Desperate Characters are neither desperate nor characters. This shockingly overwritten, overpraised work is the result of minor talents pursuing significance like hounds chasing after an endangered species. The film employs all the stock subjects of contemporary fiction, from the insensitive husband (Kenneth Mars) to the anaesthetized heroine (Shirley MacLaine). Her name is Sophie, a Manhattan housewife compelled to wander glassily through Frank D. Gilroy's scenario like a science-fiction victim: The Woman Without a Brain.
On her journey to nowhere, Sophie caroms off a number of archetypes over-familiar to readers of the urban novel: eunuchoid males, knife-edged women's libertarians, garrulous old leftists,...
