Movie Review: He Said, She Said (1991)

The movie stars Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Perkins, Nathan Lane, Sharon Stone and Anthony LaPaglia.

This is a movie I had heard about but had never taken the time to watch until a couple days ago, when I came across it on one of our movie channels. Even though I'm not a big fan of romantic comedies in general, I have recently been entertained by a couple films from that genre and decided to take a chance with this movie too. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this one was a bit of a disappointment for me.

Overall, I do like the main premise of the film. You have two people who are on opposite ends of the relationship spectrum and disagree about every major issue. This, combined with the fact their disagreements are in a very public setting, does make the love story seem impossible and, because of that, much more intriguing.

I also found I liked the idea of the story being told, in separate pieces, from their own individual perspective. While I wouldn't describe it as unique (I've seen other movies that attempted to do that), the idea fit in really well with the underlying theme of the film.

Unfortunately, while I liked the concept, I thought the overall execution of this film just seemed to be lacking something. In particular, I had a hard time figuring out if this was supposed to be a drama or a comedy. There were plenty of jokes. But, they honestly weren't funny enough for me to think of this as a funny movie. Yet, the dramatic scenes weren't serious enough to be considered dramatic. This, basically, was a hybrid that would have worked much better had the writers committed to one or the other.

I also wasn't a huge fan of Kevin Bacon in this movie. Based on the story, his character came off as someone who was a veteran writer with (at least for the most part) conservative views. Had this movie been made today, Bacon probably would have been believable. But, since he was only in his early 30s when this was filmed and, at that point at least, was better known for his rebellious characters, it just didn't work for me. If anything, it would have been better to make him the liberal writer with Perkins' character being the much more conservative one.

The movie, as I said, has its good points. However, the film does lack something overall and would have been better with a different (slightly older) male star. It wasn't really bad. It just wasn't anything that was memorable.

My Grade: C