David Denby

“At first, we seem to be watching a story about the way New York’s high-pressure life induces Valium addiction…. Clayburgh, hunched over in her editing room like an old man praying in an icy synagogue, looks pale, clammy, physically knocked out. Her Barbara snaps at her assistants, sucks frantically on cigarettes, and ritually pops Vals, pried loose from her bag or worked out from beneath the cellophane surrounding a cigarette box, until she achieves a glassy-eyed tranquility.

“Most of this stuff seems like a Nichols and May skit without laughs….

“…. There’s something that audiences all over the country share—not a Jungian collective unconscious but a more practical kind of knowledge a common unspoken agreement about how to act in times of love or grief or danger or whatever…. All screenwriters and directors … know … that when they put behavior onscreen that is crazy or merely stupid…, the only way to hold the audience is to make poetry or tragedy out of the craziness and comedy out of the stupidity.

“Rabe and Hofsiss do neither. At first, Derek’s not calling the doctor—any doctor—when Barbara is chewing the East Hampton sand seems like a cheap, gothic-novel trick, a device that gets us to the next stage of the movie, in which the two of them, locked in Barbara’s gray-walled apartment, begin to unravel. But then, as we watch these two bash each other and sink into the pits, we decide that the filmmakers point is that they are both mad as hatters. Not calling a doctor now makes a kind of sense, but Barbara and Derek, as dramatic characters, have ceased to matter to us in the same way, since the insane aren’t responsible and therefore don’t have the same moral life as the sane.

“Derek, it turns out, is a screaming lunatic who loathes Barbara’s success so much he wants to do her in. Swigging vodka like Tab, he makes the pathetically enfeebled Barbara his prisoner, refusing to call for help even when she requests it, humiliating her, beating her up, finally strapping her to a chair. We seem to be watching “An Unmarried Woman Meets the Wolfman.” Clayburgh writhes around, shrieks, and wears her bruise makeup with sullen pride, vamping the camera with haughty looks. She’s a trouper all right, but who cares? She’s lent herself to a creepy, dumb spectacle. I’d rather watch explaitation-film sadism, which you can easily shrug off, than this kind of ‘serious’ sadism, produced out of the evident belief that the audience will be improved by having its nose rubbed in something painful and disgusting…. [T]he middle section of this movie is like a particularly virulent and meaningless exercise in Off Broadway psycohodrama. Like so many dramatists, directors, and actors burning with rage, Rabe and Hofsiss have nothing interesting to say. If we’ve got to be put through the wringer, let it be for a problem more weighty than lingering emotional “dependency” in successful media executives.

“Barbara, it seems, is an extremely neurotic woman whose use of Valium has prevented her illness from coming out in the past. We never do discover the source of her problems, although find out that men—invariably weak, cruel, and stupid—screw her up and that only women can save her. The movie turns into trite inspirational feminist therapy in which Miss Put-Upon finds the road to sanity and self-reliance at last by learning from two strong women. But by this time I was long past caring.”


David Denby
New York, March 15, 1982