It’s no accident that the un happy architect played by Timothy Hutton in 1979-set “Multiple Sarcasms” spends his weekday afternoons at the Cinema Village playing hooky, repeatedly watching a big film from that year, “Starting Over.”
That film features what is arguably Burt Reynolds’ best performance, as a newly divorced man in what was a response to feminist films such as “An Unmarried Woman.”
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Hutton, who won an Oscar for 1980’s “Ordinary People,” does fine work in “Multiple Sarcasms” as a man whose marriage is coming apart during his mid-life crisis.
But the movie itself shows how stories like “Starting Over” have devolved since they were abandoned by major studios for threadbare, navel-gazing indies like this one.
First-time filmmaker Brooks Branch underutilizes an estimable cast in a movie that basically sums itself up in a line of dialogue: “I love you, I really do, but this f – – – ing whiny white-guy s – – t has got to stop.”
It doesn’t. Not after Hutton, fired from his job, locks himself in the bathroom with his typewriter — and his fed-up wife Dana Delany (almost as chilly as Candace Bergen in “Starting Over”) flees with their precocious daughter (India Ennenga).
It continues when Hutton, despite warnings from his gay male best friend (Mario Van Peebles), makes a pass at his longtime platonic female best friend (Mira Sorvino).
It seems unlikely that Hutton’s loser will ever complete a play he’s been working on, and even more improbable that his agent (Stockard Channing) will find someone to produce it.
“Multiple Sarcasms” happens to be the title of the play within the movie, and it turns out to be by far the most interesting thing in the film.
Not that many people will want to suffer through the first 90 minutes of this vanity production to get there.