Review of The Lonely Guy (1984) by Steve W — 02 Nov 2010

It's a tough life being lonely in New York City. After Larry loses his exceedingly loose girlfriend, Warren, a sad sack singleton, tries to teach him how to talk to the ferns in his apartment and to enliven a party with cardboard models of celebrities. In two of the funniest scenes in the film, Larry joins the hundreds of other lonely guys who stand on building rooftops and call out for the women they have lost. In the second, Larry finds himself on the Manhattan Bridge where those moles devoid of hope leap off into the river below, but not before making sure you're not using this ledge, or they'll wait their turn. These hilarious bits make a creative comic rumination on being single.

There is apparently a Charlie Kaufmanesque approach to this film's story and background. It's based on a non-fiction book The Lonely Guy's Book of Life by a New York City-based writer named Bruce Jay Friedman, but departs into a purely, obviously fictional tale of a greeting card writer who goes through a period of terrible luck with women. Then, at the pit of his despair, Larry writes a book titled A Guide for the Lonely Guy, which is rampantly successful and catapults him into an entirely different experience of life. Evidently The Lonely Guy is a satire on the social superficialities surrounding the success of its source material rather than an adaptation, which I find quite creative.

Steve Martin, who takes so well to the pathos of the role that he even turns up as Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp in one scene, seems most comfortable here in his scenes with Charles Grodin as the dryly hilarious sad sack. He does least well in sequences in which Hiller works against the material's essential gloom. Whenever the film tries to be a high-spirited, zesty head rush, it slips slightly. When it succumbs to the indispensable melancholy of Larry and his situation, it begins to fashion a concealed blade of sullen comical sense. Some of the sharpest laugh moments could even be when Martin keeps being rejected by a woman who clearly loves him, because of some twisted logic of hers that avoids any kind of affection because she could get hurt.

Here's a refreshingly broad screwball comedy, rooted in a universal kind of human agony, constructed out of disguised satire and freely seasoned with countless Zucker-style sight gags. And it's carried with typical briskness by Arthur Hiller, a solid and undistinguished director, most of whose success has been with light comedy such as this. As can be seen in the Wilder-Pryor teamings or the original In-Laws, he has a basic flair for it. And you can't go wrong with a theme song by America.