Vintage typewriter photo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Best Friends is not the film audiences expected from Goldie Hawn and Burt Reynolds in 1982. Both stars were at the height of their box-office power, and a pairing of Hollywood’s favourite funny blonde and its favourite moustachioed charmer promised a breezy romantic comedy. What director Norman Jewison delivered instead was something more interesting: a tender, sometimes uncomfortable portrait of a long-term relationship tested by marriage, family, and the fear of losing a best friend. Hawn, as Paula McCullen, gives one of the most emotionally honest performances of her career, and the film has aged surprisingly well.
The story follows Richard Babson, played by Reynolds, and Paula McCullen, played by Hawn, a successful Hollywood screenwriting team who have lived and worked together for five years. They are best friends, creative partners, and lovers, and their life together works beautifully, until Richard proposes marriage. Paula, who has reservations about marriage as an institution, reluctantly agrees, and the couple set off on a honeymoon that is really a tour of their parents’ homes. First they visit Paula’s parents in snowy Buffalo, played by Jessica Tandy and Barnard Hughes, where Paula regresses into childhood anxiety and the marriage begins to fray. Then they visit Richard’s parents in Virginia, played by Audra Lindley and Keenan Wynn, where different family tensions emerge. By the time they return to Los Angeles, Richard and Paula must decide whether marriage has strengthened their friendship or threatened it.
Hawn’s Paula is the emotional centre of the film. She is funny, intelligent, and successful, but she is also anxious, vulnerable, and afraid of being trapped. In Buffalo, in her childhood bedroom, Paula unravels in a way that is both comic and genuinely distressing. She takes tranquillisers, she argues with her parents, she feels smothered by the very home she grew up in. Hawn plays these scenes without vanity, allowing Paula’s panic to feel real rather than performed. In Virginia, Paula tries to be the perfect daughter-in-law and fails in a different way, caught between politeness and honesty. Back in Los Angeles, she must confront the hardest question of all: can she be married and still be herself?
Director Norman Jewison, whose career included In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, and later Moonstruck, brings a humane, unsentimental eye to the material. The screenplay, by Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, was loosely based on their own relationship as a screenwriting couple, and Jewison respects that autobiographical edge. He does not turn Richard and Paula into symbols. He lets them be specific, flawed people, whose problems are both ordinary and profound. His direction is quiet and observant, focusing on small moments: a look across a dinner table, a silence in a car, a joke that falls flat because the person telling it is hurting. Within that restraint, Hawn’s performance shines. She does not need big speeches to convey Paula’s inner life. A change in her voice, a hesitation before answering, a laugh that stops too soon, tells the audience everything.
The pairing of Hawn and Reynolds works because they are real friends off screen, and that friendship translates into an easy, lived-in chemistry. Richard and Paula finish each other’s sentences, tease each other, and work together with the shorthand of people who have shared a life. When they argue, it hurts precisely because they know each other so well. Reynolds, often cast as a swaggering hero, plays Richard as vulnerable and insecure, a man who wants marriage to prove something that Paula is not sure needs proving. Hawn matches him with a performance that is both comic and dramatic, never letting Paula become either a shrew or a victim. She is a woman trying, imperfectly, to be honest about what she wants.
Best Friends was not a massive hit on release, and some critics found its mix of comedy and drama uneven. Over time, however, it has come to be appreciated as a film ahead of its moment. It asks questions that many romantic comedies avoid: what happens after the happy ending, when two independent people try to build a life together without losing themselves? Hawn’s answer, through Paula, is that love requires not just passion but friendship, patience, and the courage to say when something is not working. That answer feels modern even today, and it is one reason the film deserves rediscovery.
For Past Tunes readers, Best Friends offers a different side of Goldie Hawn. It is not the broad comedy of Private Benjamin or the farce of Seems Like Old Times. It is a quieter, more adult film, and Hawn rises to its demands with grace. Paula McCullen is a woman many viewers will recognise: talented, funny, loving, and afraid, all at once. Hawn plays her with the honesty that has always been her greatest strength, and in doing so, she reminds us that her best performances are not always her loudest ones.
Best Friends feels even more relevant now than it did in 1982, because it refuses the simple idea that marriage either fixes a relationship or ruins it. Richard and Paula are already happy, already creative partners, already best friends, and marriage introduces new pressures without providing new answers. Hawn’s Paula articulates a feeling many viewers recognise but rarely see on screen: the fear that a legal commitment might change the very friendship that made love work in the first place. Her anxiety in Buffalo is not played for easy laughs about difficult parents, although Jessica Tandy and Barnard Hughes are wonderfully funny. It is played as a genuine regression, a reminder that adult independence can feel fragile when we return to childhood homes. Jewison’s gentle direction allows that fragility to breathe, and Hawn rewards his trust with a performance full of small, truthful details. Paula’s story does not end with a grand declaration. It ends with a quieter understanding that love is a daily choice, not a ceremony, and that best friends, if they are lucky and honest, can survive even the institution of marriage.