It's not so much the action in "Addicted to Love" that makes the movie funny as it is the reactions of the two stars, Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick.
Broderick has long been the master of bemused or flabber-gasted doubletakes. He often plays the innocent who doesn't know quite what to make of things that are out of the ordinary.
Ryan, on the other hand, takes a step in a new direction, as a self-assured mischief-maker, mixing attitude with vulnerability.
They play a pair of mismatched soulmates who come together to get revenge on the respective former lovers who dumped them. And if the film is a bit tentative — and in the end dissolves into mush — it's funny enough along the way to earn audience appreciation. That is, if the audience can embrace the dark premise and the offbeat treatment of the material.
Broderick is a mild-mannered, small-town astronomer whose longtime girlfriend (Kelly Preston) is an elementary-school teacher. She wants to travel and see the world. He's content with their "safe," suburban lifestyle — and he looks forward to marriage and family.
Naturally, when Preston heads to New York City for a sabbatical, Broderick is reluctant to let her go. And two months later, when he's "Dear John'd" (in a letter read by her father, an inspired bit), Broderick does the unthinkable. He packs his bags and goes to Manhattan to win her back.
When he finally tracks her down, Broderick discovers Preston has been swept off her feet by a womanizing French restaurateur (Tcheky Karyo). Broderick moves into an abandoned warehouse across from their love nest and spies on them with planetarium equipment that displays their live images on a wall like a huge video screen.
There he secretly watches and waits, mooning and statistically plotting how long it will take her to dump the Frenchman and return to him. Then, Ryan appears, all punk hair, raggedy clothes and raccoon eyeliner, dressed in leather and riding a motorcycle. She is Karyo's former girlfriend, of course, and she drops into the warehouse to plant bugging equipment. But her motivations are quite different — she wants to break Karyo, reduce him to a puddle and then splash around in it.
Broderick is at first appalled but then joins in. Naturally, they fall in love with each other . . . but don't know it for awhile.
In terms of plot development, "Addicted to Love" plays like a cross between the Doris Dorrie German comedy "Men . . . " and Griffin Dunne's first movie, "Chilly Scenes of Winter." In terms of sensibility, it's more like Martin Scorsese's dark satire "After Hours," which also starred Dunne.
So, it seems fitting that "Addicted to Love" marks the feature directing debut of actor/producer Dunne, whose own on-screen persona has often resembled Broderick's. In that sense, Broderick is filling in for Dunne the same way Woody Allen sometimes has younger actors fill in for him (think John Cusack in "Bullets Over Broadway").
Dunne's most impressive directing technique has to do with the film's visuals, which are quite intriguing, especially when Broderick sets up equipment in the warehouse. One of the funniest moments is a little "Mystery Science Theater 3000" homage, as Broderick and Ryan superimpose their own dialogue over a conversation between Preston and Karyo.
In the film's second half, the edge softens as Dunne and first-time screenwriter Robert Gordon allow things to get gooey. During these scenes, the charm of the players is what keeps it afloat. (I was particularly annoyed with the cockroaches-in-the-restaurant sequence, a creaky device if ever there was one, and done to much better effect in "Victor/Victoria.")
"Addicted to Love" is rated R — a soft R by today's PG-13 standards, however — for sex, profanity, vulgarity, violence and brief nudity.