Director: Danny DeVito
Cast: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, G.D. Spradlin
Have I Seen it Before: Several times. It’s one of my parents’ favorite films. Before you get to deeply concerned with how grim things were while growing up in the Boyle compound, dear old dad is a divorce lawyer…
Although he’s only ben doing divorce law for the last fifteen years or so…
Anyway.
I was so lukewarm on The Roses (2025) this year, that it absolutely stuck in my mind to come back around to the original. I never got the sense that Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman ever really hated each other.
Did I Like It: One never gets the sense that Douglas and Turner don’t hate each other, even when they’re supposed to be in love and can’t keep their hands off of each other. The Jewel of the Nile (1985) might have been rougher on them than we were led to believe.
DeVito is a tragically, perhaps even criminally undervalued maestro of the dark comedy, and this might be his greatest foray into the genre. A lesser director would have been content to let the chemistry of Douglas and Turner carry the film through, and probably would have gotten away with it, too. An above average director would have been able to take the material as it was presented and probably would have made an enjoyable enough movie. DeVito sees how much everyone enjoyed Romancing the Stone (1984) and thought it would be great if we got to see the two of them murder each other.
There’s a great amount of style on display here, as well. Far more than a relatively novice director might have been expected to use. The dark comedy is augmented by DeVito’s sense that this isn’t just a reframing of Douglas and Turner’s screen image, but an opera at its core. There’s moments where the production value is that of a stage production, with the backgrounds of Washington DC seeming less like locations and more like set design. I don’t think most people pick up on that when they first see the film. I certainly didn’t.