Chances Are

Chances Are (1989)

 
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Mary Okeefe
Updated October 26, 2024
Chances Are

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Movie Overview | Chances Are (1989)

A man's love for his pregnant wife, Corinne Jeffries (Cybill Shepherd), is interrupted when a car accident sends him to heaven. He is reincarnated, however, and two decades later he is a writer named Alex Finch (Robert Downey Jr.). But when Alex starts dating Miranda Jeffries (Mary Stuart Masterson) -- his all-grown-up daughter from his previous life -- he remembers his love for Corinne. This spells trouble for his past-life best friend, Philip Train (Ryan O'Neal), who is now pursuing Corinne.

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Overall rating
 
3.4
Entertainment Factor
 
4.0(1)
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4.0(1)
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3.0(1)
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1980's Romcom with style
(Updated: January 04, 2025)
Overall rating
 
3.4
Entertainment Factor
 
4.0
Story
 
4.0
Actors Performance
 
3.0
Cinematography
 
3.0
Sound Track
 
3.0
Cybill Shepard stars in “Chances Are” as a Washington, D.C., professional woman whose husband is killed in a traffic accident in the early 1960s. She never quite gets over that loss. Years pass and then decades, and she still treasures her love in her heart. She was pregnant when she became a widow, and she raises her daughter and leads her life and never remarries. Her love is so constant that she remains oblivious to the fact that the family’s best friend has always been in love with her.

Meanwhile, we get another one of those standard movie fantasies of heaven, in which everyone walks around on white clouds and speaks English and looks like they were painted by Norman Rockwell. And we discover that it’s time for the soul of Shepherd’s dead husband to be recycled back to earth again. Through a heavenly mix-up, however, the soul is not inoculated with a special forgetfulness serum, and so the scene is set for the reincarnated husband to recognize his wife again.

When we meet the reborn husband, he is a student at Yale, where Shepherd’s daughter also goes to school, of course.  The student and daughter start dating, she brings him home to meet her mom, and, of course, suddenly all of his memories come flooding back and he realizes that Shepherd is his wife, and he is her reincarnated husband.

It’s really at this point that the movie begins; everything earlier has just been laying the foundations. It is also at this point that I had better stop describing the details, because “Chances Are” has a lot of fun with the implications of its plot. If the student is indeed the reborn husband, for example, then he is dating his own daughter. If he is not, then Shepherd will be guilty of stealing her daughter’s boyfriend. And so on.  The director approaches these paradoxes in a time-honored way, with lots of swinging bedroom doors and mistaken identities under the covers.

Although Shepherd gets top billing, and deserves it, in a way this movie belongs to the student, played by Robert Downey Jr. He is at the center of the action, trying to juggle with the emotions of both women.  If Downey were not able to bring a certain weight and conviction to his performance, everything else in the movie would collapse, but Downey is convincing and good.

The movie itself is surprisingly affecting, perhaps because Shepherd never goes for easy laughs but plays her character seriously: This Yale student, after all, may actually harbor the soul of her late husband, and that is an awesome possibility. By the end of the movie, all of the confusing possibilities have been sorted out with impeccable romantic logic, and the movie somehow provides a happy ending for everyone. 

Chances Are Ending Scene & End Credits (After All)

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