Children of Hollywood
I’ve seen Irreconcilable Differences maybe six or seven times over 25 years, and I like it just as much in my balding, disappointed middle-age as I did when I had a full head of hair and hopes of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's true I've always been predisposed to the film because of its two main subjects, both near and dear to my heart: movies and the effect of dysfunctional families on children. But the intelligence and emotional truth with which the husband and wife director-writer team of Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers imbued the project should qualify this as an overlooked gem in most people's book.
O’Neal gives a fine performance as Albert Brodsky, a film director with a story arc awfully similar to that of Peter Bogdanovich. Brodsky's a film professor hitchhiking his way to California and a teaching position at UCLA. In the middle of a driving rainstorm, he's picked up by Lucy (Long), en route to drop off her marine financee's car. Long, in mid-"Cheers" form, employs considerable comedic and dramatic chops as the analog to real-world Bogdanovich-ex Polly Platt. The long-legged hypotenuse in that triangle, Playboy bunny-turned-actress Dorothy Stratten, turns up in the film as the wild child Blake Chandler, played by a young Sharon Stone.
As they drive cross-country, Albert and Lucy start out bickering, naturally. But in one of the more romantic sequences I've seen on film--her reading him her unpublished children’s book, the two of them dancing in the lounge of a roadside motel, their dissolving into mutual tears while watching An Affair to Remember on Spanish-language TV--they fall in love. “I see in you exactly what Jimmy Stewart saw in Jean Arthur,” he tells her, for him a declaration of love if there ever was one.
Happiness and a child soon follow. Then a producer (Sam Wanamaker), impressed by Albert's encyclopedic knowledge of film, takes him under his wing as a consultant, eventually giving him a chance to write and direct. While he's discussing his first script with Lucy, she off-handedly improves one of the scenes, and he convinces her to co-write the movie, which becomes a huge hit. But while searching for an ingenue for their next film, he impetuously hires Blake, whom he finds working as a waitress at a hot dog stand. She moves in with Albert and Lucy for round-the-clock coaching, Albert falls in love with her, and just like that he and Lucy are divorced.
The two then engage in a topsy-turvy battle of wills and careers. But no matter who's on top, their daughter is put in the middle, taking the brunt of their mutual recriminations. As the psychic wounds take a palpable toll on Casey,the film becomes a searing portrait of childhood neglect at the hands of died-in-the-wool narcissists, as well as a chilling depiction of an adult child in the making. The night that Lucy discovers her husband's affair, she grabs Casey and they drive off, but instead of comforting her daughter, she breaks down in a self-indulgent panic. Later, she continually bashes Albert in front of Casey, while at the same time pumping her for information about Blake. Meanwhile, over at Albert's Hollywood mansion, his slavish devotion to his new wife leaves no room for his daughter.Finally, Casey is reduced to ping-ponging between them, forced to bear vicious messages they are too cowardly to give each other.
This is all rendered in some extremely affecting scenes, both comic and dramatic. A highlight is the sequence in which Albert attempts to film Atlanta, a self-financed musical version of Gone With the Wind destined to flop in the grand style of Heaven's Gate. As a director, he's obsessive on the order of Stanley Kubrick: Before shooting his version of the famous scene in which the camera cranes up from Scarlett O'Hara to reveal hundreds of dead and wounded soldiers lying in rows on the ground, Albert laments, "We don't have enough flies."
"Albert, we have every fly in the state working," his assistant director replies.
Albert then fixates on the dress color of an extra somewhere deep in the background as the A.D. warns they're going to lose the shot because of the encroaching darkness. The scene begins, and a coke-snorting Blake decamps her trailer in full diva mode, singing lyrics she wrote herself:
“This…civil war…
ain’t gonna get...me down...
I’m moving my act...
To a brand new town!”
But she doesn't like the way the scene's going and yells "cut!" ending the any possible shooting for the day and pushing the already over-budget film even further into the red. "Collect the flies!" yells the A.D.
But the real impact of Irreconcilable Differences lies in its finely observed, subtle psychological moments: Lucy, fighting a cold, compulsively gives notes to Blake on her performance while Albert languorously lights the young beauty''s cigarette, tipping off his wife to the affair with just that one gesture. Or Lucy beckoning her staff --a pair of standard Hollywood flunkies--to giddily inform them that her tell-all book about her marriage has gone to number one, then insisting on telling the housekeeping staff as well. When the cook seems puzzled, just the slightest hint of loneliness and shame flashes across Long's face; she's on top of the world, but has no one to share it with.
Finally, in a return to the court scene of the beginning, Casey takes the stand and sums up her view of what we have just seen:
A few minutes later, the credits roll over Lucy and Albert back in the beginning, dancing in the motel bar on their road trip, with Sinatra singing “You and I” on the soundtrack. At that point, whether I was 21, 28, 35, or 45 years old, I'm in tears.
Irreconcilable Differences is a stinging psychological portrait, resonating with emotional truth while still managing to be a lot of fun. You shouldn't miss it.
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