Starting Over

What to do if you are male, American, no spring chicken, and abandoned by your wife on the ground that you get in the way of her career? One answer is to wedge the tongue firmly in cheek, join a Divorced Men's Workshop, get yourself a new girl, and regard your ex-wife with the careful patience usually reserved for the demented. The irrepressible ebullience of Burt Reynolds, which has been known to buoy up less fragile craft than this, is here in danger of swamping not only Jill Clayburgh's rather mousy rendition of Marilyn-the-nursery-school-teacher, but the movie as a whole. Moments of little-boy-lost helplessness, thrown in to indicate his 'earnestness', merely make you wonder if he's schizoid or just a complete philanderer. It's as if Pakula had got on a fairground horse that has gone out of control, and is undecided whether to go with it or try to stop it.