THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 20, 1995 TAG: 9503180047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
THESE GUYS ONCE traded baseball cards. Now, they swap meatloaf recipes.
Once a week, the three men meet at the local McDonald's (``neutral territory'') to collect their children for weekend visitation rites.
There is every reason to suspect that someone could make a touching and yet hilarious comedy about divorced guys trying to adjust. But ``Bye Bye, Love'' is closer to a TV sitcom than a real movie. James Brooks, for example, could possibly have made something like ``Terms of Endearment'' out of the same subject. The TV veterans who churned out ``Bye Bye, Love'' don't even try.
Matthew Modine is the playboy. He has a young girlfriend cooking dinner when several divorced women show up with casseroles in hand and a gleam in the eye. Paul Reiser (of TV's ``Mad About You'') is the wounded romantic. His hangdog look suggests that he's born to be a husband and doesn't quite know what happened. Randy Quaid is the cynical one. He's bitter about the divorce, resents support payments and is reluctant to re-enter the dating game.
Hollywood likes to bond males in groups of three, from The Three Stooges to ``Three Men and a Baby.'' The threesome here are so oddly cast that it is difficult to believe they are long-time friends. In any case, we're told little about how they make a living or how their marriages broke up. The ex-wives, for the most part, only make fleeting appearances.
Reiser is quite good in what is perhaps the most serious of the roles, although there are hints that he'd like to scrap the nothing script and do his own humor. Quaid is perhaps the funniest. It is Modine who looks most uncomfortable with his lady-killer role.
All the performers are victims of the makeup man from hell. They all look as if they have been bathed in pancake goo - a most unnatural demeanor.
Rob Reiner is assigned the role of an annoying radio psychiatrist who spouts generalities about how marriages could have been saved. It's a funny idea, as are so many in the film, but it isn't developed.
Most pesky of the subplots is Reiser's problems with his rebellious teen daughter. It ends in a particularly melodramatic, almost embarrassingly overdone, treehouse scene. There was an understandable cheer from the audience when Dad finally told the little snit off.
There are so many characters that no one has enough screen time to score. Ed Flanders (as an aged employee of McDonald's) and his teenage boss (Johnny Whitworth) have a pleasant relationship. (Sadly, Flanders, best known for TV's ``St. Elsewhere'' took his own life several weeks before this film's release.) The subplot is very pleasant, but it seems as if it's from some other movie.
It's all pretty repetitious and tedious as we endure whining from the guys until, in mid-movie, Janeane Garofalo, from ``Saturday Night Live'' and ``The Larry Sanders Show,'' comes along to almost save the movie. As Quaid's disastrous blind date, she is hilarious.At an Italian restaurant, she turns ordering into a traumatic decision. (``Do you know how long veal stays in the colon?''). Both waiter and Quaid are stymied.
Garofalo has a knack for going just far enough without quite going too far. She must have written her own material because nothing else in the movie is nearly on the same level of humor.
Along the way, there are lots of pop tunes that serve no purpose, such as the Everly Brothers' rendition of the title tune.
Juggling three stories, this ultimately looks more like three weeks of a TV situation comedy than a real movie. Perhaps it will even end up where it belongs, as the basis for a weekly series - complete with inane little jokes unhampered by plot or depth. ILLUSTRATION: 20TH CENTURY FOX
From left, Matthew Modine, Paul Reiser and Randy Quaid get a crash
course in parenthood in ``Bye Bye, Love.''
MOVIE REVIEW ``Bye Bye, Love''
Cast: Matthew Modine, Randy Quaid, Paul Reiser, Janeane Garofalo,
Rob Reiner
Director: Sam Weisman
Music: J.A.C. Redford
MPAA rating: PG-13 (divorce treated comically, not for
children)
Mal's rating: **1/2
Locations: Chesapeake Square, Greenbrier in Chesapeake, Military
Circle, R/C Columbus in Norfolk, Lynnhaven Mall, Surf-N-Sand in
Virginia Beach
by CNB