"Boys on The Side"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                             February 4, 1995

  Well, this was Indigo Girls week in Tampa, starting with their
concert on Thursday night, during which they revealed the fact
that they appear in the film "Boys on The Side."  The film opened
on Friday with, predictably, lots of Indigo Girls concertgoers in
the audience.(They do attract an enthusiastic following).  You
didn't get to see much of Amy and Emily in the film, they were
entertainers at a club where Jane (the Whoppi Goldberg character)
is given a surprise birthday party, but there's plenty more in
the film to make it worth your while to see.

    From the previews, I thought this was going to be a kind of
with-it,'90s comedy, female road picture.  And, in part, that's
what it is.  But that didn't quite jibe with it's being a Herbert
Ross-directed picture.  I, at least, remember him best as the
director of another very moving women's friendship film, "The
Turning Point."  And although there are more funny lines and
funny scenes here than in many films trying to be comedies, "Boys
on the Side" is, indeed, much more than just comedy.  As the
title implies, men are peripheral to this story, the central
focus is the development of the relationships of friendship and
love among the three main women characters.

   Briefly, the initial situation is this: Nightclub singer
Jane's act gets fired and breaks up in New York; a lesbian, Jane
has also lately broken up with her lover, so she decides to head
for L.A. to look for a new start.  She answers an ad in the paper
looking for someone to share the driving to the West Coast.
The ad had been placed by Robin (Mary-Louise Parker), a 30ish,
determinedly perky, insistently cheery, yuppie real estate woman
whom Jane instantly judges to be "the whitest woman in New York."
Things do not look good for a pleasant, cross-country trip
(at least not from Jane's perspective--and it's her point of view
from which the narrative unfolds).  Nonetheless they start out,
get as far as Pittsburgh, and end up with a third passenger, a
young friend of Jane's named Holly (played by Drew Barrymore)
who's in a very bad relationship with a piece of work named Nick.

    They actually do seem to have a pretty good time together
driving across country, though as Whoppi's character says, making
a joke about "Thelma and Louise," "I'm not driving over any
cliffs for you two!"  When they hit Tucson a major unforseen
catastrophe befalls them and sidetracks the trip, so they settle
down there for a while.  Though problems loom for each of them,
it is the period in the film where they really get to know one
another and bond into what can only be seen as a loving
family of choice, to which they bring various friends they
make and, in Robin's case, her long-estragned mother (Anita
Gillette), as well.

    Certain scenes stand out for the sheer chemistry of the
actors playing off one another, like one in which Jane is trying
to get ever-proper Robin to say the "c" word.  It was like an
actors' improvisation that just clicks as their repartee goes
back and forth wholly in character and utterly hilarious.

    I came away from the film wondering when someone out there in
Hollywoodland is finally going to tumble to the fact that Mary-
Louise Parker is a fantastically good screen actor.  When you
think of her performace in "Fried Green Tomatoes," then her
brilliant work as the mother in "The Client," and now this very
nuanced, funny and moving portrayal of Robin in "Boys on The
Side" it seems to me she has to be recognized with an Oscar
nomination one of these days.

    I have two qualms about this film.  For one thing, the plot
has a number of gaping holes in it that are sometimes distracting.
Partly these are just inconsistent or unrealistic events; at other
times it seems as though there were subplots that have been edited
out, but traces remain.  Second, though much is made verbally about
Jane's lesbianism, she never gets to express her sexuality in the
film.  Even in the opening sequences where they could have showed
her breaking up with her lover to establish her lesbian identity,
they chose to show, instead, her breaking up with a band member.
I suppose they thought that just talking about a Black lesbian
was daring enough for a mainstream Hollywood film.  Well, forget
that! If the film had the courage of its obviously inclusive
convictions, Whoppi's character would have been more than a
lesbian in name only.

   Still, I predict this one will be on my list of best feminist
films of 1995, so why wait? Go see "Boys on The Side" now.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister
on Women and Film.
   Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.