CROSSING DELANCEY

Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey Year: 1988 Rating: ***1/2

Peter Riegert is a brilliantly subtle actor; so much so you can't even notice anything brilliant at all... as in, there's no performance in his roles ranging from Tim Matheson's sidekick in ANIMAL HOUSE, or Burt Lancaster's Scotland-bound employee in LOCAL HERO... he simply IS the character...

Which means something two-fold since, as a perfectly normal, hard-working owner of a Manhattan pickle store, he's the last person that gorgeous Jewish single girl Amy Irving wants to date... especially because her own doting mother (and mom's doting friend) really, almost desperately wants the relationship to happen...

Amy Irving in Crossing Delancey

And, in-between this somewhat buried mainline, CROSSING DELANCEY gets a bit too artsy/progressive for its own good, particularly involving Irving's job as a book publisher's assistant having affairs (or near-affairs) with a pretentiously published author and an unhappily married man...

Then again, all these distractions (also including a handful of girl-friends that often seem like three characters in one) make the relatively few sequences with Riegert that much more important and effective, and even romantic... in a perfectly suited anti-romantic-comedy fashion, neatly towing the line of mainstream and art-house.

Amy Irving and Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey

Peter Riegert in Crossing Delancey with Peter Riegert