted kid. Playing strip poker, he and his wife are, for the moment, as uninhibited. Even the children's closed society has its warped reflection in the S.P.F.C. In the end Jeannie brings home her songwriter boyfriend to meet her parents. Her father wants the young man to sing for his supper; but when he finds out the kid makes ＄290,000/year, it is he who adds the final audition to the film.

Of course a “take-off” is a parody, and that seems to be what Forman had in mind. But taking off is one thing this film never does in any sense. Forman is yet another European filmmaker presumptuous enough to think he could explain all our problems to us. The truth is he fits in too well here to be of any help. Taking Off might as easily have been a television series. Its ending, like that of a series, is completely arbitrary. And the Tynes' search for their daughter is certainly as episodic, and full of non-sequiturs, as any series is. The freaking out of Ozzie and Harriet, which is the essence of the film, just isn't either a funny idea or a powerful insight.