Addicted to Love movie review (1997)

Huh? I'm thinking. They can see the stars through that telescope at high noon? I should have taken the clue right there. Then I wouldn't have been distracted a little later, when Preston announces she wants to leave their small town and spend some time in New York City, and as her commuter plane taxis to take off, Broderick races beside it down the runway in his pickup truck, waving goodbye. I think that's against FAA regulations.

So look. I'm not being fair to the movie. It's obviously a romantic fantasy, and only a curmudgeon would nitpick. What bothered me more was that the characters are supposed to be intelligent, and yet they have the maturity of gnats. It is always a problem in a love story when the rival seems more interesting than the hero, and that's what happens here.

But let's back up. Broderick plays Sam, the astronomer, who follows his lifelong love Linda (Preston) to the big city, where she has gone because she finds small-town life stagnating. Sam tracks her down by canvassing residential hotels until he finds the right one (don't try this yourself unless you have lots of time). Then he discovers that Linda is dating a French chef named Anton (Tcheky Karyo). In fact, she's moving in with him.

Sam sneaks into an empty building across the way and, using his astronomer's knowledge of lenses, builds a refracting gadget that projects an image of their apartment onto a wall in his (the technical term for his device is "camera obscura''). Later he bugs their place, so he can relax on his sofa and watch a moving picture of their private life, with sound. Using his scientist's training, he graphs their progress (there is even a chart showing her daily smile quotient) to predict when they will break up.

During this process, a mystery figure on a motorcycle turns up. It is an old rule in movie comedies that whenever a motorcyclist's head and face are completely obscured by a helmet, that motorcyclist is inevitably revealed to be a woman. True again this time: It's Maggie (Meg Ryan), who is the jilted lover of the French chef. Since Maggie and Sam have their losses in common, they team up to try to sabotage the two happy lovers across the way.

Among their tricks: They pull a pickpocket scheme to get lipstick on his collar. They bribe kids to use squirt guns to douse him with perfume. These clues are supposed to make Linda jealous. By this point in the film, I was squirming: At what intelligence level is the story pitched? Sam eventually inveigles himself into the kitchen of Anton's restaurant, as a dishwasher, so that he can masochistically observe his rival at close quarters. This leads to a conversation between the two men in which Anton seems so manifestly wiser and more grown up that I was reminded of a generalization I once heard: "European films are about grownups, and American films are about adolescents.'' Not true in all cases, of course, but it's dramatically true here that Anton has an adult's understanding of the world, and the Sam character thinks he's living in a sitcom.