INTRODUCTION: A ROAD TRIP TO NOWHERE
There’s a peculiar breed of film from the late 1970s that tries to blend introspection with structureless storytelling—a sort of pseudo-European moodiness filtered through American self-help culture. Old Boyfriends (1979) is one of them. Directed by Joan Tewkesbury (best known as a screenwriter for Robert Altman’s Nashville) and starring Talia Shire, Richard Jordan, John Belushi, and Keith Carradine, the film aspires to be a thoughtful psychological drama about identity, love, and memory. What it actually delivers is an awkward, shapeless odyssey of emotional detachment, populated by cardboard characters who drift through scenes like under-rehearsed stage actors.
With its disjointed pacing, lethargic energy, and a script that mistakes muttering for meaning, Old Boyfriends feels less like a film than a protracted therapy session—with none of the catharsis. What might have worked as a 25-minute short stretches out into a two-hour meander through half-drawn relationships and half-baked themes. It wants to be profound but settles for being vague. It wants to provoke thought but mostly provokes yawns.
THE PLOT: TRACKING THE PAST WHILE STALLING IN THE PRESENT
Talia Shire plays Dianne Cruise, a depressive clinical psychologist suffering a post-divorce identity crisis. She decides to take a cross-country road trip to revisit the three “old boyfriends” of her life in an effort to find clarity or reclaim some lost version of herself—or maybe just to kill time between therapy appointments. It’s never entirely clear what her motivation is, and the film seems oddly proud of that ambiguity.
Each visit unfolds as its own self-contained vignette, loosely stitched together by Dianne’s blank stares, monotone narration, and long silences that seem to exist solely to stretch the runtime. She begins with her college boyfriend Jeff (Richard Jordan), then visits high school flame Eric (John Belushi), and finally confronts Wayne (Keith Carradine), a brief but intense relationship from her younger years. Along the way, she lies, manipulates, and stumbles her way through interactions with these men—not in a daring or psychologically insightful way, but in a muddled, borderline implausible fashion.
The encounters are meant to build a cumulative portrait of a woman in crisis. Instead, they feel like a series of disconnected sketches, each ending with an emotional shrug. The narrative structure isn’t experimental or elliptical—it’s lazy and unfocused. There’s no sense of momentum, no meaningful transformation. By the end, Dianne remains just as unknowable and static as when she began.
TALIA SHIRE: LOST IN TRANSLATION
Talia Shire is a capable actress, and when given the right material (Rocky, The Godfather Part II), she can do wonders with understatement. But Old Boyfriends leaves her floundering in a role that’s underwritten and emotionally inert. As Dianne, she is supposed to be introspective and reserved, but instead comes across as somnambulant and emotionally disconnected.
There’s a fine line between internalized pain and passive vacancy, and Shire’s performance too often lands on the wrong side of that divide. Her narration—dry, hesitant, and strangely emotionless—doesn’t offer insight so much as bland commentary. Her character doesn’t grow, reveal, or process anything with conviction. She simply drifts from one ex-boyfriend to the next, offering blank smiles and occasional bitterness, with no real sense of why we should care.
Dianne may be having a psychological crisis, but she never brings the viewer along for the ride. We’re outside looking in—and even from that distance, there’s not much to see.
THE OLD BOYFRIENDS: A MIXED BAG OF UNREALIZED POTENTIAL
Richard Jordan as Jeff
Jeff is the college boyfriend, now a confident, smug filmmaker. His encounter with Dianne is framed as a power struggle: he recognizes her instantly, remembers her fondly, and is flattered (if confused) by her reappearance. She lies about being a documentarian and pretends to be doing a story on him, then seduces him and bolts.
It’s supposed to be clever, a reversal of the power dynamics from their youth. But the execution is muddled. Jordan gives a decent performance—smarmy but charismatic—but the scenes never crackle. Their interactions feel stiff and clinical, as though neither actor is convinced by the dialogue. There’s no real sense of what their past relationship meant or why we should care now.
John Belushi as Eric
Then there’s the Eric segment, easily the most baffling part of the film. Belushi plays a high school football coach, married and bumbling, still clinging to adolescent glory. The idea of casting Belushi in a dramatic role could have been interesting, but the film doesn’t know what to do with him. He’s miscast and out of place, mumbling his lines with a confusion that mirrors the audience’s own. His character is a cartoonish mess—a man-child whose scenes feel like they belong in a completely different movie.
