The Pompatus Of Love movie review (1996)

The story follows the adventures of four friends in their mid-30s, who are having great difficulty in their relationships with women, possibly because they don't have their pompatuses screwed on straight. Mark (Jon Cryer) is a therapist, Runyon (Tim Guinee) is a writer, Josh (Adrian Pasdar) is a businessman, and Phil (Adam Oliensis) runs a hardware store. They're all single, except for Phil. During the movie they meet various women and have various relationships with them, and whenever the film is able to pause long enough to observe these relationships, it is interesting.

Unfortunately, both director Richard Schenkman and editor Dan Rosen can't leave well enough alone. This is an overdirected and overedited film, in love with the technique of short cuts in which characters finish each other's sentences. Since this is impossible in the real world, it suggests that the filmmakers consider technique--and indeed their own implied presence in the film--more important than their characters.

There are a couple of nice sequences. One involves Mark and Tasha (Kristen Wilson), who meet on a blind date, fall in love, and then fall out of love during the process of deciding where they want to live. (The movie is set in New York, and like a lot of New York films it more or less equates romance with apartment-hunting.) Once again we get quick cuts of the characters starting a line in one apartment and ending it in another, but at least the sequence has a subject.

I also enjoyed the dilemma of Runyon, the playwright, who nurses an unrequited love for a woman who now lives in Los Angeles. He flies to L.A. to meet with some TV producers, and has an intriguing encounter on the plane with a seatmate (Jennifer Tilly) who describes herself as “Geena Davis' body double.” In L.A., after endless agonizing about whether he should call his old flame, what he should say on the answering machine, etc., he climbs in through her bedroom window, finds her asleep with her significant other, wakes her, and has a conversation with her on the beach in which she explains how much of an idiot he is.

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