Old Boyfriends (1979)

Old Boyfriends is not the longest film that I have ever seen, but it is one of the looongest films that I have ever seen.  Over-extended, overly melodramatic, and as dull as a beige room.  It is a film that I could easily dispose of if I didn’t feel that the intentions were so strong.  No one involved was really out for the money, they really wanted to make something special here.

The biggest disappoint is the talent involved.  It was directed by Joan Tewksbury, the screenwriter of Robert Altman’s Nashville.  The writers are Paul and Leonard Shrader who are known for making films about complicated men like Raging Bull and Kiss of the Spider Woman.  And it stars Talia Shire, Keith Carradine, John Belushi and Richard Jordan, and if you don’t know their credits, you’ve been living in a closet.

What these talents saw in this story is easy to understand, but the execution doesn’t work.  Shire plays a troubled named Diane who wonders why her love life is a spiraling void.  So, in order to dislodge the problem, she decides to reunite with three of her old boyfriends, first Jeff played by Jordan, second Eric played by Belushi and the third, a guy named Wayne, played by Carradine, who is the younger brother of one of her boyfriends who was killed in Vietnam.

It is pretty much as dull as it sounds.  The meetings with the Jeff and Wayne are snooze inducing as we sense, right away, that she has no real connection with either of them.  The second, with Eric, brings suc a spark to this insipid slog that we almost want this to be the entire movie.  Eric is kind of fun and even sings “Jailhouse Rock” at one point, but then the movie goes back into it’s mopey patterns.  What does Diane find out about herself at the end?  Who cares?