With Raggedy Man, you could feel that Jack Fisk wanted to make exactly that movie; with this one, you can feel instead that he wanted just to make a movie, another movie, any movie. Or at least any movie that had his wife, Sissy Spacek, in it. It is of course nice -- because rare -- to see Sissy Spacek in a Jane Fonda or Faye Dunaway sort of role -- a globe-trotting photojournalist, still unattached in her mid-thirties, who returns home and looks up her old high-school flame, now attached to a wife, a son, and the editor's desk of the local paper. It is also nice -- because also rare -- to see a screen characterization of someone who is glaringly self-centered and self-rationalizing without that being the main thing about her -- or the main focus of the movie as a whole. Spacek, who as always seems not to have a guileful bone in her body, continues to stand by her character (or inside her, rather) long after a Fonda or Dunaway would have betrayed her to irony. That aside, the dramatic premise of the piece never really amounts to much: soap opera diminuendoed into a sort of soap hum. And for all the semblance of being a small, intimist, somewhat Frenchified romantic drama, the movie perversely keeps trying to substitute sailboats, dodge-'em cars, ferris wheels, tilt-a-whirls, more sailboats, etc., for any genuine human interaction. With Kevin Kline and Bonnie Bedelia. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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