reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP (09/30/84)
I'm not sure why anyone wanted to make "Irreconcilable
Differences", at least not as a big screen movie. This is real
TV movie stuff, blown up to big budget proportions, without any
corresponding increase in the underlying value of the material.
The central concept is that a little girl (Drew Barrymore, who is
OK but not fantastic) is suing her parents for divorce. This idea
is tossed aside early on to give way to a dreadfully standard
romantic comedy, then the concept is picked up at the end to
prove that the screenwriters didn't forget it. This film is no more
a serious study of whether some children are better off without
their parents than it is an expose of the collapse of marriages
in Hollywood, though I'll bet it got sold as both somewhere along
the line.
The central focus is on the parents, played by Ryan O'Neal
and Shelley Long. Both are charming, and that's about all the
script really called for, so I suppose one can't fault them.
They meet cute, one of the prerequistes for second rate romantic
comedies. He's a professor of film moving from the east coast to
UCLA (yay!) who has decided it would be exciting to hitchhike
across the country. She's about to get married to a naval
officer, and is driving his beloved car across country. She
splatters O'Neal with mud as he attempts to hitch a ride with
her, and he eventually talks her into picking him up. Romance
blooms, Long forgets her naval officer, and they get married four
days later.
O'Neal eventually becomes a successful director, with Long
providing the body of his scripts. But a selfish young ninny
comes between them. Blind devotion to the little rotter cause
O'Neal to forget his wife and his daughter, and eventually to
destroy his career. Meanwhile, Long becomes a Haagen Daas junkie
for a while, then writes a best selling roman a clef novel, just
in time to lord it over O'Neal's downfall. Poor little Drew is
forgotten in all the excitement, and learns how to make
enchiladas from the Mexican housekeeper. Eventually, enough is
enough, or perhaps even too much, and she hires an attorney,
Allen Garfield (returned to us after several years as Allen
Goorwitz), to separate her from her parents.
None of this is particularly fresh, though there is a
certain energy in the earlier scenes and there are a few funny
lines scattered throughout. Let's face it, it's just an average
TV movie dressed up with fancier sets, a few bigger names, and a
couple of scenes with a lot of extras. Looked at in those terms,
it's hard for me to criticise it too much, but it's also rather
shoddy to expect people to pay $5 or so to see it. Wait for it
on cable, or on network TV if you don't have cable. This is not
one of those films that would lose much on the small screen.
Wouldn't be too bad on the bottom half of a double bill, either,
or for a buck at a university screening; at any rate, it's
certainly nothing special.
--
Peter Reiher
reiher@ucla-cs.arpa
{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher