Word: lila
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...wheeze," replies Lila Fisher, maintaining her emotional equilibrium...
Their last evening together is the climax to this tragicomedy of errors. Over sumptuous dinner, Lenny tries to break the news of his decision to divorce her. When he finally makes it clear, Lila sobbingly responds in character: "Lenny... I think I have to throw up." She finally collapses into his arms, and he tries to ward off the poignancy of the moment with empty consolations: "When two people share a common tragedy..." But it defeats him; at the end of the scene, Lila cries on with the nobility of the victim, as he falls into guilty silence...
...direction is characteristically light and bouncy, a necessity given the heavy-handed theme, but she does not skim over elements of sometimes tragic seriousness. Underlying Lila and Lenny's relationship, as May develops it, is an escalating dynamic of disintegration which lends the humor and fun a keen psychological edge. Lila, for all her obtuseness, senses from the start Lenny's reserve--but he refuses to tell her anything is wrong, to bring it all out in the open, since his trust and confidence in her has been broken. She frantically tries all the harder to communicate and to please...
...Lila's departure is in one respect a relief to an audience torn between laughing at her buffoonery and crying at her deep anguish. But without her, the movie loses its humanness, and is quickly trivialized into an exchange of bon mots. Neither Lenny nor Kelly has a heart to be broken, and that is precisely the problem. Cybill Shepherd in particular lacks the range of acting emotion necessary to sustain the human relationships at anything more than a superficial level; a serious flaw in the latter part of the film is her inability to warm up to the very...
...EXTRAORDINARY EYE for comic, human detail prevents all but a few such bald moments from materializing. On one occasion, the physical possibility of holding hands comfortably while lying side by side is used to subtly underscore Lila and Lenny's uneasy relationship. To emphasize Lenny's guilt and embarrassment during the break-up scene, the camera matches Lila's cries or his frantic whispers with closeups of disapproving restaurant customers within earshot. Lenny's frigid welcome in Protestant Minnesota is highlighted by a monotonous radio voice droning the sub-zero weather report, which seems to follow him everywhere...