Almost You (1984) User Reviews

Are you really expected to care about these people?

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 17 March 2024]

A rather talkie, stagy and dull character comedy/drama, this deals with the boring problems of a married couple (Brooke Adams and Griffin Dunne) who are dealing with his infidelity and her recovery from being hit by a car. He's a rather uninteresting working man, indecisive and neurotic, and not really someone easy to root for. She's pretty bland too, and it was her own stupidity that got her hit by a car.

More interesting are the supporting characters including Dunne's boss Joe Silver and coworker Miguel Pinero. Josh Mostel and Christa Estabrook add spicy Big Apple style gusto at a dinner party that Adams and Dunne throws. Karen Young has the unfortunate part of the home attending nurse taking care of Adams who allows herself to fall into bed with Dunne. It's a Woody Allen type film ripoff where the script doesn't hit the marks and Allen in a dream would probably consider a nightmare.

This film doesn't know exactly what it wants to be

[soranno · 21 October 2002]

Is this a comedy or a drama? The sometimes confusing narrative finds married man Griffin Dunne hiring and eventually having an affair with a young nurse who he had originally hired to help care for his wife (Brooke Adams) who had recently been left incapacitated following injuries in a car accident. This rather obscure 1985 20th Century Fox release suffers from being an originally good idea that just didn't get off the ground as well as one would have hoped.

accurate, cynical dialog

[tobiasn · 7/10 · 31 August 2005]

I lived for awhile in NYC, and I liked this movie.

I spent some part of my life in virtually identical apartments. So maybe I am just being nostalgic. But watching this, I really felt like the people were much like real people I have known.

One thing I am sure of is the dialog is terrific. For instance when one character asked 'what do you do?' and got the reply, 'I am an actor' she immediately followed this up with: 'Oh, what restaurant?'.

At this stage in my life I prefer this to anything Woody Allen has done (or for that matter the two Edward Burns' movies I have seen).

Yes, the characters sit around drinking wine, and making small talk. And, yes, the lead is irresponsible, and feels far too sorry for himself. But the movie is really about the various women's perception of the lead, about their experience of him. Which makes it darkly amusing, and happily so not in the Allenesque, narcissist, self-deprecating style. The lead is a clown, but we aren't pressured to feel sorry for him. At all.

The worst and most compelling performance ever

[jbels · 16 June 2003]

This movie is a trifle, kind of on the side of Annie Hall. But Almost You contains probably the worst acting performance ever committed to film, that of Marty Watt, who plays Kevin. This "actor" plays an up and coming "actor" and if you want to have a laugh riot, rent this movie just for this performance. I say this with all due respect.