Sean Burns
Burt Reynolds gives one of his least Burt Reynolds-y performances in Starting Over. It’s not just that he’s missing the mustache, it’s that he’s also got no swagger – none of the actor’s trademark, smirky joie de vivre. Starring as a depressed, newly divorced magazine writer named Phil Potter, the Bandit wears tweed jackets with suede patches on the elbows instead of a cowboy hat. He seems to move a couple of beats behind everyone else in the picture, accepting the increasingly absurd situations he keeps finding himself in with a forlorn smile. Even Burt’s toupee looks less robust than usual.
It’s affecting work, vulnerable in ways we’re not used to seeing the star. On the rare occasions he went without facial hair, Reynolds looked appealingly disarmed. Phil is a nice fellow whose wife (Candice Bergen) recently dumped him to go make it big as a pop songwriter. There’s a wonderfully uncomfortable scene in which Phil finds himself on an awkward first date with a woman (played by young Mary Kay Place) who can’t stop singing the hit song his ex wrote about their breakup. The screenplay is full of messy, funny moments like that — the trademark of writer James L. Brooks, here making the leap to movies after revolutionizing TV comedy with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi.
Starting Over has an odd pedigree. Scripted by Brooks, the film was directed by the master of paranoid thrillers Alan J. Pakula, whose The Parallax View and All the President’s Men did not exactly suggest a flair for romantic comedy. It was shot by Sven Nykvist, and I must admit my life has been enriched considerably upon discovering that Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer once photographed the Building 19 discount warehouse in Lynn, Massachusetts. (Their motto, “Good Stuff… Cheap” is a beloved Masshole memory.) It’s a nicely staged sequence following Reynolds and a daisy chain of store employees as Phil buys everything he’ll need for a new apartment and a new life all in one jaunty afternoon montage.
As you’ve already probably surmised from the title, the film is about Phil’s attempts to start anew after the collapse of his marriage – fending for himself in a bachelor apartment and going on a series of bad dates. It was 1979 and Hollywood was just discovering the exotic subject of divorce. Starting Over came out two months before Kramer vs. Kramer, and a year after An Unmarried Woman had become a phenomenon. Jill Clayburgh received an Oscar nomination for that film, as well as for her role in Starting Over as a schoolteacher who finds herself falling for Phil in spite of her better judgement. She can tell he’s not over his ex yet.
The loopy, neurotic Brooks-ian dreamgirl – recurring throughout the writer’s career over half a century from Mary Richards to Ella McCay – takes two forms here. There’s Clayburgh’s grounded, slightly spazzy nurturer (she owns so many plants) and Bergen’s career-obsessed maneater, who doesn’t realize how much she misses her hubby until she sees him happy with someone else. Brooks isn’t exactly fair to the latter, saddling Bergen with a couple horrifically unflattering freakouts in which she has to sing the Marvin Hamlisch-Carole Bayer Sager songs her character supposedly wrote. (The radio single versions were sung by Stephanie Mills. You’ll understand why.)
The stacked cast also includes Charles Durning as Burt’s brother, backed up by Frances Sternhagen as the nosy sister-in-law. They’ve signed Phil up for a divorced men’s group that meets weekly in a church basement, where he talks out his feelings with the likes of Austin Pendleton, Jay O. Sanders and a young Wallace Shawn (who somehow already looked old). The men’s meeting is followed by a divorced women’s group, and the scene in which the two cohorts must pass each other on the stairwell is such an expertly staged sight gag you’ll wish Pakula had tried his hand at slapstick comedies. Sharp-eyed viewers will also spot Daniel Stern and Kevin Bacon in the backgrounds of other scenes.
Starting Over suggests a road not taken for Reynolds. It’s a low-key, sophisticated comedy for adults made on the precipice of a decade in which he’d devote his career to car chases and crap. Brooks was so taken with Reynolds’s work in Starting Over that he wrote a part specifically for him in his next script – that of the retired astronaut and neighborhood lothario who woos a reluctant Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment. Jack Nicholson wound up winning his second Oscar for the role. Reynolds turned down the movie to make Stroker Ace instead.
“Starting Over” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, Kanopy, and Hoopla.
