Three sisters with quite different personalities and lives reunite when Babe, the youngest, has just shot her husband. Oldest sister Lenny takes care of their grandfather and is turning into an old maid. Meg, who aspires to make it in moxia.cc Hollywood as a singer and actress, has had a wild, man-filled life. Their reunion is joyful but also stirs up much tension
Another hammer blow hits hard, Diane Keaton (1946-2025) has left us - and somehow, the world feels less rhythmically odd, less nervously human, less alive with the possibility of contradiction. She was the one who made hesitation glamorous, who turned confusion into wit, who wore vulnerability like a perfectly cut suit. If Hollywood ever had a saint that melds weirdness and chicness, she was it.
It is a peculiar pleasure in ruminating an actor’s career not as a chronology of hits but as a private mixtape of moods. The selected foursome, a B-side miscellany compared to her more well-known and successful works, traces the contours of a performer refusing repetition. Keaton is often remembered for her comic cadence and the asymmetrical little-girl-with-big-hat persona, but these films remind you that she was always a shape-shifter - a woman who could tilt into danger, cradle spinsterhood like an honest chore, do physical comedy with a calculator, and find courage to embrace her mortality.
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR is a dizzying report from the edge, a cold, moral fable dressed as a night out in 1970s New York. Keaton’s Theresa Dunn is a teacher for the deaf by day - a fact the film uses cleverly, not as a gimmick, but as metaphor: she is expert at reading gestures and patient enough to teach deaf kids, and yet she moves into public life seeking noise, risk, sex, and a kind of self-definition that a classroom doesn’t supply. The classroom scenes matter more than you remember: the soft, meticulous way Theresa signs, watches faces, and tends children is set against her bar-room self like two different languages the same body speaks. Those early sequences anchor the character and make the late-night experiments that follow feel less like exhibitionism and more like a frantic attempt at escape. The bars, the drugs, the casual relationships - the film stages them as experiments in identity rather than as mere titillation. Keaton’s achievement is to make Theresa’s appetites ambiguous and therefore human; you feel her intellect under the bravado, and you feel the emptiness, the anguish below the intellect.
One of the film's most defining traits - and most divisive ones - is its editing: that feverish, almost panicky rhythm that keeps cutting between Theresa’s fractured identities. We’re thrown from fluorescent classrooms to smoke-choked clubs, from the intimacy of confession to the chaos of her own impulses - often within seconds, which feels like Theresa’s nervous system: overstimulated, compulsive, desperate for sensation and terrified of stillness. What’s especially striking is how this technique builds unease rather than excitement. Many disco-era films cut rapidly to energize; here, it disorients, as if it has a moral vertigo.
Keaton, for her part, uses this jittery rhythm as fuel. Her performance becomes syncopated - she times her glances, gestures, and hesitations to the film’s unstable pacing, a pause after being touched a certain way, a flinch at a remark that sounds like judgment, the way she tucks the scar on her back away from sight without ever turning the camera into a confessional. In quieter moments - like the scene where she tells her lover she doesn’t believe in love - the editing slows, and we suddenly see the stillness she’s been avoiding. Then the tempo quickens again, slicing her back into pieces. It’s as if the movie itself can’t look at her for too long without blinking. Ultimately, that frantic editing becomes prophetic: Theresa’s life collapses in a final act that’s as visually fragmented as her psyche. The cuts come faster, more violently, until the last moments dissolve into stroboscopic chaos, a deathbed where montage becomes a moral reckoning. It is a tip-top performance that could give her Oscar-conquering turn in Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL (1977) a run for its money.
Gere, in his first significant role, embodies the reckless magnetism that Theresa can’t resist. As Tony, he’s pure kinetic seduction: a streetwise narcissist whose charm reeks of danger, moving like an exclamation mark in Theresa’s sentence - beautiful, shallow, predatory and violent. Weld, earning an Oscar nomination as Theresa’s sister Katherine, gives a sly, congenial yet unbalanced performance. She’s all glamour without peace, a tacit enabler of Theresa’s unglued mentation. Weld injects a schizoid neurosis into their scenes together: two women negotiating the blurred line between sexual freedom and self-destruction. Her breezy superficiality becomes a tragic compass for Theresa.
Atherton, as the nice-guy suitor James, plays the counterpoint to Gere’s volatility. He’s buttoned-up, sweetly bland, crystallizes one of the film’s themes: the paralysis of goodness in a culture addicted to danger. Lastly, there is Berenger’s brief but brilliant appearance, just in a few minutes, he captures something most actors spend entire careers trying to: the horror of masculine insecurity turned violent, a final, twitching embodiment of all the danger and erotic despair that had been lurking in Theresa’s nightlife odyssey.
