Word: sarandon
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BORN. To Susan Sarandon, 38, actress (Atlantic City, the upcoming Compromising Positions and TV's Mussolini and I); and Franco Amurri, 27, Italian writer: their first child, a daughter; in New York City...
EXPECTING. Susan Sarandon, 38, actress currently shooting the comedy-mystery Compromising Positions: her first child; next March, in New York City. Divorced from Actor Chris Sarandon since 1979, she declines to name the father...
...from the film's opening scenes, where Sarandon burns toast and Dreyfuss battles with his talking scale, The Buddy System leaves little to the audience's imagination. We know before Wheaton ever meets his ideal father that Dreyfuss will play Daddy Warbucks and take the kid under his wing, and that Sarandon will become his new playmate. The plot ostensibly thickens when Dreyfuss's old girlfriend--a mindless blonde who parrots '60s cliches--returns. But the audience has little doubt that everything will somehow work out when the three are seen happily planting tomatoes in the garden...
...clear problem with The Buddy System is its lack of focus. The film vascillates between being a corny romance and the pitiable story of a friendless child, and never clearly decides which plot has the most appeal. Moreover, side issues like Sarandon's silent struggle to free herself from her mother (Jean Stapleton) are either given peripheral treatment or never fully developed at all. By the time the characters move towards resolving their crises, the audience has difficulty piecing together the tangential fragments of the story...
...this, of course, could have been less offensive if the film didn't attempt to take itself quite so seriously and was more successful at drawing laughs. But from the scenes where Dreyfuss talks about his work as a novelist to the moment where Sarandon liberates herself from the maternal clutches of Stapleton, one senses that The Buddy System is not merely a sappy romance, but an unsuccessful attempt at cautiously confronting contemporary issues. The characters repeatedly resort to grandiose gestures and profound philosophical statements when simple actions would suffice. Dreyfuss doesn't need literally to cast his manuscripts...