ADDICTED TO LOVE
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1997 Ben Hoffman
It would be difficult to find two more charming actors than Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan but it takes more than charm to sustain a movie. Somewhere between the reading of the script and getting it on film, something went a bit wrong; not very much but enough. The premise of a young man and woman losing their respective significant others, only to discover that the "others" they lost are now in love with each other, certainly sounds as if it would have made a light romantic comedy.
Sam (Broderick), who is an astronomer in a small midwest town, is a young romantic. Maggie (Ryan), a New Yorker who has seen enough to make her wary, is a photographer who by chance meets our astronomer when both she and he are spying on the two lovers who had jilted them. The cynic in Maggie convinces the romantic in Sam that the best way to get back their respective lovers is by humiliating them. But how?
Suffice it to say, Sam and Maggie establish themselves in a run-down loft that just happens to have a one way view into the apartment of their ex-lovers, Linda (Kelly Preston) and Anton (Tcheky Karyo) where they sit around watching their exes cavort. This is where the movie bogs down. After a while the spying becomes a bit tiresome but continues through a good part of the film. That may have been the funniest gimmick in the movie but it soon becomes a one- note gimmick. That screenwriter Robert Gordon was experienced in breakups of longtime relationships because he had had one of his own is really irrelevant. One would hope his breakup had more humor than does the story he wrote . . . and that is too bad because whatever entertainment there is in the film falls mainly on the aforementioned charm of the two leads, too heavy a burden.
In a cameo, Maureen Stapleton appears as Maggie's mother.
Directed by Griffin Dunne.
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Ben Hoffman
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