Gene Wilder and Christine Lahti try very hard to breathe life into this disappionting dramedy-romance that is marred by a lackluster and sometimes miscalculated screenplay by Norman Steinberg and David Frankel. Wilder is Duffy Bergman, a liberal political cartoonist patterned after Gary
Trudeau. When he first meets Lahti's Meg Lloyd at a book-signing, she is working as a caterer's assistant. Duffy approaches the counter to register a complaint about the coffee, only to end up complimenting the coffee-maker once he gets a gander at Meg. Within a few minutes of screen time, Duffy
and Meg are married (the second time around for each), yet they remain ambitious career-oriented people. Despite Meg's blossoming career as a chef at a swanky restaurant, the newlyweds decide it's time to start a family. (Naturally, their respective biological clocks are ticking loudly.) That
decision is followed by a tedious, overly clinical, sometimes vulgar, and almost totally unfunny 25-minute stretch of plot dealing with Duffy and Meg's efforts to alter his sperm count and to do whatever else is necessary for them to have a baby. Both Meg and Duffy try hard, but she is unable to
conceive. Three years pass, and Meg, now at the top of her profession, is growing weary of Duffy's increasingly obnoxious persistence about trying to have a child. When she finally says no, they separate, and Duffy has a fling with Daphne (Mary Stuart Masterson), a foul-mouthed sorority leader who
ends up pregnant with Duffy's baby. After Daphne miscarries, Duffy decides to leave her to try and patch things up with Meg. It requires real effort, but Duffy succeeds, and he and Meg (who by now owns her own plush restaurant) live happily ever after, complete with an adopted baby.
Directed unevenly by Leonard Nimoy, FUNNY ABOUT LOVE never quite seems to know where it's headed or what--precisely--it is trying to say. Everything about this film is tentative, and as a result, the viewer is made to feel like Jimmy Durante when he asked the musical question: "Did you ever have
the feeling that you wanted to go...but you wanted to stay...still you wanted to go?" Clearly, the filmmakers hoped to involve the audience in the plight of Duffy and Meg, whose situation has the makings of a hilarious comedy; unfortunately, Nimoy and company fail to come up with a consistent
style with which to tell their story. Should they relate this tale with unabashed sentimentality, as in 1941's Cary Grant-Irene Dunne classic PENNY SERENADE, the story of a couple who decide to adopt a child once they know they can never have one of their own? Or should they opt for a FISH CALLED
WANDA-style black comedy. (Reminiscent of the scene in that film in which a large safe, dropped from an upstairs window, sends a pair of pet dogs to their ultimate reward, FUNNY ABOUT LOVE plays for laughs an otherwise tragic scene in which a falling stove crushes Anne Jackson, who portrays
Wilder's mother.) Is FUNNY ABOUT LOVE another in the genre of cutesy baby comedies like THREE MEN AND A BABY; LOOK WHO'S TALKING; and BABY BOOM, or is it intended in part as a clinical study of the methods of improving a would-be father's sperm count?
Though all of these questions remain unanswered, Wilder, Lahti, and Masterson still manage to acquit themselves well, and Jackson, Robert Prosky, and Susan Ruttan offer adequate if uninspired support. Fred Murphy provides the film with truly impressive photography, and Miles Goodman serves up a
charmingly well-blended background score. (Sexual situations, profanity.)
