Directed by Griffin Dunne
Running time 100 mins
Certificate 15
Do Not Panic. That bloody awful song by Robert Palmer does not appear on the soundtrack to this movie. They get Neneh Cherry to perform it instead, so it's OK, you can sit through the credits if you want.
Now we've got that out of the way, a lot of you reading this are going to be thinking "uh-oh! Meg Ryan romantic comedy. Like we haven't seen this before". These are probably the same people that think that Matthew Broderick hasn't worked since Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Well, forget all those preconceptions and try some other ones, because this is not their movie. It firmly belongs to director Griffin Dunne.
Who? say the ant-Ryanites, showing their lack of cinematic historical knowledge yet again. You'll probably remember him best as the bloke that gets eaten and then starts frequenting porno cinemas in American Werewolf In London, which is a terrible way to remember one of the more intriguing talents of the Hollywood fringes. If you need a marker for his influence on this movie, go check out his performance in Martin Scorsese's After Hours, in many ways the immediate precursor of Addicted To Love. Both center on a normal and fairly affable guy who, through a combination of naivete, accident and just plain stupidity enters a twilight world of sexuality, crime and fixation in the bohemian borders of New York.
Broderick takes the role that Dunne played in Scorsese's movie and adds a certain small-town charm as an astronomer, living in the same rural community that he was born in, in sight of the school he attended and at which his childhood sweetheart now teaches. Every day at lunchtime he turns his big telescope (not an euphemism) towards her school, and she waves to him, even though she can't see him waving back. It's perfect, and surprisingly far from cloying. So obviously it's got to go wrong. The girlfriend goes to New York, moves in with a French restaurateur and gets her father to dump Broderick for her.
So what does he do? Does he act like a respectful ex-partner and acquiesce to her wishes and life choices? No, of course not. He does precisely what everybody else on the planet would do. He moves to New York, sets up camp in an abandoned tenement over the road from her new lovenest and starts spying on her and lover- boy.
Now, right about now you're probably thinking "restraining order", but Dunne manages to make Broderick look like the hero. He's not malicious, he just can't work out the obvious: that it's over. Instead, he's sat in a hovel, throwing Twinkies to his pet cockroaches and becoming convinced that Frenchman has cast some evil spell on his perfect angel. He's a figure not only of tragedy, but of understandable, almost empathisable, pity. Plus he's about nineteen times less mad than Meg Ryan, the Frenchman's ex-. Unlike Broderick, she doesn't want him back. She wants him cast into a pit of endless torment and suffering, which is understandable.
Everybody has created a simplified image of their ex-partner; to Broderick, she's an unassailable tower of virtue, whereas Ryan can't see anything other than a 6ft banana-slug whenever the Frenchman turns up. It's obvious that these illusions are going to be shattered, and that new, more realistic loves will blossom. I know this, you know this, everyone knows this: but it doesn't matter. The joy of this movie is how it happens: two barmily over-fixated people undertaking increasingly insane plans to overturn a relationship that gets more resilient because of their actions. From hiding underwear down the back of the sofa, to credit card fraud and food poisoning, every tactic is employed, until one mistake is made: they get to understand the targets of their offensive behavior.
As cunning lampoons of the romantic comedy go, this film is one of the best. It's set in New York, as all great romances have to be, and has two of the great light romantic character actors of our time in the cast. But each is spoofing their traditional roles: Broderick's wide-eyed innocent is a cause of endless turmoil and catastrophe, while Ryan manages to prove yet again that she can do far more than look decorous and fall over on cue. Here she builds upon the artistic success of her criminally under-rated performance in Courage Under Fire with a scene-stealing performance that is by turn scary, obsessive, funny and sexy: all characteristics that more than enough critics have accused her of being incapable of portraying.
This film could be written off as a stalker comedy, and there is nothing comedic about stalking: but it's more than that. It's about obsession and the way it can ruin your life. It's about fear of relationships, of being hurt again and committing yourself to hatred because it's so much easier to live with an old pain than develop an new one. It's about getting on with your life and leaving old mistakes behind, and has as much on an air of autobiography as recently released critics' favorite Swingers, without the smugness. Plus it's the only movie you'll see this year with a camera obscura employed as a major plot device, so how can you go wrong?
RMW