Perhaps that is the point. The hero of the story is Larry Livingstone (Jeff Bridges), a psychiatrist. He is the very model of a modern, sensitive male, who is able to see both sides of every issue so thoroughly that he even discusses his own mistakes with a certain bemused wonder. At the outset of the movie, he is married to a model (Farrah Fawcett) and lives happily, it would seem, with her and their two children. Then she says they need to have a talk.
We meet another family, the Goodwins, also with two children.
He is a concert pianist who is faced with the paralysis of one of his hands. She has devoted her life to supporting him. One day his hand betrays him in the middle of a concert, and two years later, we learn, he kills himself. Both this death and the divorce proceedings of the Livingstones are kept offscreen, while the film flashes forward three years to a meeting between the psychiatrist and Beth, the pianist's widow (Alice Krige).
They fall in love. Well of course they do. They're both in need, both lonely, and as he walks her home through the rain they discover, as people always do in the movies, that getting wet together is one of the most romantic things that can happen to you. There is a marriage, and then the movie settles in for the long haul, to consider Larry's problems as the new stepfather of Beth's kids, Cathy (Drew Barrymore) and Petey (Lukas Haas).
Cathy seems more or less normal. Petey has a habit of practicing his cello far into the night, "as if," his mother says, "he feels that he somehow caused his father's death by not practicing enough." When Beth is sent to Russia to photograph a concert tour, Larry is left with the two kids and tries his best to understand them and relate to them in an intelligent and sensitive way. Of course he fails, intelligently and sensitively. And when Beth and Larry get that worked through, Larry's first mother-in-law grows ill and dies. Alone with his first wife in a northern cottage, he grows foolishly nostalgic for what they once had together, and attempts to have it again, but is betrayed by his equipage.
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