CelluloidTime

This film could very easily have been awful, but thanks to Charlize Theron's outstanding performance as the deranged ex, it is lifted to something that is nearly (if not totally) profound. Also, Patton Oswalt's performance is outstanding. Everyone else in the cast is there for Theron and Oswalt to play off of, which made it difficult for anyone else to make much of an impression on me, but that didn't matter.

Because of the film's title and Theron's character constantly living in the past, it might be easy to miss the fact that this isn't just a film about a woman who doesn't know how to have a non-toxic relationship with a man, it is also a film about the havoc that alcoholism can cause in the life of a person who has too much free time on his or her hands.

I once read someone say that the problem with this film was that it needed to be 30 minutes longer for the characters to be fully developed. This film is only 6 minutes shorter than Diane Keaton's Annie Hall, a film that is a quintessential (and iconic) character study. Characters can be developed in short order if the writing is good, but the writing for And So It Goes was not very good. Rob Reiner is a first-rate director, but when the writing for a small-scale comedy isn't good, the film isn't going to be good.

The primary reason I even watched this film when I saw that it didn't receive good ratings at RT (or on IMDB) is that my late friend (actress Susan Gordon), used to get told that she looked like Diane Keaton AND once gave Michael Douglas a tour of Tokyo (or maybe it was Kyoto?) when she worked at an advertising firm in Japan and he was there to shoot a commercial. The serendipity of that drew me to this film.

This film does accomplish one unintended consequence -- by being relatively poor, it makes one appreciate more the good comedies Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas have made.