Old Boyfriends (1978)

 Old Boyfriends (1978)

Directed by Joan Tewkesbury
Written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

Dianne is an LA psychologist going through a difficult time. She is retracing her past, driving around the country in her car. She is hunting down old boyfriends, relationships that didn’t work out from years back, even back to junior high school.

The movie has a very good cast of men supporting the nuanced central performance by Talia Shire as Dianne.

What is Dianne after? Is it revenge? It seems to be in the first two reconnecting encounters. First in Colorado with Jeff, Richard Jordan, who she seduces and immediately abandons without a trace. Then in Chicago with Eric, John Belushi, her high school boyfriend. She takes Eric to the old teen parking makeout place where they were as kids and restages a scene that hurt her. This time, in control, it comes out differently.

Things begin to shift for her when she meets up with Wayne played by Keith Carradine. She goes back to the town where she lived in her early years and goes to the home of her old junior high boyfriend there. Here she meets Wayne, the younger brother of the old boyfriend who was killed some years ago in Vietnam. Wayne has been wounded by the loss of his brother who he idolized and looked up to.

Their interaction brings about a shift in Dianne and the path to the resolution of this small but appealingly personal dramatic movie.

There was a scene looking out the window in the neighborhood where she meets Wayne. Something about that shot evoked another small movie set somewhere in the USA in John Huston’s Wise Blood.
There is a tone in movies like this, to quote the great lyrics to The House I Live in by Abel Meeropol, “That’s America to me.”