This is a difficult film to assess. On the one hand, it is a very masterfully crafted tale of a couple that meet and eventually drift apart...way apart. On the other hand, the film is painful to watch and leaves a lasting impression of some pretty horrific emotions. It is comedy at its blackest, where humor and pain are one and the same, and you can't take one without the other. Danny DeVito's directorial debut proved to be a cinematic success, but there's a heavy price to pay to experience it. I give it a high but not perfect rating, because it is a fantastic motion picture...but much too costly for my tastes.