Divorce, second chances and a very funny film
Starting Over is the warm, wise comedy that followed Jill Clayburgh’s triumph in An Unmarried Woman, and it earned her a second consecutive Academy Award nomination for Best Actress — a rare achievement that confirmed her as one of the finest actresses of her generation. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, better known for serious dramas such as Klute and All the President’s Men, the film stars Burt Reynolds as Phil Potter, a man whose marriage has just ended, and Clayburgh as Marilyn Holmberg, a singer-songwriter whose own marriage has also ended, and who is trying to build a new life and a new career in Boston. Candice Bergen plays Jessica, Phil’s ex-wife, a glamorous and self-absorbed woman whose reappearance complicates everything. The film’s comedy comes from the messiness of starting over: new apartments, new jobs, new lovers, and old habits that refuse to stay in the past.
Clayburgh’s Marilyn is a different kind of divorced woman from Erica Benton, and the difference is illuminating. Where Erica was blindsided by her husband’s departure, Marilyn has chosen her independence, and she is determined to keep it. She is a talented musician, funny, self-aware, and wary of being absorbed into another man’s life. Clayburgh plays her with a lightness that never feels lightweight: Marilyn jokes about her situation, sings about it, and still, in quiet moments, lets us see how frightening it is to begin again in one’s thirties, with a career to build and a heart to protect. Her chemistry with Reynolds is delightful — he is at his most relaxed and charming here, and she matches him joke for joke while keeping Marilyn grounded in a way that stops the film from floating away on charm alone.
Alan J. Pakula and a comedy of grown-ups
Alan J. Pakula might seem an unlikely director for a romantic comedy, but his seriousness is exactly what makes Starting Over work. He treats divorce not as a joke but as a real, painful, sometimes funny fact of adult life, and he directs his cast with a patience that allows comedy to grow out of character rather than out of gags. The Boston locations — apartments, clubs, streets in winter and spring — give the film a lived-in feel, and the supporting cast, including Charles Durning, Frances Sternhagen and Austin Pendleton, provides a rich world of friends, family and therapists who offer Phil and Marilyn advice that is often well meant and occasionally disastrous.
Clayburgh’s musical performances are a particular pleasure. Marilyn is a singer-songwriter, and Clayburgh, who was not primarily known as a singer, performs her songs with a directness and an emotional honesty that suit the character perfectly. The songs are not showstoppers; they are the work of a woman trying to make sense of her life in public, and Clayburgh sings them as if she means every word. That quality — meaning every word, even in a comedy — is what earned her the Oscar nomination. The Academy does not often nominate comic performances, and it does so even less often twice in a row for the same kind of role, but Clayburgh’s Marilyn, like her Erica, was impossible to ignore: a fully realised woman, funny and serious at once, in a film that respected its audience enough to let her be both.
Marilyn Holmberg and the art of the second act
The film’s title is its theme, and Clayburgh embodies it. Marilyn is not starting over in the sense of erasing her past; she is starting over in the sense of carrying her past with her and deciding, deliberately, what to keep and what to let go. That is a harder and more interesting story than a simple romance, and Pakula and his screenwriters, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, understand it. Phil, too, must learn the same lesson: his ex-wife Jessica represents the glamour and excitement of his old life, while Marilyn represents something quieter and more durable — a partnership between equals, built on humour and mutual respect rather than on need or nostalgia.
Clayburgh and Bergen make a fascinating contrast. Bergen’s Jessica is beautiful, witty and, in her own way, sympathetic, but she is a woman who has made a career of being adored; Clayburgh’s Marilyn is a woman who has made a decision to adore herself a little less desperately and to work a little harder at being happy. The film does not punish Jessica for her glamour, nor does it reward Marilyn for her virtue in any simple way. Instead, it suggests that starting over is not about finding the right person, but about becoming the right person — or at least a person you can live with. Clayburgh plays that journey with a grace that makes the film’s final, hopeful scenes feel earned rather than sentimental.
Revisiting it today
Starting Over is sometimes overshadowed by An Unmarried Woman, and that is understandable: the earlier film was a cultural event, while this one is, by design, a gentler, more conventional romantic comedy. But it deserves to be remembered in its own right, and Clayburgh’s performance is the reason. She shows, in back-to-back years, that she could play two divorced women who are entirely different people — one blindsided, one self-determined — and make both of them unforgettable. That range, that refusal to repeat herself, is the mark of a major actress.
For Past Tunes readers, Starting Over is also a pleasure in its own right: funny, humane, beautifully acted, and full of the small, true observations about adult life that made 1970s American cinema so special. Watch it for Reynolds at his best, for Bergen’s sparkling comedy, and above all for Clayburgh, singing, joking and thinking her way towards a new life — and reminding us that starting over, however hard, can also be a kind of freedom.