What more could they do to The Buddy System? It was cast with stars who have little (if any) box-office clout; it was directed by a stage director with one previous film to his credit (and that Neil Simon’s Only When I Laugh – or is it Neil Simon’s Only When I Laugh?); it was deemed b.o. poison and allowed to languish for more than a year, sitting on a shelf over at Twentieth Century-Fox; it was finally dumped on the market with a minimal advertising push, after lukewarm reviews in New York and L.A. It even has a title that suggests a primer on water safety. So what more could they do to this small-scale domestic romance?
I don’t know – perhaps as a final, humiliating blow, they could release it as the second feature to the fading Blame It on Rio, which is truly the most hideous film experience the year has had to offer. And that’s just what Twentieth Century-Fox did. This is kinda too bad; I’m not going to get all bent out of shape about this, but I liked The Buddy System. The plot is strictly Simonized stuff: An unsuccessful novelist/inventor (Richard Dreyfuss) moonlights as a grade school security guard, and in the course of his job he picks up a kid (Wil Wheaton) who should be at a different school. Kid drags Dreyfuss home to mom (Susan Sarandon), an anxious legal secretary long since abandoned by the boy’s father, and they, predictably, hate each other at first sight. We all know perfectly well that the two people are going to get together, that the kid is going to be brainy and precocious, and that there’s going to be a lot of funny bickering, a la The Goodbye Girl; so, if you please, point me to the nearest exit. Right?
Well, yes, those things happen. It’s all perfectly predictable. But a couple of toasters stopped me from leaving. In the first moments of the film, as we watch Dreyfuss go through his morning routine, we see a bunch of his makeshift inventions working for him. They perform a few household functions, as he goes about his duties. One of them is a toaster, which has an elaborate system of dropping the bread into slots and then automatically buttering it. The camera watches this thing start to work – okay, we get the idea already, this guy’s an inventor – and then it cuts away. A few minutes of screen time later, we watch another household rouse itself; Sarandon’s trying to get her son off to school, and doing a pretty inept job of it. Among other things, she manages to substantially screw up the simple process of toasting bread; it just won’t go.
Now, the director, whose name is Glenn Jordan, doesn’t do anything like cut from one toaster to another, or even put Sarandon’s toaster in close-up. The rhyming elements are simply there, existing as part of ordinary morning routine. If you want to see some kind of cosmic connection being made, you’re free to; if not, no sweat. The Buddy System has a few of these connections, most notably the Thanksgiving school play that frames the yearlong story, and a sequence in which Jordan does cut back and forth between the two protagonists, as they’re being brushed off by their loved ones (for Sarandon, it’s prig lawyer Edward Winter, and for Dreyfuss, it’s airhead Nancy Allen). Jordan makes the sequence work by playing the montage for a kind of horrible comedy. We know what the Others are going to say, but Sarandon and Dreyfuss remain blissfully in the dark until the final, brutal moment.
All this doesn’t make The Buddy System a great, or even good, movie. By anybody’s objective standards, it’s an ordinary film. But objective standards don’t always have a great deal to do with what a film, or any other work of art, is really up to. The currents that run underneath the surface of a movie like this do not necessarily transform the work itself, and The Buddy System may remain stranded on its dull, clichéd screenplay. But when you see, in a mediocre film, patterns that suggest that someone involved with the project really thought about what they were doing – and, in this case, I believe those people were Glenn Jordan and Susan Sarandon – it can make you feel in tune with a sort of special presence in the film. No, not some kind of elitist cinematic “code”; just a response to the humanity or wit or design.
In The Buddy System, the film’s special presence rises to the surface during a scene following a successful day for Dreyfuss; it may be the first successful day any of these people has ever had. He and Sarandon and Wheaton sit around Dreyfuss’s kitchen table, joy springing forth (actually, the scene will have its joy deflated in about two minutes), dreams being dreamt, and a special toast – did I say “toast”? – being made. For just a moment in the lives of three hard-luck cases, everything comes together. Someone had to care about this movie for that to happen. I was glad they cared about it enough to let me care, too.
First published in The Informer, April 1984
Written for the Seattle Film Society’s monthly publication, which I edited. I’m torn between thinking this is an amusing example of a young writer trying something out (the review feels like it was written in one long rush, and I’m certain it was), and declaring that, at the very least, this is the greatest thing ever written about The Buddy System. I’ve always liked the kind of review that makes a case for small-scale pleasures, and I suppose that’s what I was attempting to do here. Multi-Emmy-winning Glenn Jordan came out of TV (including the key 70s series Family), and after flopping with this film and Mass Appeal, he went back into it, becoming a key maker of prestige TV-movies. This was the first produced script by Mary Agnes Donoghue, who is best known as the writer of Beaches. I haven’t revisited the movie, and I wonder where it even exists now.
WHAT A FEELING! 