Addicted to Love (1997)

Simply Perfect

Powerful

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The worst thing about this movie is that the leads, played by Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick, are obsessive stalkers. He wants his lover back, but instead of taking a normal approach, he decides to set up elaborate spying equipment to watch her every move. His creepiness is matched only by Ryan's character, who conveniently shows up with listening equipment that adds sound to the visuals.We are supposed to buy into the idea that because they were hurt by someone, we should cheer them on as they deliberately ruin someone's career, business, relationship, and reputation. And of course invade his privacy and even break his bones. It's not funny, and the characters just come across as pathetic losers who can't deal with life. I kept wanting to tell them to get over it, for heaven's sake. It is possible to get audiences to cheer for the antagonists in a story, but this one is not told well enough or acted well enough to show us redeeming qualities that would cause us to root for them.There is no chemistry between the two lead characters. A relationship between them is just not believable. Despite that, these two nutbars end up with each other and will hopefully leave normal people alone.Broderick is even more vapid than usual. In a way he is well-suited to this role of a guy with no real emotions. Ryan has a few good moments but mostly seems mis-cast in her role. She is not believable as a tough, motorcycle-riding, bitter person bent on revenge, and she doesn't have the acting chops to pull off the moments in which we are meant to see the hurt surfacing in her.I'm still annoyed, days after watching this, that I wasted my time on it.

"Addicted to Love" is one of those films which probably owe their existence to someone in the movie industry noticing a catchy title, thinking it too good to waste on a mere song and then concocting a plot to fit it. "Pretty Woman" and "Sweet Home Alabama" are other examples which come to mind. Sam, a young astronomer, is devastated when his girlfriend Linda leaves him for another man. This is not an unusual situation, but Sam's reaction is perhaps an unusual one. He gives up his job and moves to New York where he sets up house in an abandoned building opposite the flat where Linda is now living with her new lover, a French chef named Anton. His plan is to keep them under constant observation and wait until they split up. Shortly afterwards, however, another person moves into the old building with a rather similar purpose in mind. She is Maggie, Anton's former fiancée until he dumped her for Linda. The difference between them is that Maggie has no intention of winning Anton back; she merely wants to get revenge on him and will do anything to ruin his life. (Or, as Robert Palmer might have put it,"Might as well face it, you're addicted to hate".) The two of them join forces to try and separate the couple but (as anyone familiar with the conventions of romantic comedy will have anticipated) start falling for each other.The film has some similarities with another from the late nineties about a man and a woman who join forces to seek revenge on their respective enemies, the British-made "The Revengers' Comedies", based on a stage play by Alan Ayckbourne. The difference is that "The Revengers' Comedies" was made as a full-on black comedy whereas "Addicted to Love" isn't sure what it wants to be. The basic idea is too screwed-up and creepy to work as a standard rom-com, but the overall tone is too light- hearted and insufficiently cynical for a black comedy. Part of the problem is the casting of Meg Ryan as Maggie. In 1997 Ryan was America's reigning official Girl Next Door, the sweet and wholesome heroine of several romantic comedies such as "Sleepless in Seattle" and "IQ". Even pretending to have an orgasm in a crowded restaurant, as she did in "When Harry Met Sally", did not shake her reputation, at least as far as her screen persona was concerned, of being something of a goody two shoes. Maggie really needed to be portrayed as a, vindictive, half- crazed avenger, the way Helena Bonham-Carter played Karen Knightly in "The Revengers' Comedies", but Meg's innocent niceness kept on breaking through at the most inappropriate moments. Matthew Broderick, too, seemed just a bit too much "Mr. Nice Guy" for a film like this. Kevin Thomas, the film critic of the Los Angeles Times, said that "It is exceedingly difficult to find what's funny in the calculated, obsessive, relentless destruction of Anton, especially when he proves to be the most likable and mature of all four of these people". I wouldn't agree that Anton is likable; in Tchéky Karyo's performance he comes across as arrogant, self-centred and narcissistic. (In other words, your typical average Frenchman as seen by Hollywood. Isn't there a French Anti- Defamation League to counter this sort of stereotyping?) I would, however, agree with Thomas that the revenge exacted upon Anton seems disproportionate to his offences. His main offence, after all, was to dump Maggie, and by the end of the film I was starting to think that he had done so not because he is a selfish bastard but because he had realised just how difficult she would be to live with. The ending seemed wrong as well. A final reunion between Sam and a repentant, chastened Linda might have seemed a bit sentimental, but at least there would have been some psychological and emotional logic to it. The ending we actually have, in which Sam (essentially a gentle soul, if a bit obsessive) ends up with Maggie (borderline fruitcake) makes no sense at all. Linda also seems to be punished beyond her deserts in that after she splits up with Anton she appears to be reunited with Sam only for him to leave her just as cruelly as she once left him. Kelly Preston, however, fades out of the film towards the end, so we never see what emotional effect this has on Linda. (I realised while watching this film that this was the first time I had ever seen Preston act, apart from her brief appearance in "Amazon Women on the Moon". Although she appears to have a fairly long filmography, I had previously only thought of her as Mrs. John Travolta). There are occasional amusing scenes, such as the one where Sam and Maggie release a horde of cockroaches in Anton's restaurant, or the one where Maggie's unworldly old grandmother relates what she believes is the plot of a soap opera she has heard on the radio, whereas what in fact she has been listening to is a massive argument between Linda and Anton, whose apartment has been bugged by her granddaughter. Overall, however, "Addicted to Love" just doesn't work, largely because the actors and director Griffin Dunne cannot decide whether to play it as a romantic comedy or as a black comedy. Might as well face it, I'm not addicted to this film. 4/10

I apologize if this is more about Meg Ryan than the movie but I just saw this flick for the first time tonight despite meaning to check it out for years frankly. I just expected more from Meg Ryan -- more from her career to be honest.She plays her standard semi-bimbo, semi-slick and yet semi-alluring chick with little substance and not much thought it seems for how her dialogue progresses -- DOA and the Presidio some to mind. Her career is chock full of meaningful characters that defined themselves with any number of strong emotional traits. Even her small supporting role in Top Gun was incredibly well done, despite the arguably contrived and cheesy nature of the film (you have to admit -- cheese doesn't get better). She was electric in that movie -- Harry Met Sally of course is another. You felt her true emotion. I'm a hetero male so it takes a lot of soul-searching to write something bad about Meg. LOL. I just think she's a little one dimensional in a lot of her films and Addicted to Love is one of them. I have no idea what her character is truly thinking in most scenes and what her motivation is. I think that a lot of her troubles are poor script choices. But no one is forcing her.I would skip it or wait for cable.

Astromer Matthew Broderick sets out to spy on his ex-girlfriend and her new lover; when the man's jilted fiancée comes into the picture, the two conspire to bust up the budding romance. Amiable, rascally, but ultimately predictable comedy is more about transitory love than love addictions. Sunny Meg Ryan gets to work with a little more shading and edge than usual, and she works well with Broderick; but the second-half of the movie scatters around trying to come up with an ending. The finale is cute, like the rest, but some of the wind has already gone out of the picture's sails. Director Griffin Dunne stages a few beautiful comedic scenes (as with the restaurant critic), but Broderick's 'friendship' with the new man in his girl's life is just silly, and the whole conceit of Broderick and Ryan setting up shop in an abandoned building right across the street from the loving couple is amusingly ridiculous. Still, there are finely wrought, surprisingly telling moments in the movie, such as the two leads sneaking over and going through the things in the love-nest, or Kelly Preston telling her Frenchman that she would sell pencils on the street with him if she had to. It's better than it had to be. *** from ****