Best Friends

Best Friends follows Richard Babson (Burt Reynolds) and Paula McCullen (Goldie Hawn), screenwriters and lovers, as they impulsively decide to get married and subsequently spend the next several weeks traveling (and meeting) their respective in-laws, with the narrative detailing the degree to which the couple’s formerly rock-solid relationship is tested by these encounters. There’s little doubt that Best Friends fares best in its compulsively watchable opening stretch, as filmmaker Norman Jewison, working from Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin’s screenplay, delivers a low-key yet completely captivating portrait of the central characters’ day-to-day existence, with the picture benefiting quite substantially from the top-notch work of stars Reynolds and Hawn and their undeniable chemistry together (ie Richard and Paula feel like an authentic, real-life couple, rather than an idealized version of the same). It’s only as the movie progresses into its meandering midsection that one’s interest begins to flag, as this section of the proceedings suffers from a repetitiveness that’s compounded by the protagonists’ seemingly ceaseless squabbling – which ultimately does ensure that the whole thing peters out to a distressingly palpable degree. The end result is a thoroughly erratic endeavor that never quite becomes more than the sum of its parts, and it’s fairly apparent, in the final analysis, that Best Friends could’ve used a few more passes through the editing bay (ie 116 minutes is more running time than this story can easily handle).

**1/2 out of ****