Irreconcilable Differences

After being Oscar-nominated for their first produced screenplay, the wildly and unexpectedly successful Goldie Hawn comedy Private Benjamin (1980), husband and wife team Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer got to take full control of one of a movie for the first time. Irreconcilable Differences was Shyer's directorial debut and was based in part on their marriage and creative partnership. Shelley Long and Ryan O'Neal play a Hollywood couple whose obsession with success destroys their marriage and their relationship with their daughter, played by the eight-year-old star of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Drew Barrymore. The film is told in flashback, as courtroom testimony during a case in which the little girl is suing her parents for emancipation. Her lawyer (Allen Garfield) has helped her file for divorce from her parents, so we learn about this couple's history via her testimony and theirs.

The life of Albert Brodsky and Lucy Van Patten Brodsky unfolds an awful lot like that of director Peter Bogdanovich and his first wife, production designer, writer, producer, and primary creative partner, Polly Platt. Sam Wanamaker plays a producer based on Roger Corman, the indie impresario who gave Bogdanovich and Platt (and countless others) their start in pictures. Sharon Stone (in her first major role) plays Blake Chandler, a younger, sexier actress with whom Albert has an on-set affair that leads to a fully blown relationship, just like Bogdanovich did with actress Cybill Shepherd when he and Platt were making the acclaimed The Last Picture Show. Many of Bogdanovich's other early films are "parodied" here as well, with Albert falling victim to early acclaim and Academy awards by embarking on a misguided big-budget musical remake of Gone With The Wind starring his new young love in a role she's entirely wrong for. This references Bogdanovich's period drama Daisy Miller and his musical At Long Last Love, both of which starred Shepherd and were major flops, ending his winning streak with critics and audiences.

While the events depicted are hardly a direct copy of the Bogdanovich/Platt/Shepherd scenario, it feels more than a little crass to mine someone else's showbiz break-up for comedy and present it as your own story, which is more than a little bit of what happened here. That wouldn't matter all the much in the end if Irreconcilable Differences was a really funny or insightful movie, but it's a labored affair. Shyer's direction is pedestrian, the screenplay's comical situations mostly fall flat, and the flashback structure, which should enable a tight, zippy energy, just boggs the whole thing down in repetitive scenes.

Ryan O'Neal is good casting since he starred in two of Bogdanovich's early hits, What's Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973)—in the latter of which he co-starred with his own eight-year-old daughter, Tatum O'Neal. Unfortunately, little Drew Barrymore is no little Tatum O'Neal. While Steven Spielberg knew exactly how to use the adorable youngest member of the Barrymore acting dynasty in E.T., and though Barrymore would become a fine actor and great producer as an adult, in this film and her other 1984 picture Firestarter, she's out of her depth and feels like she's just making faces and reciting lines in a cute voice rather than giving a real performance that can carry a film, as O'Neal did in Paper Moon, for which she deservedly became the youngest competitive Oscar winner in the history of the Academy Awards.

Shelley Long, who was making a name for herself as the star of the then-low-rated sitcom Cheers and in movies like Night Shift and Losin' It, was Golden Globe-nominated for her performances. But Lucy is nowhere near as entertaining or deep a character as Diane Chambers, the co-lead in Cheers. It wouldn't be until Meyers divorced Shyer and started directing on her own that she'd create rich portrayals of women balancing life, love, family, and a professional career. The movie was a mild hit and launched Meyers and Shyer's career as a writing-producing-directing team, though devoting so much time to this project meant Meyers and Shyer lost control of another of their scripts, Protocol, which they considered one of their best works. That film became another Goldie Hawn vehicle and was heavily rewritten by Buck Henry and outgrossed Irreconcilable Differences when it was released later the same year.