The worst offense? The tonal inconsistency. What starts as an awkward, almost comedic reunion veers into strange, sad territory without any narrative justification. Dianne’s decision to manipulate and sleep with Eric as some sort of punishment for her own past hurts borders on disturbing, but the film treats it as quirky character exploration.
Keith Carradine as Wayne
Wayne, the third and final boyfriend, is the most interesting of the three—but only because Keith Carradine is the only actor who seems fully awake. His character is a wandering rock musician, aimless but emotionally present, a mirror of Dianne’s own lost identity. Their scenes together have the potential for genuine connection, and Carradine’s natural charisma makes the segment watchable. But even this final act suffers from a lack of clarity and purpose.
Wayne ends up disappearing as well, and with him goes the film’s last chance at finding emotional grounding. What should be a revelatory final encounter becomes just another dead end.
DIRECTION AND TONE: AIMLESS AFFECTATION
Joan Tewkesbury, stepping into the director’s chair after scripting Nashville, brings a strong visual sense to Old Boyfriends. The cinematography is often lovely—muted colors, autumnal hues, long quiet takes. But aesthetics can’t compensate for a total lack of narrative propulsion.
The tone is a mess. At times, the film wants to be a psychological character study. At others, it plays like a road movie. Then there are scenes that veer into black comedy (especially with Belushi) or soft melodrama. But the transitions between tones are clunky and unearned. The pacing is glacial, the scenes are overlong, and the emotional beats are either missed or undercut.
Tewkesbury seems unsure of whether she’s making a feminist revenge story, a dreamy reflection on memory, or a clinical exploration of trauma. In trying to do all three, she accomplishes none.
WRITING: ALL PSYCHOBABBLE, NO HEART
Written by Paul and Leonard Schrader—yes, that Leonard Schrader, brother of Paul and co-writer of several better films—the script of Old Boyfriends is strangely lifeless. It’s filled with conversations that go nowhere, therapeutic jargon that feels ripped from self-help paperbacks, and characters who speak like abstractions rather than people.
The concept itself—revisiting old boyfriends to discover the self—isn’t a bad one. In the hands of a more emotionally grounded filmmaker, it could have been profound. But here, it’s reduced to a series of “aha” moments that land with a thud. There’s no sense of real pain or revelation. Just cold analysis, usually spoken aloud in voiceover, stripping the characters of any mystery.
MUSIC: A SCORE THAT DOESN’T KNOW WHAT IT’S SCORING
The film’s score, composed by David Shire, is lush and atmospheric. But like much else in Old Boyfriends, it feels disconnected from the emotional beats of the story. The music tries to tell us how to feel, even when the scenes themselves fail to earn those emotions. It swells, it sighs, it meanders—just like the movie.
THEMES: AMBITION WITHOUT INSIGHT
Old Boyfriends wants to explore memory, regret, and the way our past relationships shape our identity. But rather than dig into these themes with specificity, it handles them with the detached coldness of a clinical trial. The film is more interested in observing behavior than understanding it.
The script flirts with ideas of revenge, projection, and emotional closure but abandons them before they can bloom. We never learn who Dianne really was in these relationships, and we certainly don’t learn who she is now. She lies, seduces, vanishes—and we’re told this is some kind of healing process?
There’s no insight. No transformation. Just repetition.
CONCLUSION: OLD BOYFRIENDS, OLDER REGRETS
Old Boyfriends is a film that confuses ambiguity for depth and silence for substance. It features a talented cast, a capable director, and a premise ripe with potential—but it squanders it all on aimless storytelling, flat performances, and a script that feels more like a graduate thesis than a screenplay.
Talia Shire, saddled with a character that never comes alive, does her best but is ultimately let down by a film that has no interest in emotional honesty. The three men, each with their own dramatic potential, are reduced to undercooked sketches. And Jan Belushi—dear God—is so miscast he might as well have been edited in from Animal House outtakes.
This is a film that desperately wants to say something about love, memory, and the passage of time. But like its protagonist, it spends too much time looking backward and not enough time finding meaning.
Final Score: 4/10 – One for Keith Carradine, one for the cinematography, one for the premise, and one for Talia Shire giving it her all. The rest is a muddled, mumbling road trip to nowhere.
