It's My Turn
First screened in March 2025
Director: Claudia Weill. Cast: Jill Clayburgh, Michael Douglas, Charles Grodin, Steven Hill, Beverly Garland, Daniel Stern, Dianne Wiest, Joan Copeland, Charles Kimbrough, Roger Robinson, Ron Frazier, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris. Screenplay: Eleanor Bergstein. In Brief:
I came in rooting for Weill's second feature and soon felt chagrined—but then, some modest virtues started unfolding.
VOR:②
Famous these days for the sad fact of being Weill's last feature and a pet of some theoretical mathematicians! Otherwise, hardly a milestone.
It's My Turn treads a slightly staggering line between exploring attraction and listlessness in a loose, flexible way and just coming across as listless itself. You can't beat up on a movie for being less amazing than the same director's Girlfriends, which among its many virtues does an expert job of bringing shape and coherence to a vignette-y script, acted in a disarming key of real-life behavior. Lots about It's My Turn, from structure to performance style to dialogue rhythms, suggests a similar agenda, but the rhythms are off as often as on. The first half-hour especially casts about for a gear or a lane. Its one standout gesture, also the film's first and most famous, is hard-selling Jill Clayburgh as a top-flight University of Chicago mathematician, briskly walking a classroom through a headspinning proof, which is a tough scene to square with almost any other impression we get of Clayburgh's Kate in the rest of the movie.
In some ways, Clayburgh's gentle-breeze acting style and watercolor approach to character is a good fit for Weill's observational storytelling. But in a movie that's chronically at risk of just drifting off the screen, a more grounding, informative presence than Clayburgh's would have helped. I'd have gone after Ellen Burstyn myself, but your mileage may vary.
It's My Turn gets so shaggy in its assembly that a few longish scenes or sequences feel like rehearsal exercises ("how do you think your characters would react to spontaneously playing a game?") or producer-driven gambits ("I've lined up Yankee Stadium and a bunch of diamond legends, you better use 'em!"). Despite being small, the secondary cast still winds up feeling cluttered with people I couldn't quite tell apart, and don't even get me started on the credits' typographical felony against "Diane" Wiest, in her movie debut.
But then, there's plenty to be said for a little shagginess, which Sally Jane Black captured beautifully in her review, even if she definitely admires this movie more than I do. I also share Angelica Jade Bastién's amazement that a movie can actually get comfier, more relaxed, and more humane upon the entrance of Michael Douglas, who so often tenses things up when he enters a film, appearing to watch his own performance. Styled more handsomely than ever, before or since, Douglas turns out to be a great, mutually curious foil and match for Clayburgh and she for him, especially when they abandon the foosball table for some low-voiced, should-they-or-shouldn't-they verbal badminton in a hotel room. The actors seem to be discovering a lot in their own performances and in each other's, which happens a lot in Girlfriends, too, and in Weill's episodes of the great 90s TV drama Once & Again: rich testament where Weill was consistently able to take her casts.
A few other scenes have this welcome lived-in quality, low-key but not at all lacking in stakes, where characters reveal and shuffle through their own layers and also discern some new ones in their scene partners: Clayburgh with Beverly Garland as her soon-to-be stepmother; Clayburgh and Douglas surreptitiously monitoring each other as they help their parents move in together; Clayburgh and Charles Grodin, as her passionless live-in lover, in a late scene of sorting out whether they want any of the same things and how far they're each willing to compromise. That last exchange actually benefits from the dialogue being a little vague: Grodin's character keeps missing what Clayburgh's is trying to express, but I was struggling to make sense of her, too, and the scene was thus more interesting than yet another leading lady telling yet another doltish or withholding beau that he was smothering her or not paying enough attention. That conversation ends on a couple of special, truthful notes from both parties.
And then the whole ending is a bizarre botch, so much so that the already-puzzling title It's My Turn gets even harder to parse. I was rooting for none of the possible post-credits trajectories that the script (or, I suspect, the much-contested final cut) leaves open. There's such a thing as a movie being impressively warm, wise, and inviting at intervals while also being more than a bit of a mess. I fully appreciated the throwback to when the default impulse of middle-of-the-pack American movies was to showcase some adult behavior and let a good cast figure out who they're playing and what's possible with their colleagues in the cast. I'd also have a hard time fighting for It's My Turn as an unfairly maligned gem. Sometimes average is enough. Grade:C+
