(2 of 3)
Clayburgh's Caterina is as changeable as the film demands—by turns silly, head strong, pathetic, psychotic, loving and sexy. Hers is not a likable character, any more than Luna is a likable movie. But affection is always a matter of taste. Taken on their own difficult and demanding terms, both the film and its star are perfect.
STARTING OVER
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
Screenplay by James L. Brooks
Starting Over is a perfectly charming movie, but sometimes charm is just not enough. When a band of Hollywood's cleverest talents make a comedy about divorce, one wants the wit of Annie Hall or the angst of Petulia or at least the winning sentimentality of An Unmarried Woman. Though this film has funny lines and a potentially explosive story, it rarely generates any emotion beyond bland good cheer. Right up to the moment that Starting Over is over, we are still waiting for the fireworks to start.
The movie is the creation of a first-rate director, Alan J. Pakula (Klute, All the President's Men), and television's best comedy writer, James L. Brooks (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi). Their premise is sassy: Starting Over is An Unmarried Woman in reverse, with Jill Clayburgh playing the Alan Bates role. This time around, the protagonist is a recently unmarried man, Phil (Burt Reynolds), who continues to pine for his ex-wife (Candice Bergen) even as he woos a new flame (Clayburgh). While Phil bounces back and forth between his two loves, Starting Over seeks to dramatize the hostility, hurt and panic of both men and women who have been wounded in wedlock.
The early scenes are quite promising. When the hero moves to his new playboy digs, his hapless attempts to rekindle the gung-ho spirit of bachelorhood are so grimly dutiful that they seem almost tragic. Phil's first post-separation dinner with his brother and sister-in-law (Charles Durning and Frances Sternhagen) is a riotous demonstration of how overly empathic relatives can send a depressed divorce victim crashing to rock bottom. It is when Reynolds and Clayburgh get together that the movie begins to meander. Starting Over soon becomes a chain of arbitrary and repetitive scenes that show Phil alternately breaking up and reconciling with the two heroines. Though the film spins its wheels mightily—and at times amusingly—its characters and themes cease to move forward.
Everyone involved contributes to the second-half blurriness. Writer Brooks runs out of narrative steam as soon as the movie goes beyond the length of an hour TV episode; he also lets his initially crisp characters trail off into vagueness. Director Pakula, usually a precise stylist, forsakes the film's up tempo and takes to staging comic sequences (notably those featuring a men's consciousness-raising group) in the solemn manner of Ingmar Bergman. The confusion of tone is compounded by Cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman's frequent collaborator, who here contributes the murkiest camerawork of his career.
The actors are left in the lurch. It is a fine notion to cast Reynolds against type as a sensitive, sexually unaggressive man, but his performance is cheerless to a fault.