Loving Couples (1980)

Loving Couples is one of the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen, not just about relationship but about the basic function of human behavior.  It locks in several hate-fueled spite games between characters whose motivations seem baked into the popularity of “Three’s Company” and expels them out the other end as shallow, meaningless cartoon characters.  Worse, it locks them into those spite games in a plot that is so confusing that I needed a scorecard to keep up.  Let me see if I can sort it out:

Evelyn (Shirley MacLaine) is married to Walter (James Coburn), both are doctors.  Walter knows that Evelyn is cheating him with a patient named Greg (Stephen Collins) whom she met when he crashed his car next to a horse track.  Greg’s girlfriend Stephanie (Susan Sarandon) takes her grievance to Walter and they decide to have an affair out of spite.  Both parties split from their original partners and move in with their new partners only to realize that there are just as many complications with the new partners as the old ones and so everybody realizes what they had in their original partners in the first place.  Oy!

Of all the bad middle-age screwhead comedies that I’ve seen lately, this is the worst.  It is written at a cynical TV level with characters as props more than human beings and jokes that are more hateful than funny.  In the face of real movies about real people with real problems like Ordinary People and Kramer vs. Kramer and the recent It’s My Turn, this is a movie that takes real issues of infidelity and mistrust and squeezes it for laughs that never materialize.  This is a hateful movie.