High Hopes

By Frank Rich

GIRL FRIENDS

Directed by Claudia Weill

Screenplay by Vicki Polon

Girl Friends is very easy to admire--from a distance. Shot on a shoestring budget with mostly unsung actors, this film was made by a young woman director working outside the studio system. Claudia Weill, co-director of Shirley Mac-Laine's documentary The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, raised the money for Girl Friends herself, then hawked the movie to distributors (eventually landing Warner Bros.). Although the film's real subject is female friendship, Weill is not a dogmatic feminist. Girl Friends tells of both men and women who suffer the pangs of young adulthood in present-day Manhattan.

So far so good. The problem with Girl Friends is the movie itself: Weill's film is not half so interesting as its intentions. There are some nice things in it--finely shaded performances, a couple of amusing scenes--but they cannot carry a movie that lacks such essentials as sharp writing, cinematic flair and a strong point of view. Could it be that Weill spent so much energy producing Girl Friends that she was all tuckered out once she began to shoot? The film feels tired.

The picture gets in trouble very early. The opening scenes, meant to establish the title characters, are much too sketchy. Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) comes across as little more than a standard Upper West Side ugly duckling, like TV's Brenda Morgenstern: she is a sassy, overweight Jewish woman who is luckless with men and still struggling in her career as a photographer. Her roommate Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner) is an even more familiar type--a svelte, high-strung Wasp with ambitions to write poetry. When Anne leaves the nest to get married, her relationship with Susan starts to deteriorate. Since we never understood why they were close friends in the first place, it is impossible to care about the seemingly arbitrary squabbles that follow.

The film doesn't do much better at dealing with the heroines as individuals. Anne's ambiguous struggles with her square husband (Bob Balaban), her career and motherhood seem to be yet another extension of The Group. Susan's predictable progress toward personal and professional self-confidence offers few surprises to anyone who has ever met Georgy Girl or Sheila Levine. The only fresh scenes in the film are those that describe Susan's touching, unrequited affair with a married middle-aged rabbi (Eli Wallach) whom she meets while photographing weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Beyond its narrative difficulties, Vicki Polon's screenplay still leaves a lot to be desired. Polon is no wit, and her attempts to portray such overly familiar New Yorkers as SoHo art dealers, pushy cab drivers and Greenwich Village hipsters fall flat. Hot issues like lesbianism and abortion are dragged into the action for cheap effects rather than serious consideration. There is not a single memorable or startling line in the movie.

The direction is often as fuzzy as the screenplay, but Weill does get the best out of her cast. Mayron, who played the hitchhiker in Harry and Tonto, resists the trap of sentimentalizing Susan. In her best moments--all with men, intriguingly enough--we see the heroine's intelligence and are spared any self-pity. The other actors follow the star's lead. Wallach, Bal aban and Christopher Guest (as Susan's one dogged suitor) all keep potentially cloying characters in check.

Even so, there may be a few too many likable people onscreen. Everyone in Girl Friends is so self-effacing that the movie never works up any convincing dramatic tension or provocative ideas. If that was Weill's original plan, she has gone to a lot of unnecessary trouble. You don't have to raise your own money to make a mushy movie; you can just go to Hollywood and auction yourself off.

--Frank Rich

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