As per director Brooks' knack for tackling uncomfortable issues, LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR follows Theresa toward danger and refuses tidy moralizing - and Keaton makes you complicit in that watching. The ending, shocking and terrible, is not cheap shock so much as the inevitable collapse of a long pattern of choices (influenced by the era's signs of times: homophobia, sexism and fragile macho ego). The final sequences land because the film takes the time to show how Theresa's diurnal and nocturnal routines are not parallel lines but intersecting highways. She is both victim and architect of her own lonely geography, and that duality is what the performance lingers on.
Aussie Beresford's CRIMES OF THE HEART is a tonal left turn (who has a consistently copacetic track record of toiling away in the American South): a Southern gothic comedy set in Hazelhurst, Copiah Country, Mississippi, adapted from Beth Henley’s play, whose mood is a delicious wobble between stand-up sorrow and small-town absurdity.
The plot hinges on a scandalized, messy act: Babe (Spacek), the youngest sister, shoots her abusive husband and might fight against a pending conviction, and the family dynamics - guilt, escape, amusement, irresponsibility, resentment, shared history of a mother’s suicide - tumble into a communal reckoning. All three sisters are a bit crazy: Lenny is easily triggered to hysteria for being an inveterate wallflower, Meg (Lange) has an unspecified nervous breakdown for her life stuck in a cul-de-sac, as for Babe, she is both homicidal and suicidal, not to mention having no visible qualms of jumping the bone of an underaged African-American boy!!!
The theatrical origin of the piece gives some scenes a stagey architecture, but it also gives the actors room to let pain and comedy coexist. As Lenny, Keaton s buttoned-up, plain, stifled by duty. She channels spinsterish repression into something heartbreakingly human, all nervous smiles and trembling dignity. Her rendition is so inward it feels like she’s folding herself into smaller and smaller spaces to keep from shattering, yet every twitch of her face betrays the ache of unmet life. And when she finally has had it, her hysteria and liberated anger are incredible to watch.
Lange’s Meg, the failed singer returning home, radiates effortless sensuality and self-absorption (her romantic partner-in-crime is Shepard, so there is rizz to spare). She is magnetic, delivering lines with lazy charm and undercurrents of regret, steadily balancing vanity and deep guilt. Spacek is mesmerizing in portraying lunatic innocence. Her Babe, childlike and unpredictable, a walking open wound, could easily have tipped into caricature, but Spacek makes her strength and sorrow feel cosmic, her eccentricity a form of truth-telling. And guess which actress is the lucky one to cop an Oscar nomination?
Supporting players Harper (as the nosy cousin Chick) and Shepard (as the local heartthrob Doc) provide texture and grounding. Harper plays small-minded piety and self-righteousness with such delectable mannerism that you can half-smell the starch on her collar, while Shepard’s weathered warmth humanizes the nostalgia of small-town Mississippi.
The movie’s key scenes are domestic - the sisters’ late-night conversations about past memories and current state of things, the fragile hilarity when they laugh in grief (that collapse - sudden and facetious - is exactly the film’s beating heart), the belated birthday lake in the end - because the film lives in the horizontal seams of family life and an inalienable sisterly bond, no judgment, no resentment, but an oceanic understanding of each other, warts and all, that is the most precious takeaway of CRIMES OF THE HEART.
One year later, mellowing into her 40s, Keaton headlines BABY BOOM, from the then husband and wife team of Shyer and Meyers, a sitcom-ready fantasy of a certain Reagan-era America, whose premise conforms to Hollywood's role-reversal comedies of the early-mid-1980s. But it is as funny as it is revealing about how gender and ambition being negotiated in the public imagination of its time.
Keaton plays J.C. Wiatt, a high-powered Manhattan management consultant whose life runs with the precision of a Swiss watch. She’s at the top of her game - all tailored suits and early-morning conference calls - until a distant cousin dies and, in a bureaucratic twist of fate, leaves her a baby girl. The arrival of little Elizabeth detonates J.C.’s carefully arranged world like a small, cooing grenade. From there, the film unfolds as a kind of domestic bildungsroman, chronicling J.C.’s uneasy transformation from urban alpha to reluctant nurturer and, finally, to self-reinvented entrepreneur.
Shyer’s direction (and Nancy Meyers’ sharp, sugarcoated script) takes a familiar premise - the career woman (a yuppie dink no less) forced to rediscover her humanity through motherhood - and refines it with an intelligence rare in Hollywood comedies of the time. The film’s watchability comes not from slapstick or sentimentality, but from its quiet attention to logistics: the disarray of business meetings, the childcare procedures, the impossible juggling act of modern womanhood. BABY BOOM is a screwball comedy reimagined as an economic case study, its heroine balancing love, labor, and lactose with the poise of someone learning to breathe again.
