Burt Reynolds, Sans Mustache, Comically-Dramatically Registers The 1970s Becoming The 1980s Opposite Romantic Eccentrics Jill Clayburgh And Candice Bergen

DIRECTOR: ALAN J. PAKULA

STREET DATE: APRIL 23RD, 2024/KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS 

Adapting Dan Wakefield’s 1973 novel about a public relations man who moves from New York to Boston following a divorce, still hung up on his ex-wife while entering a bewildering dating scene, director Alan J. Pakula and screenwriter James L. Brooks update the book’s background of the waning era’s sexual revolution for a more timely look at sexual confusion as the 1970s became the 1980s. In addition to making the former PR exec an even more nebulous magazine freelancer, albeit similarly reduced to teaching part-time at a junior college, the just as hapless Phil Potter is here advantageously underplayed by Burt Reynolds without his mustache, and in film terms the book’s sociological significance is movie translated into endearingly bleak romantic comedy. 

Kino Lorber releases this deluxe, slipcovered “4K scan of the original camera negative” on Blu-ray a few spring months after the late autumn-to-midwinter of its lower-key holiday setting, the east coast snowfalls, subdued light-levels, and frosted car windows making admirably muted fellow screen-travelers on the cozy, grace scale road to romantic fulfillment – or not. Starting Over, per the title and to its credit, lacks a handy dashboard road map, romantically speaking, and a befuddled Reynolds, a forthright Candice Bergen, and an anxious Jill Clayburgh provide few clues through 106 leisurely minutes of sudden departures, arrivals, confessions, declarations, meltdowns, leaving, and returns how it will all fall into place. 

Or again, not. Opening in media res with the breakup of upscale NYC couple Phil (Reynolds) and Jessica Potter (Candice Bergen) a frame-one screen-reality – Jessica confidently piano-serenading the forlorn Phil on his way out the door in her newfound identity/vocation as a confessional if somewhat off-key singer-songwriter – Phil makes the downscale move across the tri-state area to his psychologist brother Mickey (Charles Durning) and sister-in-law Marva’s (Frances Sternhagen) comfortable home in Boston. Securing an unpretentious apartment, furnished by three shopping carts full of home supplies totaling $731.66 in circa 1979 money ($5,000 or so in today’s money?), and later an equally unpretentious position as creative writing instructor at an area college, the remaining strands of Phil Potter’s life continue to unravel as his brother enrolls him in a support group for divorced men (whose members include Austin Pendleton, Wallace Shawn, Jay Sanders, and frequent Reynolds cohort Alfie Wise) that meets weekly at 8:00 p.m. in a local church’s basement. (The impatient divorced women’s group meets promptly in the same place at 9:00.)

In between a disastrous first post-marital date with a desperate single mother (Mary Kay Place), Phil has already encountered through Mickey and Marva their mutual friend Marilyn (Jill Clayburgh), an overcaffeinated nursery school teacher – working tirelessly and sleeplessly on her master’s – with whom the push-and-pull of her romantically shy neuroses and his well-meaning aimlessness is ultimately confused further by the abrupt reappearance one early evening of Jessica sitting serenely under the sun-setting glow of their apartment’s backview window in a top-revealing blouse. (The three hours she spent awkwardly talking to Marilyn while Phil had randomly decided to take the long walk home that afternoon eventually necessitated taking off her winter coat in the well-heated apartment.) The seriocomic, dramatically funny, and romantically askew stoppings-and-startings cycle over-and-again through ever-complex emotional terrain as the commercial lights of the season continue to shine coldly but ever hopefully in the soft glowing background.

A showcase individually for its trio of stars, rooted in the expectations of the actors’ established screen personas while subtly, slightly playing against them, perhaps the greatest departure is the mentioned mustacheless Reynolds’ effectively off-Burt underconfidence as Phil; precisely contemporary to his supremely suave superstar turns in Gator (1976), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and Hooper (1978). More in line with his ambitious and self-directed turn in The End (1978), Starting Over definitively displayed Reynolds’ deft facility with both era-resonant emotional realism and equally realistic, character-based comedy, a rich, overlooked vein the highly-skilled actor continued to explore in David Steinberg’s Paternity (1981), Norman Jewison’s Best Friends (1982), opposite Goldie Hawn, and Blake Edwards’ underrated remake of François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women (1983).

