Afterglow

I don't have a career, I have a careen," writer-director Alan Rudolph once told Film Comment. Afterglow, which stars Julie Christie as half of a broken marriage and Nick Nolte as the handyman husband who knows how to fix every woman's problems but his wife's, is Rudolph careening and careening and finally losing control over his material. Lara Flynn Boyle and Jonny Lee Miller are the younger, wealthier couple who join Christie and Nolte in one of Rudolph's trademark love quadrangles, but the working out of everybody's needs and desires is so schematically erratic that the couples seem less a love quadrangle than a quadratic equation involving quite irrational numbers. Fine acting by Christie and Nolte helps put over lines like "My soul needs an overhaul." But it's the movie, not the characters' souls, that needs an overhaul.