The film’s first half, set in the Big Apple, glitters with brisk efficiency. Shyer and cinematographer Fraker shoot the corporate scenes like a GQ spread - steel-gray light, geometric compositions, the sensuality of productivity. The camera loves the streamlined office space, her power lunches, her immaculate control. Then, once she relocates to Vermont - a move both literal and metaphysical - the film softens into a kind of pastoral comedy, full of flannel and snow and failed plumbing. What could have been a cliché becomes, thanks to Keaton’s instinct for the absurd, an oddly poetic depiction of rebirth, whose élan saps a tad for all its cosy familiarity and the gnawing fact the the infant has aged a day through the intervening months.
Keaton’s performance is a wonder of shifting registers. Few actors could make panic look so elegant. She has an almost musical sense of timing, turning moments of frustration into balletic comedy - a sort of high-strung grace that evokes both Katharine Hepburn and early Woody Allen. Her eventual decision to reject both the suffocating corporate hierarchy and the fantasy of total domesticity feels radical — even now. J.C. doesn’t choose between work and motherhood; she rewrites the rules to make both possible on her own terms.
Shepard, as the veterinarian who becomes her romantic counterpart, plays a gentle foil - solid, understated, as if carved from the same Vermont wood that frames J.C.’s new digs. His chemistry with Keaton is warm but never overdetermined; the romance feels like a reward, not a rescue. Supporting players like Ramis (as J.C.’s slick, commitment-averse boyfriend) and Wanamaker (her condescending boss) give the city scenes a sharp satirical edge. They embody the masculine architectures that J.C. must learn to navigate and, ultimately, outsmart.
The film’s humor thrives on contrast: the absurd sight of a power broker haggling over diapers, the dissonance between corporate speech and domestic chaos. And yet, as J.C. reinvents herself by marketing her homemade apple purée as “Country Baby,” Baby Boom deftly satirizes the same capitalist mechanisms it seems to celebrate. The film ends not in renunciation but in re-appropriation - success reimagined through intuition, not aggression.
Shyer and Meyers would later refine this formula in FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991) and SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (2003), BABY BOOM remains their purest distillation of that distinctly late-20th-century anxiety: how to stay human in an economy that rewards abstraction. The soundtrack by Bill Conti bubbles with optimism, while the snowy landscapes lend an almost Capra-esque glow to J.C.’s reinvention. Yet unlike Capra, Shyer and Meyers understand that happy endings require compromise - and that in modern America, self-fulfillment often arrives wearing the mask of entrepreneurship.
Finally, MARVIN'S ROOM is the dusk-turned-dawn of the quartet. It’s a domestic tragedy masked as an implosive opera: a story of decay, duty, and unexpected hilarity, wrapped in that late-‘90s indie sheen that made even pain look photogenic. Zaks is a theatre man with a taste for confined spaces and human folly, the film is adapted from McPherson’s 1990 play, and you can feel its stage bones creaking amiably beneath the cinematic flesh. But what flesh it is: Keaton, Streep, DiCaprio, De Niro (in a thankless small part as Dr. Wally), Verdon and a terminally ill patriarch who’s mostly just a moan behind a closed door - Marvin himself (Cronyn), the title’s wraithlike landlord of familial bond.
The story, such as it is, unfolds like a dysfunctional family’s group therapy session accidentally televised. Keaton plays Bessie, a Florida spinster whose life has been consumed by caretaking, for both her ailing aunt Ruth (Verdon) and her bedridden father Marvin (echoing Lenny in CRIMES OF THE HEART). When she’s diagnosed with leukemia, Bessie summons her estranged sister Lee (Streep), who arrives from Ohio dragging two sons and a lifetime of dissension, for the bone-marrow matches that might save Bessie's life. One of those sons is Hank (DiCaprio before embarking on the fateful Titanic), all twitchy rebellion and molten frustration. The other is Charlie (Scardino), McPherson’s alter ago, the kind of forgotten ‘90s kid actor who gives every line a faint scent of homework.
There’s something both absurd and deeply human in how the film refuses to pick sides. Bessie, saintly in her selflessness, is also slightly delusional; Lee, selfish and scatterbrained, is refreshingly alive. Their reunion is not cathartic but comic - two women circling the same wound, unsure who deserves the bandage. Zaks doesn’t push the melodrama; he lets it simmer, like soup left too long on a back burner. The result is a film that’s sentimental without ever quite surrendering to sentimentality. You find yourself smiling in the midst of tears, not because it’s manipulative, but because life just works that way - equal parts disaster and deadpan.
Keaton is at her most weathered and humane here; she makes sacrifice look like something stubborn and ordinary rather than glorious, also a pluperfect auntie who opens up to an arson-committing Hank without judgment and pretension.
Streep, meanwhile, does a strange and wonderful thing - she plays Lee as someone slightly bad at acting, a woman trying to perform normalcy after years of neglecting the role. Her voice slides between hard Midwest pragmatism and near-cartoonish pitch, but it works: she’s a survivor of herself. When Keaton and Streep share the screen, it’s like watching two virtuosos dueling on the same violin - notes colliding, harmonies emerging almost by accident. Again, guess which sister is rewarded with an Oscar nomination?
