Starting Over

Er, not quite

While looking through the movie channel listings on Pluto TV, I came across yet another movie I hadn't heard of on the 70s channel, and with Burt Reynolds in the lead, it sounded interesting enough to watch. The movie was Starting Over, so I hit the remote to start over (pun definitely intended) from the beginning.

Burt Reynolds plays Phil Potter, who at the start of the movie is married to Jessica (Candice Bergen), an aspiring singer-songwriter who has the problem that, well, she simply can't sing. Maybe she should try just writing songs for other people. But for whatever reason, she responds to her lack of success as a singer by announcing to her husband that she wants a divorce.

Phil, not knowing what to do, calls his brother Mickey (Charles Durning), who lives up in Boston with his wife Marva (Frances Sternhagen), who suggests that perhaps Phil should move closer to Boston. Phil does this, but since the movie was made well before the internet was a thing let along good enough to do work from home, Phil needs a way to make money to tide him over. He's able to get a bit of work teaching creative writing at the local community college, although he's never done any actual teaching before.

Along the way, Phil tries to get back into the swing of things by attending a support group for newly-divorced men (do such things even still exist?), which offers the movie a chance for a bit of humor to lighten the proceedings. Meanwhile, Mickey and Marva set Phil up on a blind date with Marilyn (Jill Clayburgh), who is working on her master's degree in elementary education.

Phil isn't too excited about being pushed into a blind date, but the relationship begins to blossom into something. Enough, in fact, that Phil feels comfortable having Marilyn and his brother's family all together for a Thanksgiving dinner. However, things get complicated when the phone rings and it's Jessica. Phil finds that he still has feelings for Jessica that aren't negtive, but he also likes Marilyn. Marilyn, understandably, wants to know that she'll be able to get a real relationship from Phil. The question of how Phil is going to navigate the two women dominates the rest of the movie.

Starting Over is theoretically supposed to be a comedy, although it's really more of a dramedy. The drama isn't heavy, but the comedy doesn't overwhelm the film. Clayburgh and Bergen are both quite adept at handling this sort of material; in fact, both of them received Oscar nominations. Burt Reynolds was big at the time for his previous comedies and southern-set action movies. He's somewhat miscast here, I think, although I can see why the producers (James L. Brooks and Alan Pakula, who also directed) would want to cast somebody like Reynolds since he had an obvious charm that should work here. That and the fact that the movie was intended to be a comedy. One can see glimpses that Reynolds could have real dramatic talent, something that finally showed up two decades later when he got an Oscar nomination for Boogie Nights, but a lot of the time he slightly sticks out. Not too badly, but just enough for it to be noticeable.

Starting Over isn't a bad movie by any sense of the imagination, and is definitely worth a watch. It is, however, one that probably could have been better. That and it's a bit of a product of its late 1970s era.