John Sayles's characters are the Ivy League student activists of the Vietnam War years, who, a decade later, have found niches for themselves in such "meaningful" lines of work as high-school teacher, Vista volunteer, drug counselor, singer-songwriter manquée, and chief speechwriter for a U.S. Senator (Democratic, of course). A similarity of age, of outlook, of concerns, between these people and the present generation of movie critics has probably contributed greatly to this movie's fat portfolio of raves. That, and the predisposition of critics to be overgenerous to any movie costing just $60,000, whether out of their compassion for paupers or their esteem for inflation-fighters. Frugality, though, only becomes a virtue in movies to the extent that it combines with other virtues, and Secaucus Seven is basically just a very small movie with commensurately small virtues. Any moviegoer who cannot instantly cozy up to the cast of characters, cannot feel himself to be just one of the gang, will conceivably have great difficulty taking an interest in their meandering discussions of whether or not they want to have babies, what kind of birth control devices they employ, who is, or has been, or soon might be, sleeping with whom, etc., etc. None of these topics, or any of the others touched upon, is worked out dramatically to any satisfactory degree, and Sayles's hip, chirrupy dialogue is pitched way out of the range of the overtaxed actors and the supposedly down-to-earth, real-people, slice-of-life situations. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd
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