Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York

What minimal value the novel may have had is forfeited by this appalling adaption of the story.

The heroine, played by Jeannie Berlin, emerges as a dull klutz, a humorless whiner with bulldog determination and charm to match.

Every time Furie's relentlessly dreary movie gets anywhere near a laugh, it immediately swerves and plunges into bathos.

Berlin goes through awkward, putatively comic body movements, as if trying to cry on her own shoulder.

It has some nice moments, but too many contrived or soggy scenes diminish believability.

Only Elaine May could have carried this movie off.

Furie, who apparently had at least skimmed the novel but failed utterly to absorb its message, gives the film a dark, dismal look totally at varience with the admittedly feeble stabs to create a comedy romance.

The story gets stickier by the minute, and there are an awful lot of minutes as Sheila drags on interminably.

It is not exactly a bad movie... despite all its shortcomings, it manages to stay afloat as an entertaining, likeable little film.

Sheila falls somewhere between a genius and a schlemiel... and the actress is understandably at a loss to make any real sense of her.