Apart from the heavyweights, Verdon’s presence is also what makes the film breathe and her dancer’s intuition aids in finding her an immaculate comedic timing (her involuntary jolt when being embraced, or the scene where she asks for the orange, they are pitch-perfect little moments of wonder). Her half-senile Ruth is illuminated by an almost impish brightness inside her and becomes the film's secret philosopher. While Streep and Keaton wrestle with guilt and reconciliation, Ruth embodies the peace they’re both chasing. She lives in the in-between: half here, half gone, radiating acceptance without any fuss.
MARVIN'S ROOM walks the line between the mundane and the metaphysical. It’s about illness, yes, but also about inheritance—the emotional kind, passed through sighs and sarcasm. The script, true to its theatrical roots, loves its words a little too much, yet the actors make them feel lived-in. Every exchange carries a faint comic aftertaste, as if the film knows that mortality can also turn into a looking glass in which everyone, briefly, recognizes themselves. It’s about finding warmth in the middle of decay - about realizing that love, at its most inconvenient, might just be the only thing keeping the lights on in Marvin’s household.
Adieu, Ms. Diane Keaton - and thank you, forever. The screen will sorely miss your luminous eccentricity and bountiful inspiration. But the world is also gentler for having known you - and somewhere, I like to think you’re still laughing that unmistakable laugh, tipping your hat to us one last time.
referential entries: Richard Brooks' CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958, 8.2/10); Woody Allen's LOVE AND DEATH (1975, 7.0/10), MANHATTAN (1979, 7.0/10); Bruce Beresford's TENDER MERCIES (1983, 8.2/10), DRIVING MS. DAISY (1989, 8.1/10); Mike Nichols' POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990, 7.1/10); Nancy Meyers' IT'S COMPLICATED (2009, 6.0/10).
编剧笔下的三个姐妹都很有特征，大姐的操劳二姐的伪洒脱小妹的强忍执着。通过2对1的交流谈心直接的暴露了自我的窘境间接的揭发第三人的实况，慢慢三个人的生活状况浮出水面。三个人的感情化险为夷。然而他们的遭遇都不是忠于他们自己内心的。而是那个高高挂起的画像约束着他们的思维和行动，让他们不敢做自己想做的，那么在意别人的评论或者被道德绑架！我们一定要自主自由独断，女性们要有我们的光彩去绽放！
鼓楼西剧场的全男版芳心之罪，普利策奖的剧本毋庸置疑，没想到演绎得也非常好。四位主演一度让我忘了他们的性别，觉得他们就是契克，就是莱妮，就是贝比，就是麦格。
父亲的不辞而别，母亲的残忍自杀，外公的专制强势，三姐妹的成长过程中有着太多不足为外人道的艰辛。大姐因为不能生育而压抑自己的爱情；二姐用放荡不羁的行为掩饰自己内心的痛苦和脆弱，当发现自己真正爱上一个人，她的第一反应是逃避，这让我想起电影《下妻物语》里的那句“相对于忍受痛苦，抓住幸福需要更大的勇气”；小妹一直是聪明漂亮的乖乖女，然而她的内心，最为反叛和暴戾。在大姐30岁生日这天，小妹因枪击丈夫被捕，离家多年的二姐回家，所有的冲突集中爆发，三姐妹各自沉重的秘密，逐渐被揭开。每个人都是一地鸡毛和一盆狗血，她们互相指责，却又互相取暖，但是“一个破碎的我，又如何拯救一个破碎的你”。
这其实是一个很悲伤的故事，却被演绎得很搞笑。即使最后小妹杀了表姐，三姐妹在尸体旁边给大姐过生日边商量如何碎尸，这样诡异又残忍的情景依然让我无法讨厌她们，有的只是同情。因为我明白，如果换成是我，也未必能比她们做得更好。
四位演员都演得很好，演小妹的李松柏少女感十足，要不是没有胸，我一度怀疑他就是女孩。演表姐的王涵浑身都是戏，将契克的泼辣世俗表现得入木三分，而且绿裙子配红色渔网袜这么辣眼睛的搭配，在他身上居然很和谐……我最喜欢他。散场后想找王涵合影，没想到他特别高冷，直接就去后台卸妆了，我们只好去剧场外守株待兔。朋友问身旁的大姐，说您也是找王涵合影的吗，结果大姐说，我是他妈妈…
鼓楼西选剧的品味一向不令人失望，特别开心邂逅了这么好的一部戏。
性、婚姻、偷情、捉奸、枪杀、暴力、成名、放纵、叛逆、吹牛……这些字眼都会吸引你的眼球吧; 理想、爱情、亲情、友情……所有美好都会充斥在你的渴望里; 反思、反省、面对、真诚、欺骗……所有纠结都会伴随在你的成长中。
终究每个人都躲不过审叛，无非迟早，无非尚未来临。
2017年5 月 18日，本人在帝都观看此剧，观后大赞，特此推荐！
《芳心之罪》，讲述了三姐妹和她们大表姐的故事，短短两小时内描述一派凡人众生相，请恕此评不剧透。
你我皆凡人，你我皆世俗，你我皆八卦，你我皆虚荣，你我皆攀比，你我皆窥探，你我皆有情，你我皆真诚，你我皆率性，你我皆贪婪，你我皆欲望，你我皆避责，你我皆孤独，你我皆流浪，你我皆受伤，你我皆有爱，你我皆惘人，你我皆成长。
她们四个女人的不同角色，代表了凡人众生之红尘，表面上看挺肤浅，细思内涵极深刻。
全男版就是四个男演员来演绎女人故事，都很赞，各有千秋。
演大姐莱妮的男角有些出戏，还是像男人，表情到了，手脚没到，举止与人物有些跳脱不够入戏，台词功夫还是很赞！
编剧，在衔接处理方面还可以有些优化。 灯光设计，略显单薄，节奏明快，似乎就像夏天的衣服。
总体评价四颗半星，良心推荐。
如果想近距离欣赏精彩，尽量靠前坐。
PS，为支持也为他们将来更精彩，本人出场后买了三盒最贵的 八仙猫®。
Another hammer blow hits hard, Diane Keaton (1946-2025) has left us - and somehow, the world feels less rhythmically odd, less nervously human, less alive with the possibility of contradiction. She was the one who made hesitation glamorous, who turned confusion into wit, who wore vulnerability like a perfectly cut suit. If Hollywood ever had a saint that melds weirdness and chicness, she was it.
