Film

Return Engagement (1983)

Director: Alan Rudolph

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

'You sound like an old married couple' a journalist tells acid guru Timothy Leary and Watergate master-plumber G Gordon Liddy, as they squabble drunkenly over supper between engagements. Leary? Liddy? Engagements? America really is a wonderful country: two of the wildest cards in its pack became the highest-paid act on the college lecture circuit, debating each other. Liddy is the straight man - patriotism, loyalty, law & order, guns and the flag; Leary is the soft-shoe-shuffling joker - youth, consciousness expansion, evolution, the individual. Return Engagement - Liddy arrested Leary 16 years before - follows them on the road, on and off stage, with their wives, Liddy with a Hell's Angels chapter, Leary lecturing alfresco at Esalen. By the end it's hard to decide which is flakier than the other, though some of the debate audiences are weirder than either. A fascinating portrait of seeming opposites locked together by mutual self-interest, and in some twisted way, by history.

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