Addicted to Love

I need to teach myself to not expect plausibility in movies. Because hey, I’m the guy who says that nothing is implausible if it works, because anything goes when you’re trying to get the job done. But I was having trouble with “Addicted to Love” right from the opening scene. Astronomers are watching a supernova through their telescope. Suddenly it’s noon and the head astronomer (Matthew Broderick) lowers the telescope until he can focus on his girlfriend (Kelly Preston), frolicking in a meadow with her students.

What? I think. They can see stars through that telescope at high noon? I should’ve taken the hint right there. Then I wouldn’t have been thrown off a little later, when Kelly announces she wants to leave our small town and spend some time in New York City, and as her commuter plane taxis down the runway for takeoff, Broderick races beside it in his pickup truck, waving goodbye. I believe that’s against FAA regulations.

So look: I’m not being fair to this movie. It’s obviously a romantic fantasy, and only a total grump would pick nits on this one. The bigger problem for me was that these characters are supposed to be smart, but they have the maturity of gnats which is always an issue in love stories; it’s bad news when your rival seems more interesting than your hero.

But let’s back up. Broderick plays Sam, an astronomer who follows his lifelong love Linda (Preston) to the big city after she moves there because she thinks small-town life is suffocating her spirit or something like that. He finds her by going from residential hotel to residential hotel until he gets lucky (don’t try this at home unless you’ve got lots of time). Then he discovers well, first of all he discovers that Linda is dating a French chef named Anton (Tcheky Karyo). In fact, she’s moving in with him.

So Sam sneaks into an empty building across the street and, using his scientist’s knowledge of lenses, rigs up a refracting device that projects an image of their apartment onto a wall in his (the technical term for this is “camera obscura’’). Later he bugs their place, so he can sit on his couch and watch a home movie of their private life. With sound. And at one point he graphs her progress (there’s even a chart showing her daily smile quotient) to predict when they’re going to break up.

During all this, a mystery figure on a motorcycle shows up. It is an ancient rule in movie comedies that whenever you see a motorcyclist whose head and face are completely obscured by the helmet, you can bet your popcorn that it’s going to turn out to be a woman. True again this time: It’s Maggie (Meg Ryan), who is the jilted lover of the French chef. Since she and Sam have both been dumped by these people, they team up to try to ruin our lovebirds across the street.

In one trick, they use a pickpocket scheme to get lipstick on his collar. They pay off some kids to douse him with perfume using squirt guns. These are supposed to be clues that make Linda jealous. By this point in the movie I was squirming: What level of intelligence is the story pitched at? Eventually Sam inveigles himself into the kitchen of Anton’s restaurant, as a dishwasher, so he can masochistically watch his rival from close range.

This leads to a conversation between the two men in which Anton appears so manifestly wiser and more grown up than Sam that I was reminded of a generalization I once heard: “European films are about adults, and American films are about adolescents.” Not true in all cases, but dramatically true here that Anton has an adult’s view of life and Sam thinks he’s living in a sitcom.

How much more interesting it might have been if they’d forgotten about the reflecting lenses and the practical jokes and tried to devise a comedy out of personalities and dialogue! That might even have resulted in an unexpected outcome. Instead we get a plot so predictable that there cannot be a person in the theater who doesn’t know Broderick and Ryan are going to fall for each other. Not just going to required to, by the Hollywood Code of Cliches.

The actors are very engaging. The production design (including reflecting lenses) is artful and clever. The direction, by Griffin Dunne, is smooth and self-assured for a first timer. There are nice supporting roles for Maureen Stapleton as a wise grandmother, (Nesbitt Blaisdell) as Linda’s father Mr. Green who assigns himself to read her Dear John letters. There’s indeed much good stuff here but all at the service of an imbecilic screenplay. It’s like smart people got together to make this movie and didn’t think the audience would be smart enough to keep up.

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