The romance at the center of Joan Micklin Silver's Head Over Heels is … rather murky, and that's a disaster for this very small movie, which gives little evidence of wanting to do anything more than tell us some intimate truths about its leading characters….

Joan Micklin Silver, who wrote the screenplay as well as directed, has been faithful to the bleak mood of Ann Beattie's novel [Chilly Scenes of Winter], a book nearly punitive in its insistence that life is joyless, harsh, mediocre. The young people in this movie—the generation of the seventies—have been stripped of cultural identity, anger, rebellious instincts. These enervated children of the middle class lack the energy of the urban poor—not even pop culture speaks to them. Yet the grayness, the vacuumy deadness of both book and movie, seems to strike some people as the truth about life. My own feeling...