Best Friends

I ended up with a couple of Burt Reynolds movies on my DVR. I already did a post on The Man Who Loved Women, which I think aired during a night dedicated to Julie Andrews; the other movie is an early 1980s film I had surprisingly not heard of before TCM ran it: Best Friends. Once again, having watched it, I can finally do a review on it.

As the movie opens, Richard Babson (Burt Reynolds) and Paula McCullen (Goldie Hawn) are sitting in a house together reading the sort of dialogue that sounds like it would come from a bad imitation of Tennessee Williams. You could be forgiven for thinking that they're actors auditioning or rehearsing for a play. In fact, they're screenwriters working on a film for producer Larry Weissman (Ron Silver), and they're a successful screenwriting team.

Richard and Paula have been working and living together for years, but... they're not married. Obviously, during the Production Code this could never have been a thing, but it's the early 1980s so now it's not such a big deal. Except that it's beginning to be a thing for Richard, who feels that maybe the two of them should get married. Paula isn't so sure, because she believe the two of them being unmarried gives them greater spontaneity; presumably, she's also seen how a lot of Hollywood marriages don't really work out in the end. But Richard pushes enough that Paula eventually agrees to get a quickie marriage, only it's in a Spanish-language wedding chapel in Los Angeles instead of Las Vegas where you'd think quickie marriages would normally take place.

Having finished the movie and gotten married without telling anybody, they decide to go visit the respective sets of families to tell them the good news. First up are Paula's parents Eleanor (Jessica Tandy) and Tim (Barnard Hughes), who live in Buffalo, several days' train ride from Los Angeles. They're about to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, and they're getting to the age where their age is beginning to show, which is understandably worrying to Paula. For the audience, it's supposed to be an opportunity for laughs concerning things we don't necessarily want to hear our parents talking about like the geriatric sex drive.

After that, it's time for the two to visit Richard's family. His parents live in a giant condominium community in northern Virginia, with father Tom (Keenan Wynn) having worked for the federal government and still being married to Richard's mother Ann (Audra Lindley). Where you get the feeling that Paula's parents were always a bit more reserved, Richard's are more outgoing to the point that it really starts to irritate Paula. It also doesn't help that Richard's sisterhas moved back in due to yet another failed marriage, this time with two children in tow.

And then, to make matters worse, it turns out that the movie Richard and Paula was working on has hit a snag and that the script is going to need rewrites which necessitate their going back to Los Angeles before they planned. The couple has already begun to bicker over finding out their families aren't all they're cracked up to be; can they survive having to fix the script under a tight deadline?

Best Friends is another of those movies where you can see why everybody involved would want to be involved with it. There's fodder for what should be incisive comedy about whether married life is better than staying single; also, the was the chance for some pretty talented people to work together: apparently, Goldie Hawn and Burt Reynolds really enjoyed working together. And yet, somehow, the resulting movie winds up sterile. It feels as though the movie went for the obvious humor instead of something thought-provoking, and everybody is going through the motions. It's not exactly a bad movie; it's more that it's yet one more movie where things feel like they could have been so much better.