Echoes of Best Friends: a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team writing a script about a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team. And here as there, the result contains plenty of "insider" stuff for the movie buff: the hero's graduate thesis, for instance, is called "A Semiological Analysis of Sexual Overtones in the Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch," although after the second word of that title, no further traces of semiology will be found in the hero's vocabulary. (The scriptwriting team there, you will recall, was Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin; the team here is Charles Shyer, who also directed, and Nancy Meyers.) Comparison with Best Friends, however, must soon stop. The ostensible narrative peg here is the "child emancipation case" of the couple's nine-year-old daughter, who wants to be placed in the custody of the Mexican housemaid. This must wait, though, while the court reviews (in flashback) the couple's courtship and marriage. "Is all this really relevant," the father wants reasonably to know, "to our daughter's problem?" The judge rules yes, or there would be no movie. The comic mood does not exactly run the gamut from cute to bitter, but rather leaps from one to the other and barely sets a toe in between. At its best (at the bitter end of the gamut, that is), the movie is quite fair-minded about the beastliness which success brings out, in turn, in both partners; and despite the set-piece oration by the daughter in court, it does not hold out a pat solution. Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long, Drew Barrymore. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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