Starting Over wants so badly to be the male counterpart to 1978's rousing An Unmarried Woman, and it almost succeeds. All the adults on display are complicated, nearing 40, desperate for love, and as unsure about the future as they were when they were teenagers. This time, however, Jill Clayburgh is not the newly divorced leading character; she's the love interest and Burt Reynolds is the divorcée. Starting Over has the majority of the ingredients to make An Unmarried Woman 2: An Unmarried Man, but it's missing two important aspects: Paul Mazursky, and a character as fundamentally compelling as Erica Benton.
Phil Potter (Reynolds) has been a good husband for years. He's never ceased to be faithful, he's always contributed to the relationship, and he's brought home the bacon day in and day out. But one day, his wife, Jessica (Candice Bergen), announces that she desires a divorce — it's time she cut the restraints of marriage and pursue a career as a professional singer. But in truth, she has begun an affair with Phil's boss and craves new romance.
Jessica is human garbage, but Phil is lost without her. He hasn't gone on a date for years, and he isn't ready to tackle life as a single man. But after just a few crappy dates, he finds himself falling for Marilyn (Clayburgh), a teacher that his brother set him up with. Marilyn is self-deprecating and attractive in a non-threatening sort of way — the second we see her, we can only hope that Phil will marry her in a quaint romantic comedy fashion. Yet he finds himself still drawn to Jessica, something that doesn't sit well with Marilyn, who has burgeoning commitment issues.
Starting Over is pleasant, but it doesn't have the affecting aura that An Unmarried Woman had. I'm one that despises the idea of basing another film's accomplishments off of another, but Starting Over has so many similar aspects that it's nearly impossible not to.
The film begins with a divorce, and that's one of the biggest mistakes it makes. In An Unmarried Woman there was a period in which Erica Benton was happily married, a sympathetic witness to her friends marital issues — when her husband announced his infidelities, it came as an unrelenting shock to us and the leading heroine. But because there is no time to process or understand the marriage between Phil and Jessica, all we know is that she must be a bitch and he must be a saint. In later scenes, she serenades him in an over-the-top fashion to parallel her flighty singing career, telling us that she's crazy and he's stable.
Starting Over struggles so much because we don't get to know the characters well enough to really care about them. Phil is such a thinly sketched character that it's hard to even understand why women are really charmed by him; he's mild-mannered and devoid of personality. He's a nice guy, but is that really enough? Bergen takes on the Michael Murphy role and isn't given nearly enough to work with. Murphy's crocodile tear shedding husband to Clayburgh's Erica was a product of marital boredom; we couldn't hate him, but we also couldn't understand why he'd abandon someone has wonderful as his wife. Bergen's Jessica is such a caricature that all we want to do is boo and hiss at her; but we can never see things from her point of view.
The lone bright spot in Starting Over is Clayburgh, who is alive with spunk, disarmingly funny. But when the love interest is more fascinating than the main character, you know you have a problem. It's even worse, though, when that love interest plays Erica Benton in An Unmarried Woman. And after watching Starting Over, I found myself simply wanting to watch An Unmarried Woman again. Sue me.
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