Necessary Parties

I came across this movie on YouTube, of all places, and watched it one quiet afternoon when I didn't have anything else to do. I must say my expectations were not very high. I was expecting a saccharine, emotional weepie with little in the way of artistic merit. I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong. This is actually an intelligently written, well acted and entertaining story. The ending may be a little bit predictable and possibly improbable but the movie itself does a good job of reminding us that there are more than two parties in most divorces and more than just the couple who are splitting up get hurt. The acting is good. Alan Arkin is always a pleasure to watch as is Julie Hegarty (she always comes across as being so nice that it's a mystery why anyone would want to divorce her!) Young Mark-Paul Gosselaar acquits himself very well and I'm sorry he wasn't in more serious movies when he was around this age, instead of those vacuous teen TV shows. There are a few plot elements that don't work, but they're easily overlooked. The soundtrack, such as it is, is awful. Overall though, this is an entertaining and enjoyable movie. It's definitely streets ahead of most made-for-TV offerings.

Lots of films and television shows explore divorce (and its prequels and sequels) from the point of view of the adult participants but few explore it from the point of view of the kids. The normal speech that parents give to their kids is that children are better off when their quarreling parents split than when they caged together. Fourteen year old Chris Mills rejects that idea. He's firmly convinced that his parents are wrong to get divorced; with some work their marriage can be saved. And Chris and kid sister Jenny will have an intact family. But nobody's listening.

So Chris takes an unusual tack--he gets his own lawyer to fight the divorce. Enter Archie Corelli, played by Alan Arkin (who also wrote the script). Archie's a lawyer who abandoned the law because he decided that our justice system hides rather than finds the truth. He's much happier running his car repair business. However, he agrees to represent Chris for a $10 fee. Chris' grandpa (the familiar Donald Moffat) agrees to be Chris' guardian ad litem in the suit and Chris files a motion to intervene in his parents' divorce case, arguing that he is a third party beneficiary of their marriage contract. Needless to say, both parents and their lawyers are outraged about his meddler into their private affairs.

Strangely, this little made-for-TV drama turns out to be quite touching. The two child actors are quite strong and Arkin is terrific. And the subject is a very serious one--half of all marriages end in divorce and a high percentage of children suffer at least one highly disruptive divorce. More often than not, the kids wind up in a household headed by their mother and suffer a radically decreased standard of living. Their relationship with the non-custodial parent is badly disrupted, perhaps destroyed. All kinds of psychological, social, and financial pathologies are likely to result.

And one last word in favor of Archie Corelli--an idealistic lawyer fed up with law practice who takes a case essentially pro bono because he likes the client and because he thinks that the legal system just might deliver a little bit of justice for once. We don't see too many lawyers like Archie in the films and television shows of today (and maybe not in real life either). Arkin deserves a lot of credit for creating the role.

This film deals with important issues but suffers from the made-for-tv vernacular in which it is filmed and could use some serious rewriting.

A divorce told from a child's point of view is going to be painful to watch, but this film is overly so. The parents seem to be totally unsuited to each other and I had the strong feeling that separating them would have been in the best interest of all involved.

The way that these self-involved parents completely ignore their children was distressing to see but this was exacerbated in my view by the way that the kid's attorney/mechanic was always doing several things at once and only giving the kid a small part of his attention. It seemed to me that both of the children could have benefited from as much attention as they could get and it seemed hurtful that the kid's advocate ignored him as much as he did.

Overall the movie was only average and while touching on uncommon thematic ground, it really brought very few new perspectives to light.