But it’s Phil’s complicated relationships with the highly individualistic women in this life that registers so strongly throughout Starting Over, Candice Bergen’s seemingly left-field turn as ex-wife Jessica breaking through the glacial reserve familiar to audiences from The Group (1966) and Carnal Knowledge (1971) to bizarrely unexpected extremes, and strongly anticipating her decade-later work starring in the classic sitcom Murphy Brown (1988-98; 2018), while Jill Clayburgh’s continuing master class on an An Unmarried Woman (1978) a mere year later somehow finds fresh vulnerabilities and relatable frustrations to express in her romantically self-protective if far from fragile Marilyn. 

Seeing the director of The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976) on the credits as co-producer and director may seem an odd fit until viewing/experiencing the shared melancholy, particularly of Parallax, with which Alan J. Pakula expertly balances the autumn-into-winter dreariness of Phil Potter’s lonely plight alongside the highly quotable script and dynamic character-enrichment of co-producer and writer James L. Brooks. While Starting Over may feel like viewing the first James L. Brooks movie, again anticipating the bittersweet, character-rich interpersonal and romantic situations of Terms of Endearment (1983) and Broadcast News (1987), it remains just as much an Alan J. Pakula film, with its darker 1970s elements providing compelling viewing suspense, of sorts, regarding the possible outcomes of these fitfully and hilariously confusing relationships. 

Will the 1980s be their sequel? I’ll leave it to each viewer to decide/discover for themselves, but I might add within its ultimately audience-pleasing storyline and higher-end production values, Starting Over admirably sustains an offbeat tone and consistently inventive style that essentially preempts viewing judgments of the characters and replaces it with a not displeasing question-mark over how these relational proceedings will possibly pan out. Like the holiday season rather dryly unfolding in the background, Ingmar Bergman’s lighting-cameraman Sven Nykvist, no less, providing a wry if also somehow non-ironically dull effulgence to each deliberately-paced scene, Phil, Marilyn, and Jessica may be variably reassured if not quite fully satisfied by a far-from-assured happy ending. 

On expert hand for a second audio track to Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray are mutual cinesavants Daniel Kremer and Howard S. Berger. Both delve deeply into the more complex pleasures of Pakula’s, Brooks’, et al., serioromantic comedy, Berger in particular tracing the theme of loneliness that runs through various genres in Pakula’s earlier and later work, while Kremer additionally links Starting Over to Pakula’s overlooked but title-and-more relevant Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973), finding resonance in the director’s equally overlooked See You in the Morning (1989) much later on. A point Kremer and Berger develop between them about Jill Clayburgh’s insecure Marilyn essentially being Liza Minnelli’s kooky “Pookie”, only a decade later, from Pakula’s first directorial film The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), had me personally thinking how the era’s searching, sometimes lonely, but always plucky “modern woman” came to be defined on James L.  Brooks’ succeeding television empire into the 1970s with such diverging feminist avatars as Mary Richards, Rhoda Morgenstern, and Phyllis Lindstrom. Chock-filled with rich observations and surprising connections, of which I have only mentioned a few, this is a highly engaging listen that in the best sense will send any attentive auditor’s mental wheels similarly a-spinning. 

Finally, regarding the visual quality of Kino Lorber’s new 4K remaster, I’ll take a cue from Burt Reynolds’ Phil Potter by first somewhat sheepishly admitting my own lack of technical facility with “color timing”, “mbps”, “mm”, “Gb” and the like, and take a further cue from commenters Berger and Kremer’s speculation as to how Starting Over might have looked had it been photographed by Pakula’s most frequent cinematographer of the period Gordon Willis, as opposed to Winter Light (1963)-lenser Sven Nykvist. As the audio pair point out, Willis’s contemporary work on Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), with their dark corners, empty hallways, and off-center views, appear somewhat warmer, more open, even at times glowing through Starting Over’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) – title-quoting, courtesy of director Joan Micklin Silver’s film, a similarly contemporary Modern Romance (1981); the latter itself around the corner from frequent James L. Brooks associate Albert Brooks (no relation) – and I’ll simply – or not – conclude by praising a film-to-digital transfer that visually preserves a line of nose-drool that momentarily shines off Maryland’s upper lip during a suitably awkward moment of mistaken love-confession; an amber glare of embarrassed self-recognition in Phil’s otherwise expressionless face as he looks intently at himself in a mirror, while his ex-wife pours her heart into her own latest song confessional; or the visible sole-treads of Phil’s older brother Mickey’s winter boots as he gamely climbs onto a display couch in the middle of Bloomingdale’s busiest shopping day, to calmly comfort his hyperventilating younger brother in the middle of a panic attack. No one ever said Starting Over was easy, but fortunately it all looks achingly beautiful, and comfortingly painful, on this new Blu-ray. 

Images are taken from various internet sources and do not reflect the visual quality of Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray.