Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Dfree52 I really like a lot about this movie, mainly Burt Reynolds playing against type. Instead of his Alpha male ladies man, we get a lonely, hurt, confused writer/teacher who's just been dumped by his wife Jessica (Candace Bergen). Escaping from New York City glitter, Peter (Burt) moves to Boston and after a failed attempt to enter the dating cycle again, connects with Marilyn (Jill Clayburgh) a neurotic preschool teacher.***SPOILER ALERT****The relationship is rushed and on shaky ground from the onset and we wonder how these two can overcome their own set of insecurities and become a couple. Phil's main roadblock to opening up to Marilyn is that he still loves his ex wife.Candace (Jessica) causes several rifts between Phil and Marilyn. The first being an out of the blue Thanksgiving phone call, the second by showing up on the day Marilyn is moving in with Phil. What follows in short order is a breakup...a failed make up of Phil and Jessica...then a reconciliation with Marilyn.And that's my first of a few issues with the film. Rom Coms seem to suspend belief. Marilyn tells Peter she doesn't want to hear from him again (because she doesn't want to be the Rebound Lady). Phil breaks the rule...and she relents.More importantly...cinematographer Sven Nykvist did a horrible job, this is where the murky comes in. We know it's Winter in the Northeast but all of the interiors are dark...even the bedroom display at Bloomingdales is dark. Hard to get involved in characters who we can't see. It's supposed to be a comedy, so lighten up; literally. As a result, the whole film takes on a more serious tone.Plus, at times screenwriter James L. Brooks seems to tease us with a few quirky moments..like Marilyn's involvement with basketball player John (Sturgis Warner) because he's 'big'. Also...continuity is an issue. I wasn't sure if this took place over one winter or two. Plus, last time I checked...there isn't six weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.One highlight...the divorced men's encounter group meetings. They precede the women's group and we get to peek in on a bunch of lonely, displaced males. The staircase scene as the aggressive women march down the basement steps to start their meeting and the departing males plaster themselves to the staircase walls are great moments.On the whole, there are fun moments and nice ones too. Not meant to be a laugh riot, just a commentary on two people with 'issues'...trying to move on and cope.

Charles Herold (cherold) I'm fascinated less by how many people like this movie than by how many describe it as funny. Brooks has written a lot of funny things, but this isn't one of them. Instead, what you've got is a bunch of unlikable characters fumbling through relationships. This movie is very much of its time, or perhaps a little after it; weren't encounter groups on the way out by 1979? Reynolds is a lump who veers from passively drifting along (like Will Farrell in Stranger Than Fiction)to being decisive and determined then back again. Clayburgh is the sort of irritating neurotic most people would run away from. Bergen, who is occasionally amusing, most notably when she sings, is shallow and self-centered. To me, the movie felt like a justification for bad behavior. Yes, Reynolds is hurt and damaged, but he's also pushy and insensitive. The movie seems to be saying, hey, if divorced guys treat you badly, they're still swell guys, they're just confused and struggling through life. Far too dreary to be a comedy, far too shallow and unrealistic to be a drama, and too uneventful to be a melodrama, Starting Over just sits there, of no use to anyone.