It is a peculiar pleasure in ruminating an actor’s career not as a chronology of hits but as a private mixtape of moods. The selected foursome, a B-side miscellany compared to her more well-known and successful works, traces the contours of a performer refusing repetition. Keaton is often remembered for her comic cadence and the asymmetrical little-girl-with-big-hat persona, but these films remind you that she was always a shape-shifter - a woman who could tilt into danger, cradle spinsterhood like an honest chore, do physical comedy with a calculator, and find courage to embrace her mortality.
LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR is a dizzying report from the edge, a cold, moral fable dressed as a night out in 1970s New York. Keaton’s Theresa Dunn is a teacher for the deaf by day - a fact the film uses cleverly, not as a gimmick, but as metaphor: she is expert at reading gestures and patient enough to teach deaf kids, and yet she moves into public life seeking noise, risk, sex, and a kind of self-definition that a classroom doesn’t supply. The classroom scenes matter more than you remember: the soft, meticulous way Theresa signs, watches faces, and tends children is set against her bar-room self like two different languages the same body speaks. Those early sequences anchor the character and make the late-night experiments that follow feel less like exhibitionism and more like a frantic attempt at escape. The bars, the drugs, the casual relationships - the film stages them as experiments in identity rather than as mere titillation. Keaton’s achievement is to make Theresa’s appetites ambiguous and therefore human; you feel her intellect under the bravado, and you feel the emptiness, the anguish below the intellect.
One of the film's most defining traits - and most divisive ones - is its editing: that feverish, almost panicky rhythm that keeps cutting between Theresa’s fractured identities. We’re thrown from fluorescent classrooms to smoke-choked clubs, from the intimacy of confession to the chaos of her own impulses - often within seconds, which feels like Theresa’s nervous system: overstimulated, compulsive, desperate for sensation and terrified of stillness. What’s especially striking is how this technique builds unease rather than excitement. Many disco-era films cut rapidly to energize; here, it disorients, as if it has a moral vertigo.
Keaton, for her part, uses this jittery rhythm as fuel. Her performance becomes syncopated - she times her glances, gestures, and hesitations to the film’s unstable pacing, a pause after being touched a certain way, a flinch at a remark that sounds like judgment, the way she tucks the scar on her back away from sight without ever turning the camera into a confessional. In quieter moments - like the scene where she tells her lover she doesn’t believe in love - the editing slows, and we suddenly see the stillness she’s been avoiding. Then the tempo quickens again, slicing her back into pieces. It’s as if the movie itself can’t look at her for too long without blinking. Ultimately, that frantic editing becomes prophetic: Theresa’s life collapses in a final act that’s as visually fragmented as her psyche. The cuts come faster, more violently, until the last moments dissolve into stroboscopic chaos, a deathbed where montage becomes a moral reckoning. It is a tip-top performance that could give her Oscar-conquering turn in Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL (1977) a run for its money.
Gere, in his first significant role, embodies the reckless magnetism that Theresa can’t resist. As Tony, he’s pure kinetic seduction: a streetwise narcissist whose charm reeks of danger, moving like an exclamation mark in Theresa’s sentence - beautiful, shallow, predatory and violent. Weld, earning an Oscar nomination as Theresa’s sister Katherine, gives a sly, congenial yet unbalanced performance. She’s all glamour without peace, a tacit enabler of Theresa’s unglued mentation. Weld injects a schizoid neurosis into their scenes together: two women negotiating the blurred line between sexual freedom and self-destruction. Her breezy superficiality becomes a tragic compass for Theresa.
