Critic Reviews

The movie is a paean to outsiders and reckless love.

Mawkishness is kept at bay by the lightness of touch in Ashby's direction and Gordon and Cort's wonderful performances. Only the most miserable cynic could resist its unique charm and ultimate hopefulness.

It's to director Hal Ashby's credit that he succeeds in maintaining an unsettling tone of pre-Lynchian absurdism throughout, while also pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history.

In the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.

You may find yourself passing a very enjoyable couple of hours with the oddest of odd couples.

This is a doggedly eccentric film which some will reject out of hand. Others will find it profoundly moving and life affirming.

The effortless depiction of their growing camaraderie and unconscious courtship is one of Harold and Maude‘s great charms, as Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins transpose fading ideology into boundless truth across a modest framework of pitch-black exposition and glowingly pastoral aesthetic touches.

The message is not very different from that of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, but Harold's flaccid asexuality (he's like a sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan) and Maude's advanced stage of pixiness give that message a special freaky quality. And the film has been made with considerable wit and skill.

Ashby forever treads the thin line between whimsy and absurdity and tough sentimentality and black comedy. It is most successful when it keeps to the tone of an insane fairystory set up at the beginning of the movie.

There’s a dark streak of comic absurdity running throughout Harold and Maude that serves a dual purpose; it gives the film its unique, heightened tone, but it also conversely grounds the more whimsical element by hinting at a greater darkness beyond the events portrayed within.