When romantic infatuation takes over our lives, we are sent into a tizzy. We find ourselves lost in contemplation of the loved one and obsessed with everything about him or her from the smallest gestures to the things he or she says. Love intrudes into every waking moment and at night our dreams are ablaze with further ecstasies. Again and again, we are astonished by the seeming superiority of the object of our love. This person is idealized, endowed with splendiferous powers and attributes, and felt to be the most wonderful being in the universe. In the midst of this swoon, we are convinced that our life would not be worth living if this person were to leave. Our raison d'etre and self-worth are inextricably bound up with him or her.
Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford) is madly in love with his step-mother Eve (Sigourney Weaver), a middle-aged scientist who works at a lab. He savors this secret knowledge, and it provides him with transcendence and bliss. This fifteen year old is a very smart young man with a firm grasp of French and an enchantment with the wisdom of Voltaire. On a Thanksgiving break from prep school, he immediately comes across to adults as an extraordinary youth with ample reserves of enthusiasm and intelligence. While his farther Stanley (John Ritter) , a university professor, thinks he has fallen in love with a young beauty his own age, Oscar zeroes in on seducing Eve and declaring his allegiance to her.
At Thanksgiving dinner, he desperately tries to get her attention but winds up at the apartment of her best friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth). In a drunken stupor, Oscar allows this gifted chiropractor to give him a massage. Wearing Eve's scarf drenched in her perfume, Diane seduces him and the next morning he arises to deal with the consequences. When he learns from her that there is "a void" in Eve's life, Oscar is rejuvenated and ready to resume his quest.
Gary Winick directs this thoroughly enjoyable romantic comedy with just the right mixture of humor and insight into the dynamics of limerance (the state of falling in love). The savvy screenplay by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller has endowed Oscar with a winning combination of adult confidence and adolescent vulnerability. In one of the film's most entertaining scenes, he regales a circle of Diane's female friends with his repartee; they are all jealous of her evening with this lively and suave young man. But the real corker comes when Oscar, Diane, Eve, and Stanley go out to dinner together and a few of Oscar's secrets are brought out into the light of day. One of the most concrete indicators of his infatuation for Eve is his wearing fake sideburns after learning of his beloved's adoration of Elvis.