Atherton, as the nice-guy suitor James, plays the counterpoint to Gere’s volatility. He’s buttoned-up, sweetly bland, crystallizes one of the film’s themes: the paralysis of goodness in a culture addicted to danger. Lastly, there is Berenger’s brief but brilliant appearance, just in a few minutes, he captures something most actors spend entire careers trying to: the horror of masculine insecurity turned violent, a final, twitching embodiment of all the danger and erotic despair that had been lurking in Theresa’s nightlife odyssey.
As per director Brooks' knack for tackling uncomfortable issues, LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR follows Theresa toward danger and refuses tidy moralizing - and Keaton makes you complicit in that watching. The ending, shocking and terrible, is not cheap shock so much as the inevitable collapse of a long pattern of choices (influenced by the era's signs of times: homophobia, sexism and fragile macho ego). The final sequences land because the film takes the time to show how Theresa's diurnal and nocturnal routines are not parallel lines but intersecting highways. She is both victim and architect of her own lonely geography, and that duality is what the performance lingers on.
Aussie Beresford's CRIMES OF THE HEART is a tonal left turn (who has a consistently copacetic track record of toiling away in the American South): a Southern gothic comedy set in Hazelhurst, Copiah Country, Mississippi, adapted from Beth Henley’s play, whose mood is a delicious wobble between stand-up sorrow and small-town absurdity.
The plot hinges on a scandalized, messy act: Babe (Spacek), the youngest sister, shoots her abusive husband and might fight against a pending conviction, and the family dynamics - guilt, escape, amusement, irresponsibility, resentment, shared history of a mother’s suicide - tumble into a communal reckoning. All three sisters are a bit crazy: Lenny is easily triggered to hysteria for being an inveterate wallflower, Meg (Lange) has an unspecified nervous breakdown for her life stuck in a cul-de-sac, as for Babe, she is both homicidal and suicidal, not to mention having no visible qualms of jumping the bone of an underaged African-American boy!!!
The theatrical origin of the piece gives some scenes a stagey architecture, but it also gives the actors room to let pain and comedy coexist. As Lenny, Keaton s buttoned-up, plain, stifled by duty. She channels spinsterish repression into something heartbreakingly human, all nervous smiles and trembling dignity. Her rendition is so inward it feels like she’s folding herself into smaller and smaller spaces to keep from shattering, yet every twitch of her face betrays the ache of unmet life. And when she finally has had it, her hysteria and liberated anger are incredible to watch.
Lange’s Meg, the failed singer returning home, radiates effortless sensuality and self-absorption (her romantic partner-in-crime is Shepard, so there is rizz to spare). She is magnetic, delivering lines with lazy charm and undercurrents of regret, steadily balancing vanity and deep guilt. Spacek is mesmerizing in portraying lunatic innocence. Her Babe, childlike and unpredictable, a walking open wound, could easily have tipped into caricature, but Spacek makes her strength and sorrow feel cosmic, her eccentricity a form of truth-telling. And guess which actress is the lucky one to cop an Oscar nomination?
Supporting players Harper (as the nosy cousin Chick) and Shepard (as the local heartthrob Doc) provide texture and grounding. Harper plays small-minded piety and self-righteousness with such delectable mannerism that you can half-smell the starch on her collar, while Shepard’s weathered warmth humanizes the nostalgia of small-town Mississippi.
The movie’s key scenes are domestic - the sisters’ late-night conversations about past memories and current state of things, the fragile hilarity when they laugh in grief (that collapse - sudden and facetious - is exactly the film’s beating heart), the belated birthday lake in the end - because the film lives in the horizontal seams of family life and an inalienable sisterly bond, no judgment, no resentment, but an oceanic understanding of each other, warts and all, that is the most precious takeaway of CRIMES OF THE HEART.
One year later, mellowing into her 40s, Keaton headlines BABY BOOM, from the then husband and wife team of Shyer and Meyers, a sitcom-ready fantasy of a certain Reagan-era America, whose premise conforms to Hollywood's role-reversal comedies of the early-mid-1980s. But it is as funny as it is revealing about how gender and ambition being negotiated in the public imagination of its time.
Keaton plays J.C. Wiatt, a high-powered Manhattan management consultant whose life runs with the precision of a Swiss watch. She’s at the top of her game - all tailored suits and early-morning conference calls - until a distant cousin dies and, in a bureaucratic twist of fate, leaves her a baby girl. The arrival of little Elizabeth detonates J.C.’s carefully arranged world like a small, cooing grenade. From there, the film unfolds as a kind of domestic bildungsroman, chronicling J.C.’s uneasy transformation from urban alpha to reluctant nurturer and, finally, to self-reinvented entrepreneur.
