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Silly Romcoms: Frank Oz's Housesitter, Arthur Hiller's The Lonely Guy

 Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Peter McNichol. Dir. Frank Oz, Universal, 1992


Silly. Just pure silliness, and not in a way I can commend to others. Steve Martin plays associate architect Newton Davis, who builds a dreamhouse as an engagement present for Becky (Dana Delany), who promptly declines his proposal. 

A few months later, the house unsold, Davis has a one night stand with waitress Gwen, who confesses to being something of a con artist before proceding to appropriate the house - in Davis's hometown of Dobbs' Point - while Davis works in Boston, unaware Gwen is posing as his wife and constructing an elaborate history for them. When he discovers the deception, Davis decides to play along, convinced his improved status as a married man will win him Becky and a promotion at work. 

I suppose a wife could be seen as "housesitting" her husband's house. If not, there is no other housesitter in Housesitting, nor is that specific term ever used. It doesn't improve from there.

Any number of very silly situations arise, with Martin realizing, over time, that he loves Hawn's delusions more than Delany's reality. It's cute, it's fluffy, and it's a movie which says well-intended lies are ok because they're well-intended. 

Which, apparently, is the intended takeaway. Better to love a liar with all your heart than feel strongly for someone who tells you the truth.

It's just meant to be a silly, fluffy romcom, but I have to say I've tried that loving-a-liar thing and it worked out as well as you'd expect. All through this movie, I found myself punctuating the end of each charming and silly segment with an exasperated, "But you're both lying to everyone!"

Martin and Hawn are great together, and I laughed out loud a few times, but the silliness and the whole loving-the-liar storyline made me a little sorry I talked myself into this. Not every unseen film from the '90s is a lost classic. Some could stay lost. Housesitter among them.

THE LONELY GUY
Steve Martin, Charles Grodin, Robyn Douglass, Steve Lawrence. Dir. Arthur Hiller, Universal, 1984

A romcom largely in name, The Lonely Guy is really an extended riff on single life in the mid-'80s, sort of a well-plotted sketch from Laugh-In, the first TV show for which Martin wrote, less hard-edged than a Saturday Night Live piece, in which Martin and Grodin do an easygoing, gently observed back-n-forth shtik on the necessity and impossibility of intimacy. 

The women in the film exist more as plot devices than characters, but LONELY GUY isn't a character piece. It's a connected set of mostly-good gags about sex and relationships in the big city ca. 1983, including one featuring Martin's ongoing celebrity obsession, Merv Griffin.

A much funnier, if no less silly, movie, The Lonely Guy doesn't so much end as run out of jokes. Housesitter ends about 30 minutes after it runs out. Lonely Guy is not a lost '80s comedy classic, but it's funny and underappreciated, a much better trip back in time than the unfortunate Housesitter. 

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