IT IS A RARE and wonderful thing when an American movie comes along that is adult in every respect. Such a one is Boys on the Side, and I am quite prepared to be lenient about minor flaws in a work brimful of closely observed life, spontaneous feeling, pungent dialogue, and proper respect for the unpredictable. From the first moment to the last, the film exudes a sometimes quiet, sometimes rambunctious authenticity that does not grab you by the lapel, but slowly infiltrates the heart. You leave with the feeling of having acquired three new friends in the film’s three heroines.
Jane (Whoopi Goldberg) is a second-rate barroom singer whose act in New York bombs, and who decides to try her luck in Los Angeles; she answers an ad for a co-driver to the Coast, placed by Robin (Mary-Louise Parker), her exact opposite. Jane is black, tough, and lesbian; Robin, white, proper, middle-class, a real-estate agent who thinks she can do better in San Diego. A relationship of Jane’s has just broken up; Robin seems hardly to have had any kind of emotional experience. And so the cynical Jane and the finicky Robin set out in the latter’s minivan. They amaze and amuse each other with their differences: Robin with her love for the songs of the Carpenters and her washing Jane’s earphones with cologne before using them; Jane with her laughing indifference to a romantic movie on TV that makes Robin cry.
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