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A bittersweet romantic comedy riff on Marty that’s also the final big screen appearance of a cinematic legend? Yep, I didn’t know that this was a thing either, but Only the Lonely has its awkward charms in enough of the right places to give it a mild recommendation. Much of this praise goes towards John Candy and Maureen O’Hara mining the material for all its worth and doing their best to make the uneven tonal shifts work.
There’s only so much that multi-dimensional performances can do to distract you from slapstick that brushes up against more humane comedy, or loud moments of cartoonish behavior that takes some of the tenderness and sting from the more emotional ones. Dream sequences of Candy’s lonely beat cop fantasizing about his domineering, emotionally abusive mother encountering various bloody ends or guilt tripping him into taking different actions are cute in small doses, but Only the Lonely throws in far too many of them. The final one, where O’Hara and Anthony Quinn do battle on an airplane with hijacking terrorists, is an eye-roller of great magnitude.
The Catholic guilt of these dreams would work better more sparring, and their presence intrudes on more tender romance between Candy and Ally Sheedy. They sound like an incompatible pair, but Candy dives into the truth here and emerges with a portrait of a kind, lonely, man who glows with a sense of basic goodness and decency. Sheedy’s neurotic, awkward artistic type (something of a type for her) generates a believable romantic attraction and tension with O’Hara meddlesome mother. Even better is O’Hara as an iron willed and hyper-critical mother, and the ending scenes where Candy shakes off her domineering control reveal the vulnerable cracks in her exterior. O’Hara came out of retirement for this part, and she makes a meal out of it in the ways her tart sarcasm makes a lovely repartee with Candy’s gentler humor.
Perhaps Only the Lonely has no bigger sin than Chris Columbus’ bland, impersonal sense of direction. Even this becomes something of a virtue given how the film moves propels forward and doesn’t descend too far into treacle or grossly manipulative sentiment in the ways that films like Stepmom and Bicentennial Man do. There’s nothing here that’s terribly original, but it’s pleasantly old-fashioned in its romance and family dynamics. It’s something of a testament to how integral strong performers are to selling weaker material.
