1. This movie is like the Avengers: Endgame of will-they-or-won’t-they fakeouts.
2. The fonts! This was an era of big, gorgeous type, from sans serif (that sexy Helvetica on the poster in the affair apartment) to the chonky serif fonts seen in the titles. During the innumerable commuter rail scenes, I couldn’t take my eyes off the booze and cigarette ads.
3. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro resolutely playing unassuming characters. They both know they look fucking amazing, but they both shrug it off with an attitude of, “It’s New York…a lot of people look fucking amazing.”
4. What an era of brick-and-mortar shopping. It’s wild to watch the opening meet-cute where they’re both carrying as many parcels as Mr. Tumnus and realize that’s how it actually used to be.
5. I started out thinking this movie was a prototypical romcom, complete with the wacky best friends, but then I realized that despite its structure, this is a romcom with the “com” surgically removed. It’s just a straight drama, and it totally works on that level, but it does make you realize how moviegoers used to features like this were ready for Nora Ephron.
6. On that note, it’s amazing how much more compelling a movie is when it actually plays by the rules of normal human behavior. Molly and Frank do have more than a couple unlikely connections, but the meetings and misses effectively represent their mixed emotions about their relationship. Neither of the leads’ spouses are either demonized or beatified: screenwriter Michael Cristofer firmly sticks to his premise that it’s entirely possible for two people in perfectly healthy relationships to meet someone else and realize there could be a better match out there. It’s an old saw that what you ultimately owe yourself and your partner in a situation like this is honesty, and it’s kind of astonishing that this movie ultimately permits its characters to achieve that.
7. Wikipedia calls this movie a “box office bomb,” but that doesn’t seem entirely fair given that it made $11.1 million on a $12 million budget. Not what you’d hope for, but hardly Heaven’s Gate. As Michael Koresky notes in his book Films of Endearment, the inspiration for the Criterion Channel collection that includes this movie, middlebrow adult dramas like this used to be a staple of the studio system and they’re now essentially gone from that universe: today, a more typical “adult drama” in theaters is a Downton Abbey movie, a franchise flick.
8. The first name in this movie’s closing credits is casting director Pat McCorkle, a name I recognized from dozens of Guthrie Theater programs. Imagine the stories you’d hear at happy hour with her.
9. My favorite detail in this movie is in the Christmas morning scene, when the parents are trying to exchange their own presents and the kids start putting the decals on their Hot Wheels ramp in all the wrong places. When Frank, whose entire job is getting the details right on construction projects, gets this look of praying for fortitude, I felt that. (Second favorite detail: Meryl fighting with her shoulder pads.)
10. I absolutely just put The Big Book of Sailing on my TBR.

– Jay Gabler