How to Lose Your Lover

kind of a mess

     

Which is a shame because after watching Bright Star I sought out everything with Paul Schneider I could find and I was so determined to like How to Lose Your Lover but jut couldn't manage it. For one thing, the film is a romantic comedy and therefore entrenched in that thoroughly neurotic philosophy of dating which characterizes films of this kind. Additionally, the protagonist Owen McCabe is the victim of his own neuroses insofar as it ostensibly effects his falling out with other members of his upper middle-class L.A. lifestyle. The lifestyle itself is never in much jeopardy: on a whim Owen decides to give up his home, his writing job, and his connections in L.A. to live a new life in Brighton, New Jersey which, after much vacillation, he finally achieves. It just so happens that the new life features another writing job (an imaginative biography of a prodigious college professor) and more parties (presumably among the academic elite) in which the participants waft about the room clutching wine glasses. Nary is there the threat of unemployment or poverty, except obliquely in one of Owen's drunken rants. Ultimately the danger never materializes. And so the film's preoccupation with Owen's dilemma over which woman he feels most worthy is rather dull.