Movie Review: Only When I Laugh (1981)

Genre: Dramedy

Director: Glenn Jordan

Starring: Marsha Mason, Kristy McNichol, Joan Hackett, James Coco

Running Time: 120 minutes

Synopsis: Divorced Broadway star Georgia Hines (Marsha Mason) completes a three month alcoholism rehabilitation program. As she mulls a stage comeback, her 17-year-old daughter Polly (Kristy McNichol) moves in. Also in Georgia's orbit are beauty-obsessed friend Toby (Joan Hackett), gay struggling actor Jimmy (James Coco), and ex-lover and writer David (Dave Dukes), whose latest play may relaunch Georgia's career.

What Works Well: Neil Simon adapts his play The Gingerbread Lady, and the screen treatment benefits from shared focus among several rounded characters with imperfect lives. Marsha Mason excels as a diva beset by insecurities, her travails most poignant when reflected upon a daughter transitioning into adulthood. While Georgia's alcoholism threatens to derail her life, Toby is a slave to vanity while Jimmy holds onto a dream well past the expiry date. Polly is the sponge absorbing disintegration and not immune to damaging shockwaves. Refreshingly, the characters are honestly conceited and the resolutions deservedly messy.

What Does Not Work As Well: This being Neil Simon, the dialogue is frequently weighed down by eyeroll-inducing literariness, and the two hour running time is unnecessarily excessive. The burdens carried by the occupants of Broadway's ecosystem are very much first world problems.

Conclusion: A character-rich warts-and-all peek behind the stage curtain. 



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Movie Review: The Goodbye Girl (1977)

An opposites-attract romantic comedy, The Goodbye Girl enjoys amiable lead performances but suffers from constrained writing.

In New York City, cash-strapped Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason) is a former Broadway dancer, now raising her 10 year old daughter Lucy (Quinn Cummings). They are both shocked when Paula's current boyfriend Tony, an actor, abandons them and heads off to Europe. To make matters worse, Tony sub-lets their apartment to Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss), an actor arriving from Chicago to star in an off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Richard III.

Paula and Elliott reach at a tense agreement to share the apartment. She goes back to dance training and auditioning to support herself and Lucy, while Elliott struggles during rehearsals to understand his director's unique interpretation of King Richard. Although they bicker constantly, an attraction starts to develop between Paula and Elliott.

This time writing directly for the screen, Neil Simon goes back to The Odd Couple concept and crams two incompatible adults into a small apartment. The Goodbye Girl throws in precocious but clever Lucy into the mix to further boost the mismatched dynamics. The outcome is familiar material with a decent makeover, and the duo of Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason (Simon's wife at this stage) easily shoulder the responsibility of creating and maintaining momentum.

In addition to being opposites Paula and Elliott joust as equals, both claiming the high ground when justified and retreating or yielding when prudent. Dreyfuss is all about restless energy, despite Elliott meditating (in the nude) with his guitar and practicing yoga at all hours. Mason brings barely-contained anger at how Paula's life is unraveling. Together they create enough humorous tension to navigate Simon's prose, engaging in clever, robust and generally sharp dialogue exchanges.

Despite some zingers and wry observations from Lucy, The Goodbye Girl's script does carry hints of lazy writing. Despite writing for the screen Simon is unable to break away from the stage. The action is frequently confined to the apartment, the excursions to Elliot's rehearsals and Paula's dance auditions appearing forced and perfunctory before Simon hurries back to the friendly confines he knows best.

More disappointing is a romance that appears imposed on the two leads, director Herbert Ross unable to convincingly pivot from hostility to love. Elliott and Paula spend so much time bickering and angry, then conveniently fall into each other's arms for seemingly no other reason than the movie entering its final third. The scenes of conflict make for much better entertainment than the clunky romance, and The Goodbye Girl loses its edge once the arguing stops, forcing Simon and Ross to chart one last prolonged conflict to regain a spark.

The story waves at a few routine overarching themes, include Paula always falling for the wrong guy (usually an actor) and taking out her anger on the next wrong guy (also usually an actor), the scrappy hand to mouth lifestyle in the arts world, and a mother balancing career, daughter and romance. The Goodbye Girl can't pick her men very well, but at least her ups and downs make for modest entertainment.

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Movie Review: Chapter Two (1979)

A romantic drama with some wit, Chapter Two is an autobiographical story about second chances from writer Neil Simon. The film is talky and stagy but nevertheless saved by earnest intentions and good performances.

