In 1979’s Old Boyfriends, Talia Shire plays Dianne Cruise.

A sociology professor (or so she claims at one point), Dianne is struggling with an unhappy marriage and trying to recover from a recent breakdown.  After deliberately crashing her car, she leaves her husband and goes on a trip across the country.  She sets out to track down three ex-boyfriends.

Jeff Turrin (Richard Jordan) was her college boyfriend, the one who asked her to marry him three times.  Jeff is now working as a director.  When we first see him, he’s shooting a commercial for a political campaign in which Sam the Fisherman (Gerrit Graham) complains that the current governor of Colorado is a “long-hair” who gets in the way of small businessmen like himself.  Dianne shows up on the set.  Sam hits on her.  Interestingly, it takes Jeff a while before he recognizes her.  (Jeff comments that Dianne used to have longer hair but still, it seems like Jeff should be able to recognize someone to whom he proposed marriage three times.)

After having an affair with Jeff, who is in the process of getting a divorce, Dianne tracks down Eric Katz (John Belushi), the aspiring musician who humiliated her in middle school by telling everyone that she was “easy.”  Eric owns a formal wear store and he still performs with his band. (Belushi sings the Hell out of Jailhouse Rock at one point.)  He mostly performs at proms.  As he explains it to Dianne, most of his customers are teenagers looking for prom outfits so it only makes sense that he should perform for them as well as dress them.

Dianne’s third old boyfriend is Louis Van Til but, when Dianne arrives at his home, she is told that Louis died in Vietnam.  Under the watchful eye of his mother (Bethel Leslie) and his psychiatrist (John Houseman), she starts an obviously doomed relationship with Louis’s sensitive younger brother, Wayne (Keith Carradine).

While Dianne travels around the country, Jeff continues to look for her.  He even hires a private detective named Art Kopple (Buck Henry).

Old Boyfriends is a film that I had been meaning to watch for a while.  (I first read about it in a biography of John Belushi.)  A lot of talent went into making the film.  The script is by Paul and Leonard Schrader.  Director Joan Tewkesbury wrote the script for Robert Altman’s Nashville and indeed, there is an Altmanesque feel to the loose way that the film’s story unfolds.  The cast is full of talented people.  This was John Belushi’s first film after Animal House and Talia Shire’s first after Rocky.  With all that talent, you would think that the end result would be more interesting than it actually is.  The story is intriguing.  The cast is impressive.  But Old Boyfriends falls flat.

Why doesn’t the film work?  A lot of it is due to Tewkesbury’s direction.  She struggles with the film’s frequent shifts in tone and she always seems to be keeping a certain distance from the characters.  Talia Shire is in nearly every scene but the film seems to be determined to just observe her as opposed to actually allowing the viewer to get into her head.  Shire herself never seem to be particularly comfortable with the role and, as a result, none of her visits with her old boyfriends carry much of an emotional impact.  (Unfortunately, they don’t carry much of an intellectual impact either.)  Jordan, Belushi, and Carradine all give good performances but the film itself doesn’t seem to be sure what it wants to say about any of them.

It’s a disappointing film.  It’s not awful but, while watching it, it’s hard not to think about how much better it could have been.  One gets the feeling that Robert Altman, with his eye for quirky detail and his skill with improvisation, could have gotten something worthwhile out of the material.  As it is, Old Boyfriends is an intriguing idea that doesn’t quite work.