Shyer’s direction (and Nancy Meyers’ sharp, sugarcoated script) takes a familiar premise - the career woman (a yuppie dink no less) forced to rediscover her humanity through motherhood - and refines it with an intelligence rare in Hollywood comedies of the time. The film’s watchability comes not from slapstick or sentimentality, but from its quiet attention to logistics: the disarray of business meetings, the childcare procedures, the impossible juggling act of modern womanhood. BABY BOOM is a screwball comedy reimagined as an economic case study, its heroine balancing love, labor, and lactose with the poise of someone learning to breathe again.
The film’s first half, set in the Big Apple, glitters with brisk efficiency. Shyer and cinematographer Fraker shoot the corporate scenes like a GQ spread - steel-gray light, geometric compositions, the sensuality of productivity. The camera loves the streamlined office space, her power lunches, her immaculate control. Then, once she relocates to Vermont - a move both literal and metaphysical - the film softens into a kind of pastoral comedy, full of flannel and snow and failed plumbing. What could have been a cliché becomes, thanks to Keaton’s instinct for the absurd, an oddly poetic depiction of rebirth, whose élan saps a tad for all its cosy familiarity and the gnawing fact the the infant has aged a day through the intervening months.
Keaton’s performance is a wonder of shifting registers. Few actors could make panic look so elegant. She has an almost musical sense of timing, turning moments of frustration into balletic comedy - a sort of high-strung grace that evokes both Katharine Hepburn and early Woody Allen. Her eventual decision to reject both the suffocating corporate hierarchy and the fantasy of total domesticity feels radical — even now. J.C. doesn’t choose between work and motherhood; she rewrites the rules to make both possible on her own terms.
Shepard, as the veterinarian who becomes her romantic counterpart, plays a gentle foil - solid, understated, as if carved from the same Vermont wood that frames J.C.’s new digs. His chemistry with Keaton is warm but never overdetermined; the romance feels like a reward, not a rescue. Supporting players like Ramis (as J.C.’s slick, commitment-averse boyfriend) and Wanamaker (her condescending boss) give the city scenes a sharp satirical edge. They embody the masculine architectures that J.C. must learn to navigate and, ultimately, outsmart.
The film’s humor thrives on contrast: the absurd sight of a power broker haggling over diapers, the dissonance between corporate speech and domestic chaos. And yet, as J.C. reinvents herself by marketing her homemade apple purée as “Country Baby,” Baby Boom deftly satirizes the same capitalist mechanisms it seems to celebrate. The film ends not in renunciation but in re-appropriation - success reimagined through intuition, not aggression.
Shyer and Meyers would later refine this formula in FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991) and SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (2003), BABY BOOM remains their purest distillation of that distinctly late-20th-century anxiety: how to stay human in an economy that rewards abstraction. The soundtrack by Bill Conti bubbles with optimism, while the snowy landscapes lend an almost Capra-esque glow to J.C.’s reinvention. Yet unlike Capra, Shyer and Meyers understand that happy endings require compromise - and that in modern America, self-fulfillment often arrives wearing the mask of entrepreneurship.
Finally, MARVIN'S ROOM is the dusk-turned-dawn of the quartet. It’s a domestic tragedy masked as an implosive opera: a story of decay, duty, and unexpected hilarity, wrapped in that late-‘90s indie sheen that made even pain look photogenic. Zaks is a theatre man with a taste for confined spaces and human folly, the film is adapted from McPherson’s 1990 play, and you can feel its stage bones creaking amiably beneath the cinematic flesh. But what flesh it is: Keaton, Streep, DiCaprio, De Niro (in a thankless small part as Dr. Wally), Verdon and a terminally ill patriarch who’s mostly just a moan behind a closed door - Marvin himself (Cronyn), the title’s wraithlike landlord of familial bond.
The story, such as it is, unfolds like a dysfunctional family’s group therapy session accidentally televised. Keaton plays Bessie, a Florida spinster whose life has been consumed by caretaking, for both her ailing aunt Ruth (Verdon) and her bedridden father Marvin (echoing Lenny in CRIMES OF THE HEART). When she’s diagnosed with leukemia, Bessie summons her estranged sister Lee (Streep), who arrives from Ohio dragging two sons and a lifetime of dissension, for the bone-marrow matches that might save Bessie's life. One of those sons is Hank (DiCaprio before embarking on the fateful Titanic), all twitchy rebellion and molten frustration. The other is Charlie (Scardino), McPherson’s alter ago, the kind of forgotten ‘90s kid actor who gives every line a faint scent of homework.
