Revenger's Tale

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

OLD BOYFRIENDS

Directed by Joan Tewkesbury

Screenplay by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

A year after her marriage has broken up, Diane (Talia Shire) inexplicably finds herself breaking down. She sets forth on a therapeutic cross-country journey in search of her old boyfriends. At first it seems she wants to gain insight into her illness by re-examining past relationships. It turns out, though, that she is more concerned with gaining revenge: the other sex, she feels, has ill-used her.

Her first encounter is with a nice chap (Richard Jordan) whose wife has just deserted him. Diane has no difficulty in rekindling old feelings, but she cannot resist deserting him, too. Next she looks up the parody stud (John Belushi) who sexually humiliated her in high school, and finds a way of getting even. At her final destination she finds not an old flame (he has been killed in Viet Nam) but his almost psychotic younger brother (Keith Carradine), who has taken the blame for his brother's death on himself. Diane lures him into a sexual relationship that is enough to break his tenuous hold on sanity. It also seems to purge the last of her anguish and she returns home to find Jordan (and mental health) awaiting her.

It must be admitted that on some primitive dramatic level Old Boyfriends works. We care about Diane, mostly because Shire is capable of engendering a great deal of sympathetic concern; there is intelligence and vulnerability in her every expression. But there are jarring contradictions in this movie. The worst lies in the sweetness of Shire's manner and the brutal actions required of her by a confused script. The Belushi character perhaps deserves what happens to him, but the sequence is so farcically overstated that it is not much more than a mistake in tone. The rape of Carradine's sanity is not so easily dismissed. It cannot be integrated with the decently questing character Shire has developed. We do not believe this woman is so desperate, or that she has an adequate excuse for her destructive behavior. It is also hard to accept the ending. Why should Jordan, having been treated with such casual cruelty, come back for more? What makes him think that Diane has changed? It all seems like a desperate reach for an upbeat conclusion.

This uneasiness is a common response to films Paul Schrader (Blue Collar, Hardcore) has a hand in. They always begin as intriguing notions, but Schrader is willing to sell out themes, characterization, simple dramatic logic in order to serve up a socko scene or a happy ending. One guesses that here the producer and co-writer started out to make a trendy feminist tract about taking just revenge on male inadequacy, then found that Diane desperately needed humanization. Star and director obliged, but the result is an incoherent mess.

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