Matt Patton
Divorce American Style (1967)
A couple (Dick Van Dyke, Debbie Reynolds), on the doorstep of middle-age and the ground floor of the upper-middle class, suddenly find that their once-sturdy marriage seems to be crumbling for reasons they can't quite understand. Friends and marriage counselors, most of them with the best of intentions, offer advice, but their attempts to follow it only make things worse, and before you know it, they're getting divorced.
There are some genuinely sharp moments in the script by Norman Lear (based on a story by Robert Kaufman), and plenty of funny ones, but there is also Lear's tendency to underline everything three times and then have the actors yell so he can be sure you got the point. His partner, Bud Yorkin, had the same tendencies as a director, so even some genuinely witty ideas are stretched out beyond their shelf life.
As was usual with Lear/Yorkin productions, what saves things are the cast. Van Dyke and Reynolds weren't shattering their "nice" images in this film, they were playing nice people in the sort of messy situations that nice people find themselves in out in the real world, and one of the pleasant surprises is that they convince you of the bone-deep decency of the characters they're playing. And the supporting cast is equally good; Jason Robards and Jean Simmons as a divorced couple looking to get her married off so she can live the good life on someone's money besides his, Van Johnson as a good-hearted but terminally dull car dealer that Reynolds dates after the break-up, and Joe Flynn and Emmaline Henry as the Best Friends who unintentionally contribute to the break-up. Special mention also for Shelley Berman and Dick Gautier as the divorce lawyers who couldn't really care less about their respective clients, Lee Grant as a tart-tongued call-girl, and Tim Matheson and Gary Goetzman as the couple's sons, who seem to take their parents divorce much more in stride than their mom and dad . . .
There was a lot of great talent behind the camera as well; Conrad Hall's photography is rich and subtle (I'm rather more impressed with his work on this film than his flashier lensing of In Cold Blood the same year). Edward Stephenson's sets and Bob Mackie's costumes beautifully fix the socio-economic status of the characters (prosperous but not rich, reasonably stylish but hardly cutting-edge) without any attempts to skewer them. Ferris Webster's editing helps smooth out the bumps in the director's faulty sense of timing, and Dave Grusin's score incorporates a lot of classic and jazz influences and deploys them with a reasonable amount of comic skill.
Certainly, there are elements of this film that seem dated now ( a few years later, California, like many states thereafter, adopted no-fault divorce laws that, among other things, speeded up the process of getting divorce considerably; no more waiting a year for the divorce to become final). What hasn't changed, though, are some of the things that push people to divorce, and the sense of sadness and desolation that can accompany even the most sensible breakups. That's not going to change as long as people still fall in love and get married . . .
Divorce American Style (1967)
A couple (Dick Van Dyke, Debbie Reynolds), on the doorstep of middle-age and the ground floor of the upper-middle class, suddenly find that their once-sturdy marriage seems to be crumbling for reasons they can't quite understand. Friends and marriage counselors, most of them with the best of intentions, offer advice, but their attempts to follow it only make things worse, and before you know it, they're getting divorced.
There are some genuinely sharp moments in the script by Norman Lear (based on a story by Robert Kaufman), and plenty of funny ones, but there is also Lear's tendency to underline everything three times and then have the actors yell so he can be sure you got the point. His partner, Bud Yorkin, had the same tendencies as a director, so even some genuinely witty ideas are stretched out beyond their shelf life.
As was usual with Lear/Yorkin productions, what saves things are the cast. Van Dyke and Reynolds weren't shattering their "nice" images in this film, they were playing nice people in the sort of messy situations that nice people find themselves in out in the real world, and one of the pleasant surprises is that they convince you of the bone-deep decency of the characters they're playing. And the supporting cast is equally good; Jason Robards and Jean Simmons as a divorced couple looking to get her married off so she can live the good life on someone's money besides his, Van Johnson as a good-hearted but terminally dull car dealer that Reynolds dates after the break-up, and Joe Flynn and Emmaline Henry as the Best Friends who unintentionally contribute to the break-up. Special mention also for Shelley Berman and Dick Gautier as the divorce lawyers who couldn't really care less about their respective clients, Lee Grant as a tart-tongued call-girl, and Tim Matheson and Gary Goetzman as the couple's sons, who seem to take their parents divorce much more in stride than their mom and dad . . .
There was a lot of great talent behind the camera as well; Conrad Hall's photography is rich and subtle (I'm rather more impressed with his work on this film than his flashier lensing of In Cold Blood the same year). Edward Stephenson's sets and Bob Mackie's costumes beautifully fix the socio-economic status of the characters (prosperous but not rich, reasonably stylish but hardly cutting-edge) without any attempts to skewer them. Ferris Webster's editing helps smooth out the bumps in the director's faulty sense of timing, and Dave Grusin's score incorporates a lot of classic and jazz influences and deploys them with a reasonable amount of comic skill.
Certainly, there are elements of this film that seem dated now ( a few years later, California, like many states thereafter, adopted no-fault divorce laws that, among other things, speeded up the process of getting divorce considerably; no more waiting a year for the divorce to become final). What hasn't changed, though, are some of the things that push people to divorce, and the sense of sadness and desolation that can accompany even the most sensible breakups. That's not going to change as long as people still fall in love and get married . . .