There’s something both absurd and deeply human in how the film refuses to pick sides. Bessie, saintly in her selflessness, is also slightly delusional; Lee, selfish and scatterbrained, is refreshingly alive. Their reunion is not cathartic but comic - two women circling the same wound, unsure who deserves the bandage. Zaks doesn’t push the melodrama; he lets it simmer, like soup left too long on a back burner. The result is a film that’s sentimental without ever quite surrendering to sentimentality. You find yourself smiling in the midst of tears, not because it’s manipulative, but because life just works that way - equal parts disaster and deadpan.
Keaton is at her most weathered and humane here; she makes sacrifice look like something stubborn and ordinary rather than glorious, also a pluperfect auntie who opens up to an arson-committing Hank without judgment and pretension.
Streep, meanwhile, does a strange and wonderful thing - she plays Lee as someone slightly bad at acting, a woman trying to perform normalcy after years of neglecting the role. Her voice slides between hard Midwest pragmatism and near-cartoonish pitch, but it works: she’s a survivor of herself. When Keaton and Streep share the screen, it’s like watching two virtuosos dueling on the same violin - notes colliding, harmonies emerging almost by accident. Again, guess which sister is rewarded with an Oscar nomination?
Apart from the heavyweights, Verdon’s presence is also what makes the film breathe and her dancer’s intuition aids in finding her an immaculate comedic timing (her involuntary jolt when being embraced, or the scene where she asks for the orange, they are pitch-perfect little moments of wonder). Her half-senile Ruth is illuminated by an almost impish brightness inside her and becomes the film's secret philosopher. While Streep and Keaton wrestle with guilt and reconciliation, Ruth embodies the peace they’re both chasing. She lives in the in-between: half here, half gone, radiating acceptance without any fuss.
MARVIN'S ROOM walks the line between the mundane and the metaphysical. It’s about illness, yes, but also about inheritance—the emotional kind, passed through sighs and sarcasm. The script, true to its theatrical roots, loves its words a little too much, yet the actors make them feel lived-in. Every exchange carries a faint comic aftertaste, as if the film knows that mortality can also turn into a looking glass in which everyone, briefly, recognizes themselves. It’s about finding warmth in the middle of decay - about realizing that love, at its most inconvenient, might just be the only thing keeping the lights on in Marvin’s household.
Adieu, Ms. Diane Keaton - and thank you, forever. The screen will sorely miss your luminous eccentricity and bountiful inspiration. But the world is also gentler for having known you - and somewhere, I like to think you’re still laughing that unmistakable laugh, tipping your hat to us one last time.
referential entries: Richard Brooks' CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958, 8.2/10); Woody Allen's LOVE AND DEATH (1975, 7.0/10), MANHATTAN (1979, 7.0/10); Bruce Beresford's TENDER MERCIES (1983, 8.2/10), DRIVING MS. DAISY (1989, 8.1/10); Mike Nichols' POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990, 7.1/10); Nancy Meyers' IT'S COMPLICATED (2009, 6.0/10).
Title: Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Year: 1977
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Director/Screenwriter: Richard Brooks
based on the novel by Judith Rossner
Composer: Artie Kane
Cinematographer: William A. Fraker
Editor: George Grenville
Cast:
Diane Keaton
Richard Gere
Tuesday Weld
William Atherton
Richard Kiley
Alan Feinstein
Tom Berenger
Priscilla Pointer
Laurie Prange
Joel Fabiani
Julius Harris
LeVar Burton
Richard Bright
Brian Dennehy
Rutanya Alda
Carole Mallory
Rating: 7.8/10
Title: Crimes of the Heart
Year: 1986
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Bruce Beresford
Screenwriter: Beth Henley
based on her own play
Composer: Georges Delerue
Cinematographer: Dante Spinotti
Editor: Anne Goursaud
Cast:
Diane Keaton
Jessica Lange
Sissy Spacek
Tess Harper
Sam Shepard
David Carpenter
Hurd Hatfield
Beeson Carroll
Gregory Eugene Travis
Rating: 7.3/10
Title: Baby Boom
Year: 1987
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Charles Shyer
Screenwriters: Nancy Meyers, Charles Shyer
Composer: Bill Conti
Cinematographer: William A. Fraker
Editor: Lynzee Klingman
Cast:
Diane Keaton
Kristina Kennedy
Michelle Kennedy
Sam Shepard
Harold Ramis
Sam Wanamaker
James Spader
Pat Hingle
George Petrie
Britt Leach
Mary Gross
Robin Bartlett
Chris Noth
Rating: 6.6/10
Title: Marvin's Room
Year: 1996
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Jerry Zaks
Screenwriter: Scott McPherson
based on his own play
Composer: Rachel Portman
Cinematographer: Piotr Sobocinski
Editor: Jim Clark
Cast:
Meryl Streep
Leonardo DiCaprio
Diane Keaton
Robert De Niro
Hume Cronyn
Gwen Verdon
Hal Scardino
Dan Hedaya
Margo Martindale
Cynthia Nixon
Bitty Schram
Rating: 7.2/10