Irreconcilable Differences Blu-ray Review
D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 12, 2013
My sister-in–law was Production Manager on the long running sitcom
Cheers, and therefore had a front row
seat for years at one of the most iconic series in NBC's "Must See TV" era. Her home in the San Fernando Valley is filled
with some incredible memorabilia from the long running show, including a gorgeous painting of the bar which I believe
may have hung over the main set during the show's run. Now despite her long association and insider status, my
sister-in-law has always been the model of discretion when asked about various cast members and their quirks and
peccadilloes, but that of course hasn't stopped me from wondering about certain things all the same. Her tenure as
Production Manager was mostly during the "Kirstie
Alley" years of the show (she was a Production Assistant in the earlier seasons), and so even if she
were to be
forthcoming with any "insider" information, I'd still probably be more or less talking to myself if I even deigned to bring
up a question I've occasionally wondered about with regard to Shelley Long. Long became an overnight sensation as
Sam Malone's first barmaid
nemesis, Diane, but she, like so many television stars before and since, decided the big screen was fairly screaming her
name, and she departed the series after a few years. Her film career, while peppered with occasional reasonable box
office successes, has hardly been the stuff of Oscars and hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, and the cynic
in me has the temerity to wonder, "Was it worth it? Was it worth leaving a Top 10 television series for a somewhat
less than stellar film career?" Other stars, like David Caruso, jettisoned their burgeoning television careers only to find
that film stardom remained steadfastly out of their grasp, ultimately rather sheepishly returning to the weekly series
fold. Long has certainly managed to stay busy on both the big screen and the small (she currently guest stars as Jay's
neurotic ex-wife on
Modern Family), but a lot of her film work has frankly seemed awfully like "very special
episodes" of sitcoms to begin with. And while it's only fair to point out that Long had made some films (including
Night Shift) before she became so well known on
Cheers, there's also no denying that her role on that
show probably upped her appeal among producers, directors and casting agents. Long made
Irreconcilable
Differences when she was still experiencing her first flush of major success in
Cheers, and it shows Long in
a mostly extremely favorable light. She still has some rather Diane-esque tics in her performance (a quality which would
recur throughout several subsequent films), but there's also some nicely modulated dramatic elements here that at
least hint at depths that few if any of either her film or television roles have really adequately mined.
There's an iconic Tammy Wynette song called
D-I-V-O-R-C-E which has the heartbreaking or (if you're a modern
day cynic) hiliarious opening lyric:
Our little boy is four years old and quite a little man
So we spell out the words we don't want him to understand
Like T-O-Y or maybe S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E
But the words we're hiding from him now
Tear the heart right out of me.
One has the strong feeling that little Casey Brodsky (Drew Barrymore), the child at the center of a rather unusual
divorce
proceeding in
Irreconcilable Differences, might respond to that gambit with some spelling out of her own:
"I u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d e-v-e-r-y l-a-s-t t-h-i-n-g y-o-u a-r-e t-a-l-k-i-n-g a-b-o-u-t."
Casey, it turns out, has decided to divorce her
parents, something that does indeed happen in very rare cases,
usually emancipating older teens to pursue their own lives if the court feels the parental relationship is hopelessly
frayed or even counter to the "child"'s best interests. Casey's situation is a bit more convoluted, for her parents are
minor celebrities, Albert Brodsky (Ryan O'Neal), a film writer and producer, and Lucy Van Patten Brodsky (Shelley Long),
who has helped her husband (Alma Reville style) but gone on to her own bestselling career as a novelist. The film
delves into the long, kind of
Two for the Road-esque, history between Albert and Lucy, which, as many long
relationships do, has had its own ups and downs, with both incredible successes and spectacular failures greeting both
the partners. What's relevant about all of this emphasis on career is that the film makes clear that while the Brodskys
jockey for position, they have a beautiful little girl standing in the background waiting for
her turn in the
parental spotlight.
Things only get worse when Albert gets sucked into the Hollywood lifestyle and soon is swooning over an aspiring
actress (which of course means she's a
waitress), Blake Chandler (Sharon Stone). That leads to a fairly ugly
divorce, and the beginning of Albert's downfall, even as Lucy's star begins to rise when a sudden moment of revelation
finally pushes her to write the novel that has long been gestating in her heart. But Casey is still in the background,
now a pawn in a kind of emotional tug of war between her parents. Albert's hubris leads to him pitching a huge musical version of
Gone
With the Wind (ironically there already
was a stage musical of this vaunted property by the time this film was made), whose
ongoing disaster finally snaps Albert at least partially back to his senses. (Shyer and his longtime writing partner Nancy Meyer based the
film partly on the tumultuous relationship between Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt and Cybill Shepherd, though one has to wonder if
Bogdanovich ever wanted to musicalize
Gone With the Wind. Maybe
At Long Last Love had a secret life no one knows
about.)
Irreconcilable Differences is never as insightful as, say,
Kramer vs. Kramer, and it in fact has a kind of
lighter approach to this very serious fare that keeps things poised rather delicately between melodrama and
bittersweet humor. It's a bit hard to really feel very
sorry for either Albert or Lucy, despite their various
problems, simply because they are at least tangentially connected to the high life in La-La Land. Albert's narcissism
comes in for some of the most pointed humor, but Lucy's descent into self pity also is examined. But from an emotional
standpoint, Casey is actually the only character that most audience members are going sympathize with and
for, and that's perhaps only right, all things considered.
Some people have compared
Irreconcilable Differences to screwball comedies of yore, but tonally it's much more
reminiscent of glossy late fifties-early sixties romantic comedies like the ones starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson (or
suitable replacements like James Garner). The film doesn't really take the easy way out the way films of that era
typically did, eschewing a tidy happy ending for something at least a little more nuanced, if not exactly "real" feeling.
Co-writer and director Charles Shyer doesn't quite mine the comedic heights he did in his
Private Benjamin, but
he coaxes excellent performances out of Long, O'Neal and especially Barrymore, who claims the spotlight quite easily
even if her character never quite does.
