OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE. Directed by Arthur Hiller; written by Leslie Dixon; produced by Ted Field and Robert W. Cort for Touchstone. Starring Shelley Long and Bette Midler. Rated R (language, a little fairly explicit sex).
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It's not often that a movie with a poor story is still worth seeing. But Outrageous Fortune is one of those rare birds.
To be honest, the plot isn't terrible. But it runs away with itself all over the place. At the end of the movie, you feel like you've just seen parts of three or four different movies, pasted together helter-skelter.
But—and this is the qualifier that lets me recommend the movie— all of those movies star the wonderful new comedy team of Midler and Long. Their comic talents, both individually and as a duo, are what save the movie.
Long is as good here as she is at her best on "Cheers." And that's very good indeed. Lauren is a lot like Diane, Long's T.V. character. She's fastidious, opinionated and wickedly witty, but obviously good at heart. A struggling actress in New York, most of Lauren's struggles are with her wealthy parents, over the money she borrows from them to finance her still non-existent career.
Midler is also at her best as Sandy—loud, brassy and profane—but also good as gold, and vulnerable to boot, underneath the tough exterior. Sandy has actually made money as an actress. But the movie was "Ninja Vixens," so that doesn't count for much with the blue-blood Lauren.
Two such opposites might have trouble finding common comic ground. And their meeting is contrived to emphasize their points of difference. But as they experience one harrowing, if preposterous, situation after another together, their friendship slowly takes root and grows in a believeable way.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you much about the plot without spoiling a lot of the fun—except to say that it's as outrageous as the title indicates. There's a vague resemblance to last fall's enjoyable Jumpin' Jack Flash. Here, too, amateur females prove superior every time when pitted against professional male spies.
There are some priceless comic scenes embedded in the discontinuous plot, though, that make the over-all story almost superfluous: Lauren begging her parents for more money for an acting class via an intercom and closed-circuit TV... the girls masquerading as teenage boys on their first visit to a house of ill repute... and so on.
The focus in Outrageous Fortune is all on the ladies. But Peter Coyote is good as always as the too-good-to-be-true lover. And George Carlin brings surprising dimension to his character, a drunken Indian curio salesman and part-time tracker.
Permit one note of feminist criticism. Publicity information from the studio calls Outrageous Fortune the first "female buddy action comedy." And it IS a buddy comedy featuring females, which is a welcome change of pace.
However, these buddies join forces in the first place because of romantic interest in a man. And because of jealousy over his affections, they don't even realize that they're buddies until it's almost too late. Maybe the next female buddy movie will let the women be friends just because—the way the guys usually are.
February 4, 1987