I DID NOT MEET THEM UNTIL years later after they were married. From what our mutual friends told me, they were a happy couple. Having met initially at a wedding reception, they went out for a drink a couple of days after the event. This was followed by a series of dates that progressed until it became official, they were a couple. I was told they took turns hosting dinner parties and game nights at each one’s home. They took vacations together, enjoying each other’s company more and more. After a couple of years, they got engaged with a fall wedding date planned for the year after. I was introduced to them after they had been married for fifteen years. Everything I had heard about them seemed to be accurate, but I was surprised to notice a bit of an edge to some of their comments. At first, I thought they were just teasing each other, but some of the comments sounded strong and judgmental to me. Because I only saw them in social circles and not one to one, each time I encountered them, they seemed to be more argumentative with each other and, in my opinion, unhappy. My impressions wound up being accurate because it was only a year or so later that they agreed to get a divorce. The ex-husband stopped coming to social events, but the ex-wife continued and from conversations, one of her comments stuck with me. She said she had outgrown her husband.      FUNNY, I WAS FAMILIAR WITH THAT word, “outgrown.” I knew three other people who said the same thing about their reasons for divorcing their spouses. I believed it to be a valid reason because though I did not experience it in a love relationship, I did in a friendship. We had been friends all through school and several years after. Where we used to have similar reactions to situations, as time passed one of us started to have different viewpoints about things and no longer shared the camaraderie that resulted from reacting similarly to various situations. Not to be rude, but I believe this happened because I had been working on myself, emotionally and mentally, and was maturing at a different rate than my friend. The gap that formed between us only grew as time passed. It was not too long after where we started getting together less, not sharing as much personal information to avoid getting into any type of disagreement due to different perceptions. There was a sense of sadness as the years of friendship were simply turning into a stored memory, but the sense of relief generated from less time together was getting stronger. I chalked it up to one of life’s lessons; something like what took place in this comedic, romantic drama.      SUFFERING FROM WRITER’S BLOCK, A COMPOSER walks the streets of New York City, where a chance encounter both surprises and scares him into a different state of mind. With Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones-TV, American Dreamer) as Steven Lauddem, Anne Hathaway (The Witches, The Hustle) as Patricia Jessup-Lauddem, Marisa Tomei (Spider-Man franchise, The Big Short) as Katrina Trento, relative newcomer Evan Ellison as Julian Jessup and Harlow Jane (Dig, I Love Us) as Tereza Szyskowski; the cast is what saved this movie. Everyone was wonderful, beautifully playing off each other. I appreciated the different story lines of the script; however, I felt there was too much going on that robbed each story of fully developing a sequence of growth. Each one alone was intriguing, but the range of emotions they drew out clashed somewhat for me. However, I still enjoyed watching this film, because it kept my curiosity piqued. Maybe the writers had some writer’s block of their own, which caused them to create extra story lines and weaken the distinctions between comedy, drama and romance.                     

2 ½ stars