Poseidon-3 Reynolds, who was noted at the time for playing a lot of moustached, gum-chewing, hairy-chested rednecks, took a different tack in this thoughtful and understated romantic comedy and it earned him a fair amount of respect (though not an Oscar nomination as many expected.) He plays the husband of Bergen, an aspiring songwriter and singer who proves unlivable during her recent foray into the music biz. After a brief stay with his brother Durning, he sets up his own apartment and goes about entering the dating pool again after many years of marriage. One of the women he meets is Clayburgh, a pleasant, sensitive woman with a fear of commitment and trust. The two strike up a tentative romance and appear to be headed for another go-round at matrimony until Bergen shows up (in a see through blouse) and announces that she's ready to win Reynolds back for herself. Clean-shaven Reynolds gives a low-key, effective performance here. He's mostly a straight man for the zany people who surround him, though he does eventually have a memorable breakdown in a furniture store. His two leading ladies each got Oscar noms and it's a shame that he was denied the same honor as this was a nice departure from his typical fare of the era. Clayburgh is wonderful. She effectively creates a tender, quirky and realistic character; one who is slightly damaged and whom the audience can root for. Her opening line of dialogue is unforgettable! Bergen is also very fine, fearlessly laying out a haughty, problematic and practically tone deaf character who "sings" like a wailing banshee, yet has no idea how wretched she is. Durning (who couldn't look less like Reynolds' brother if he tried!) lends excellent support as does Sternhagen, who plays his match-making wife. Reynolds joins a support group for divorced men that includes several familiar faces from the cinema such as Pendleton and Sanders. (There is one glaring continuity error here, though, in that the editing separates one meeting into two, causing all the men to wear the exact same clothing to two meetings in a row.) Place has an amusing cameo as one of Reynolds' early dates. Despite a few dated trappings, this film still offers worthwhile ruminations and examinations of the emotions and compromises that go into making a relationship work. The humor is mostly gentle, with the exception of Bergen's hysterical songs. The director, Pakula, was someone that A-list stars loved to work for, right up until his untimely death in a car accident.

Ed Uyeshima Just coming off producing and writing the classic sitcoms, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Taxi", James L. Brooks wrote the screenplay, his first, for this 1979 divorce comedy. Even after all these years and finally out on DVD, it remains funny, perceptive and thoroughly engaging in a way that later crystallized into Brooks' film-making trademark in "Terms of Endearment" and "As Good As It Gets". Fortunately, the director is the accomplished Alan J. Pakula, who shows a flair for romantic comedy coaxing excellent performances from the three stars.The plot centers on Phil Potter, a magazine writer-turned-writing teacher who has been informed by his beautiful but flaky wife Jessica that she wants a divorce. Without much recourse, he seeks solace from his bear-hugging psychiatrist brother Mickey and sister-in-law Marva, who eventually set him up on a blind date with Marilyn, a mild-mannered, rather dowdy nursery schoolteacher. The movie then becomes a clever seesaw of Phil vacillating between his wife and potential new love interest. What remains fresh about the movie is how Pakula and Brooks keep the focus on the flawed characters and less on the predictable clichés about the awkward consequences of divorce.Even taking into account his comeback turn in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 "Boogie Nights", I doubt if Burt Reynolds has given a more subtle, genuinely humane performance than he does here. Cast completely against type (he was in his Smokey/Hooper/Sharkey action phase at the time), he makes Phil's uncertainty feel real - even at the risk of losing audience sympathy in the way he treats Marilyn no matter how inadvertently. In the afterglow of her brilliant work in Paul Mazursky's "An Unmarried Woman", Jill Clayburgh again demonstrates the malleable quality and fierce intelligence to make her deglamorized Marilyn an attractive and credibly cautious woman. In a revelation before her long, successful run as "Murphy Brown", a deadpan Candice Bergen breaks free from her heretofore vacuously decorative roles and supplies the movie's biggest laughs as the narcissistic Jessica, especially when she sings with uproariously tone-deaf panache to seduce Phil in her hotel room.There is also a terrific supporting cast - Charles Durning bringing out all the unctuous support that Mickey can muster; a scene-stealing Frances Sternhagen as Marva, more than anxious to provide Phil emotional support when he is down and out; Austin Pendleton as a needy member of Phil's divorced men's club, who keeps remarrying his ex-wife; and Mary Kay Place in a funny cameo as Phil's aggressive first post-marital date. Other than Marilyn's unflattering outfits (the orange down jacket is hideous), Marvin Hamlisch's seventies-lite pop music is really the only significant element that dates the movie severely. The divorced men's club meeting scenes are hilarious, and you can see Jay O. Sanders and Wallace Shawn as fellow members. Unlike other romantic comedies of the period full of I'm-OK-You're-OK pop psychology, this one is still well worth viewing.