In New York City, George Schneider (James Caan) is a writer still coming to terms with the death of his wife Barb after 12 years of marriage. His brother Leo (Joseph Bologna) arranges a series of disastrous blind dates, but eventually one of them works: George meets and falls in love with stage actress Jennie MacLaine (Marsha Mason), a recent divorcée.

The romance between George and Jennie is fast and idyllic, and within days they are talking about marriage, although George does suffer episodes of withdrawal and guilt as he continues to process the loss of Barb. In the meantime, Leo's marriage appears to be wobbling, and Jennie's best friend Faye (Valerie Harper) also seeks something beyond the confines of her marriage. Despite Leo's warnings that the couple are moving too fast, George and Jennie do get married, but there is trouble ahead for the seemingly happy couple.

Directed by Robert Moore and based on Simon's play, Chapter Two is a retelling of Simon's romance with Mason, his actual second wife. With Mason effectively playing herself under the guise of Jennie MacLaine, the film has undoubted passion and agony anchored in the writer's real experiences.

Moore does his best to disguise the stage origins of the material, locating events around New York City and keeping the actors moving even within the confines of George and Jennie's apartments. There is even a longish honeymoon interlude thrown in, showcasing the Caribbean. The initial romantic pursuit scenes between George and Jeannie, featuring numerous phone calls culminating in a five minute date, are genuinely awkward and cute. But at 124 minutes the film is too long, and many scenes carry on with long monologues that work well on paper and perhaps the stage, but appear contrived on the screen.

However, Simon's prose is witty enough to ride out most of the bumps, and the film's highlight is a passionate soliloquy delivered by Mason confirming her desire to stand and fight for herself, her man, and their relationship. It borders on wince-inducing, but Mason finds enough fire in her heart to make it work, and wraps the evolving status of feminism, women's aspirations and the embrace of second chances in one epic pitch.

Caan is less engaged, and other than his initial passionate pursuit of Jennie, the character of George Schneider is written as generally passive. For long periods Caan just has to play at morose and silently stare out into the distance, an understandable stance given his profound loss, but not great cinematic drama. Joseph Bologna and Valerie Harper provide stronger than usual support, and the characters of Leo and Faye get their own side stories to add texture to Simon's commentary about the status of relationships among sophisticated urbanites in the late 1970s.

Although the film is obviously self-obsessed, the euphorias and miseries of hearts struggling through emotional rollercoasters carry enough universal appeal for Chapter Two to create and maintain interest.

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Movie Review: Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

A character study movie requires a multi-faceted personality with subtleties of behaviour and perhaps some hidden secrets that can be probed for a couple of hours. Heartbreak Ridge focuses on Thomas Highway, an old-school Gunnery Sergeant with the Marine Corps who is as old fashioned and utterly predictable as they come. Highway would be the secondary role in most other war movies; building a story entirely around him is the equivalent of eating the icing in the absence of a cake.

Although he is an entertaining character, everything we need to know about Highway (Clint Eastwood, who also directs) we find out in the first 10 minutes. Battle hardened, frequently drunk, divorced, believes in the traditional military values, does not suffer fools, an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and quick with the one-liners, mostly to do with the hurt that he will lay on the next person to sneer in his face.

The problem is that the film has another two hours to kill, and spends the time entrenched in cliché land as Highway trains a group of misfits in a recon unit, with scenes alternating between poorly conceived comedy, macho fist fights to excite the young adolescents, and utter disrespect for the military. By the time the film completes it's depiction of the 1983 United States invasion of the tiny island of Grenada (population: 100,000), a war as unnecessary as this movie, the snarly line of dialogue about "ripping your head off and crapping down the hole" in all its variants has been repeated about a dozen times. Or so it feels.

Despite the character offering nothing new, Clint Eastwood is the only thing worth watching in Heartbreak Ridge, and he makes a valiant attempt to save the movie, his "Gunny" Highway hard as nails, spitting bullets, and unleashing equal torrents of hatred at his untested superiors and his slacker subordinates. There are a few clever moments, such as Highway's obsession with reading women's magazines to improve his soft side, and the film gains a few points for recreating the true story of American soldiers pinned by enemy fire during the Grenada invasion using a credit card to call collect for fire support.

Unfortunately the supporting roles are poorly developed, Marsha Mason suffering the most as Highway's ex-wife, with the script never bothering to reveal what she ever saw in the man nor shedding any light as to why she would ever consider going back to him. Mario Van Peebles is a laughably unreal wannabe guitar rock star Marine, and Everett McGill as Highway's commanding officer and chief nemesis is as stiff as a target board at the far end of the firing range.

In Clint Eastwood's stellar career as both actor and director, Heartbreak Ridge is a boorish misfire.

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