"Head Over Heels," based on a fine novel by Ann Beattie, wastes its first half hour. Then it lives up for a while to its aspirations, before disintegrating toward its close…. Charles' love is meant to be absolute, single-minded, of the sort that occupies consciousness totally. It never rings altogether true. In the year of pining, although he parks outside her house and makes scale models of it, although he never repairs the eye-glasses he broke the night she left him, although he talks constantly about her, in narration and in interior monologue (an unnecessary device, and one that almost never works in film), he neither gains nor loses weight, he manages to take his baths and go to work, he never has that desperate, ravaged look—or, on the other hand, any sign of a driving, overwrought ambition that might account for his surviving the year at...