The best scene in the movie is the Italian restaurant scene with Janeane Garofalo, using a wry Randy Quaid as her foil when she’s not ignoring him. It’s the only scene that made me laugh.

The scene with the playboy dad having three women in his home, and the one preceding it when his girlfriend’s excessive dinner fails to impress the little kids, are both weak. Playboy dad is not interesting, and that character really shouldn’t have been one of the three musketeers of this movie.

The other dad, Reiser, is uncomfortable to watch. His dinner scene with his daughter is good in the sense that it shows how estranged a father can be with his teenage daughter, but that too is uncomfortable to watch. The later scene, up in the treehouse when his daughter suddenly loves him, is completely unbelievable. The fact is, that particular girl would not say those things to her dad. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t need him at all. She’s done with him.

The stupid bit about Randy Quaid being a talk show star after busting into Rob Reiner’s talk show is just dumb. That doesn’t happen. If you want to write a cartoon, get Warner Brothers to draw it for you. Have the Road Runner in it, or Bugs Bunny.

The film gives us comfort food at the end, with the trite and meaningless advice to love your kids. The fact is that your kids need love from their father when they are young, but once they hit a certain age, in double digits, you are done. Daddy just becomes the source of cash from then on. Kids in their teens and twenties don’t want or need anything but money from dad. Fittingly, I saw this film on Father’s Day.

To sum the whole movie up, Janeane Garofalo is funny, Randy Quaid is kind of comfortable to watch although the script gets a little stupid at the tail end, and the other two male leads are just mildly annoying. The script doesn’t say anything worthwhile about the subject it took on. But it takes a subject on, so at least that’s something. It gives exposure and food for thought on the subject of how a father fits into his family.
Rating: 2 / 5

This well-intentioned comedy starts off fine. You almost get the impression that it’s going to make a SIGNIFICANT STATEMENT about love and marriage and divorce in modern day America. All the complications of split up, “blended,” and re-blended families are all touched upon, and the script seems intelligently ambivalent and a tinge melancholy about it all. The actors are, for the most part, up to the task of conveying that ambivalence. It seems almost like it’s going to be one of those (increasing) rarities in American, a comedy for thinking adults.

But by half-time, it’s pretty much gone off track, and it’s hard to pinpoint just where or why. Some notes ring true right up to the end, while others ring increasingly false. The relationship between Paul Reiser, his ex-wife and confused adolescent daughter is a case in point. The complications one would expect between a basically amicable divorced couple, one of whom is apparently happily remarried, and one is still mooning over his lost love, seem to be authentically portrayed. The tensions between father and maturing daughter aren’t glossed over either. But by the film’s end, it’s gotten, well, awfully hokey. Yes, the mooning dad is forced to come to terms with the finality of his divorce. Did he have to scale a tree to rescue is drunken and distraught 14 year old daughter (holing up in a treehouse on their old homestead no less) to reach that point. The film’s end has script doctoring and slightly-cynical-happy-ending written all over it.

BYE BYE LOVE wants desperately to be a comedy for the 90s. As I recall the critical reception and box office results at the time, it came up short back then. Ten years later, it seems a even more forced–and dated to boot. But it’s well-acted, has a number of funny moments (Janeane Garofalo and Randy Quaid’s blind date scenes are genuinely funny and up the laugh meter quotient considerably…but even that highlight is undercut by some absurd follow-up action that has Quaid invading the radio broadcast of a reviled male Dr. Laura figure (Rob Reiner)–only to achieve instant media stardom himself.

In the end, the SIGNIFICANT STATEMENT is overwhelmed by the silliness. An OK comedy, it could have been much, much better.
Rating: 3 / 5

The Anchor Bay DVD has no closed captions or English subtitles. If you need them, you’re out of luck. Too bad; it’s a fun movie.
Rating: 4 / 5