Sidney Lumet out of his depth

“Just Tell Me What You Want” tries the difficult task of trying to turn unpleasant people into viable candidates for a romantic comedy. It’s been done before but never by Sidney Lumet, who seems to be operating far out of his comfort zone here and it shows. The film isn’t good, not because the characters aren’t good people, but because they aren’t believable enough in any capacity.


It stars Alan King and Ali MacGraw as Max Herschel and Bones Burton. He’s a financial broker who has his hand in just about everything while she is an award winning television producer who also happens to be his mistress. He pretty much has a stable of women, most of which seem to have been groomed by him from a young age, but Bones is his prize and he’d give her just about anything.


Except what she really wants- which is to ditch television and go into film production. Instead Max wants to get rid of the film studio he just purchased which is the start of a rift between him and Bones, one that pushes her into the arms of a playwright (Peter Weller) who she marries out of spite for Max.


This all turns into one big battle of the sexes, one where her life, career, and all the cool stuff she was getting from Max winds up getting upended and in the most embarrassing of scenes in the film, she attacks him, first with her hand bag, then jumping on top of him, inside a Bergdorf Goodman’s before needing to be pulled off.


It’s a movie of broad cartoons but at the very least King seems to realize what’s required of his character. This is such a vulgar megalomaniac- a raging, narcissistic, controlling, vindictive asshole who needs everything to be the biggest and most expensive and whose only goal in life is to have people do exactly as he wants. His angry outbursts have comic verve and that he’s so much of a selfish prick that he’s even driving his wife nuts is a nice touch.


MacGraw never works though. Nearly always with a scowl on her face, she’s never funny, when she starts roughing it with Weller we never buy that this is her, and when she starts standing up for herself it doesn’t work because the movie never gives us a better understanding of who she is other than someone who got where she is by being on her knees too much. The Weller character is bland, the King character has few real charms, the romance is just hollow.


The one person with an ounce of integrity here is Myrna Loy, in her last film role, as a secretary who doesn’t put up with Max’s bull. Otherwise the film just comes off as a long slog, too synthetic and not nearly funny enough to tap into the broad appeal its seemingly going for.