For the early 1980’s I thought it weirdly percipient. Or, perhaps more accurately, it described those times–roughly the late Sixties to mid-Seventies–well, and we have circled back around.
You have John Lithgow as Bruce Jenner. And you have radical identity politics.
Several points I wanted to make.
Garp came in as a baby, and he left as a baby. He came in wanting and fantasizing about his father, and he left fantasizing about his father. Moral: he needed his father, no matter what psychological accommodations he reached with his actual life.
Glenn Close was exceptionally emotionally detached. She had not the slightest bit of fellow feeling, or felt empathy. Nothing fazed her. Her beliefs–her eyes, which one can readily imagine foreshadowing her much more famous role in Fatal Attaction–were abstract and purely intellectual. She didn’t bat an eye when the women who cut out their tongues in sympathy for a rape victim chose to continue their weird cult even after the actual victim explicitly told them to stop. Everyone to her was a symbol, and no one, even her own son, was truly to her a person. She was obsessed with her role, with her nursing outfit, but only as a role, only as an expression of inner ideology.
She also over-identified with Garp. She moved to New York with him. She started writing when he did. She procured a hooker for him, after using her herself first for her own purposes. They both wrote books that got them hate mail. They both even died the same way.
The whole thing was extremely unhealthy, even if I got that I was supposed to get that as odd as the whole thing was, there was still love.
And the women she surrounded herself with viewed the world through the logic of collective guilt. They did not want to allow her own son to attend her funeral, because ALL men were guilty if one was. This is the worst sort of tribalism, but it is on display, today, on every college campus in the country (or nearly, at any rate.).
You saw, of course, the rabid hate that we see today, which was fringe then, but mainstream now.
And I could not help but see in that book John Irving wrestling with his own fatherless childhood, and perhaps allowing himself to bring out and express some of the pent up rage he felt. He killed his son, then he killed his mother, then he killed himself.
This movie is due for a come-back. You heard it here first.