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Following the portentous Western (Comes a Horseman), the muffled screwball. "The possibilities for growth and self-awareness, getting to know yourself" and all the other horrors of post-breakup hell. The magazine freelancer (Burt Reynolds) moves to Boston to get over the divorce from the songwriter (Candice Bergen), who's just hit paydirt with a feminist anthem. A new beginning means a Meet Cute with the kindergarten teacher (Jill Clayburgh), who mistakes him for a stalker and threatens castration as they head to the same blind-date dinner. Their amorous skills are a bit rusty: "If we're gonna kiss each other, I think it's a good idea if one of us closed our eyes." The James L. Brooks script adjusts Neil Simon to the age of emotional muzak, Alan J. Pakula does it justice by unlearning mise en scène until he's indistinguishable from Herbert Ross or Norman Jewison. Sitcom neuroses for days, a stabbed turkey at the Thanksgiving table and a dunking reunion at the snowy carnival, the Christmas miracle of workshops for divorced men and women together at long last in the same church basement. "Well, I don't know quite what to say now, except the thing about love is that you can really make an ass of yourself." Browsing Bloomingdale's for a couch, the protagonist gazes out a fake window at the furniture department and crumbles into a tasteful pile of nerves. Valium nation, the awkward bedroom bit from The Sterile Cuckoo rehashed beneath a Will Barnet poster, a George Stevens deadpan for Mazursky's leftovers. "If there's one thing I didn't expect to do today, it was laugh." A different Brooks has the perfect revision (Modern Romance). With Charles Durning, Frances Sternhagen, Austin Pendleton, Mary Kay Place, Wallace Shawn, Jay O. Sanders, Richard Whiting, Sturgis Warner, and Daniel Stern.
--- Fernando F. Croce |