David Denby

“There's more aggression than affection in Simon's comic writing; his people are forced to disgrace or humble themselves. On their way down they bicker incessantly. Simon has created a new type of couple: Incapable of ordinary conversation, they rouse each other to frenzies of mutual hazing. In American romantic comedy, swapping wisecracks is traditionally the road to love…, but SImon has retained the Ping-Pong style of repartee for situations that are anything but romantic…

“… Jane Fonda plays a supposedly sophisticated Newsweek editor… As soon as she faces Alda, it starts--bitch, quip, and thrust … yet I don't believe for a minute that this intelligent woman who fears losing her daughter would joke this way (she might if she were losing a story assignment or even a man, but losing a daughter?). Maybe Fonda doesn't believe it either, because for the first time in her career she's tense and mannered and downright bad. The emotions come out as rigid and overdefined, jammed into place by sheer willpower. Fumbling constantly with her cigarettes, she whips around the room like Bette Davis at her most flagrantly melodramatic, cocks her arm as stiffly as a Kabuki dancer, draws in her gut, and pulls her chest up until the neck muscles nearly snap. It's the same kind of tough-vulnerable overwrought great-lady performance that Herbert Ross, who directed, bullied out of Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point. The role is doubly embarrassing because Simon has little idea of what a New York editor sounds like, and Fonda is stuck with a number of howlers, such as the boast that her current lover "has the second-best mind I've ever met since Adlai Stevenson." (Who would be the best mind she's met since Stevenson--George McGovern? David Susskind?)”

David Denby
New York, January 29, 1979