flimsy

“It’s My Turn” is a movie about having it all that ultimately ends up being about nothing. Sure, people talk about what they want a lot in this movie and there are two attractive stars in the leads but it’s ponderous and shallow. The issues are there but they’re only really mentioned, given no weight before being ended in one of the most slight, flimsy endings i’ve ever seen, even for a romantic comedy.


The film stars Jill Clayburgh as Catherine, a mathematics professor considering starting a new life by taking a new job in New York. She lives in Chicago with a boyfriend (Charles Grodin) who prefers to take things casual, although it’s unclear from the outset that she wants more from him or from anyone really.


In New York for the interview and for her father’s wedding, she meets Ben (Michael Douglas), a former ball player and married man with a family, though he, too, seems to be on the outs with his wife. The two get to talking. She doesn’t know baseball but seems to be into him. He equally seems taken with her. But holding them back is their significant others as well as that the woman her father is marrying is…his mother.


The problem with the long night they spend together- which contains one of those forced scenes where he takes his shirt off to show her a shoulder injury and then all of a sudden they’re on top of each other- is that the whole thing feels contrived. What do they have in common? What passes between them? About the only resonating piece of dialogue in this drawn out courting segment is that these two people have so much unfinished business with other people that it hardly seems fair for them to move on yet.


Yet the movie keeps forcing Douglas and Clayburgh together in one scene after another, most of which in equally superfluous scenes like her going to Yankee stadium to see him play in an Old Timers Day game. We get to see Douglas sing the Star Spangled Banner and play some ball with the likes of Mantle, Maris, and Ford, but so what? It’s just an extended segment meant to detract from how uninteresting the two main characters are.


Can Catherine have the job she wants and have Ben? Will Ben leave the unhappiness of his marriage and give real love a shot? These are fine questions but nothing about “It’s My Turn” makes them compelling. Not only do the two seem lacking together but they also don’t really have the courage to work out their own lives, nor does the movie have the courage to let them.


The ending to all this is of the short shrift variety. It proves that all that was needed all along was for the two to cut bait and jump into something new but even then, Catherine’s problem seems to resolve in remarkably easy fashion and we don’t get to even see how Ben comes to the conclusion on his. Such shallow writing has no place in storytelling- even in romantic comedy. The two stars deserved better.