Stanley & Iris (1990)

User Rating:

5.9/10   

Director:

Martin Ritt

Writers (WGA):

Pat Barker (novel)
Harriet Frank Jr. (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

9 February 1990 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Tagline:

Some people need love spelled out for them.

Plot:

An illiterate cook (Robert De Niro) at a company cafeteria tries for the attention of a newly widowed woman (Jane Fonda)...

Plot Keywords:

Face Slap | Punctuation In Title | Premarital Sex | Pregnancy | Human Relationship

Cast

Jane Fonda	...	Iris Estelle King
Robert De Niro	...	Stanley Everett Cox
Swoosie Kurtz	...	Sharon
Martha Plimpton	...	Kelly King
Harley Cross	...	Richard King
Jamey Sheridan	...	Joe Fuller
Feodor Chaliapin Jr.	...	Leonides Cox (as Feodor Chaliapin)
Zohra Lampert	...	Elaine
Loretta Devine	...	Bertha
Julie Garfield	...	Belinda
Karen Ludwig	...	Melissa
Kathy Kinney	...	Bernice
Laurel Lyle	...	Muriel
Mary Testa	...	Joanne
Katherine Cortez	...	Jan

Also Known As:

Letters (USA) (working title)
Union Street (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

104 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (DuArt)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Canada:PG (Ontario) | Iceland:L | France:U | South Korea:15 | West Germany:12 (f) | Argentina:13 | Australia:M | Chile:14 | Finland:K-12 | Sweden:7 | UK:15 | USA:PG-13 | Singapore:PG

Filming Locations:

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Company:

Lantana

Trivia:

Martin Ritt's final film. It is also the last screenplay written by Ritt's favorite author couple Harriet Frank Jr. & Irving Ravetch

Goofs:

Continuity: The final shot of that sequence supposedly takes place at Post and Washington Streets, but a street sign partly out of focus in the background is clearly different from either of those.

Quotes:

Iris: A girl's best friend is her mama. At least that's what it says on the greeting cards.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Biography Special: The Fondas (2004) (TV)

A nice movie but not much more....

A nice, sane movie that never quite gets off the ground is Stanley & Iris. Well-made and well-acted as it is, it seems unlikely to catch fire in any other context.

The opening reels, which are richer and more sophisticated in tone than the rest of the picture, promise much. As a recently widowed New England bakery worker who is supporting her children as well as her unemployed sister and her loutish husband, Jane Fonda captures just the right tone of can't-be-bothered weariness.

She's appalled at the behavior of her brother-in-law, who slaps her sister (Swoosie Kurtz) in front of the children, and she's shaken when her unmarried teen-age daughter (Martha Plimpton) turns out to be pregnant. But she's almost too busy grieving to react in an effective manner.

The only distraction in her life is a budding friendship with a cafeteria worker (Robert De Niro) who turns out to be illiterate. After a series of personal disasters brought about by his inability to read, he asks her to teach him, they visit the library together, and one thing leads to another. His pride and her attachment to her dead husband occasionally get in the way, but everything works out.

Nevertheless, Stanley & Iris is quite tolerable as a star vehicle. Fonda and De Niro, who reportedly didn't get along famously off-screen, keep an interesting tension going on-screen. Occasionally they pull off a good scene - like the one in which De Niro loses his way as he tries to read street signs - that suggests how much better this movie could have been.