12-year-old Manhattan classmates, an intelligent boy and a girl from affluent backgrounds, must deal with their clucking, suspicious, embattled parents. The boy, new in school, is shuffled back and fourth between his bitterly-divorced mother and father, while the girl's parents are trying to conceal from her the fact they are all but officially separated. Faintly amusing comedy-drama wavers uncomfortably at times between satire and hard-shelled sentiment, with the portraits of the immature adults far too obvious. After 22 minutes of character introductions, I was still waiting for the movie to get started. The picture was lent some critical cache at the time because of Robert Altman's involvement as executive producer, though it was released four months after "A Little Romance" and may have confused moviegoers. These kids (Trini Alvarado and Jeremy Levy) are sexually curious, precocious and combative--no angels--and they provide the only interest in an otherwise parched scenario. ** from ****

Okay, so the title is ... wrong. It's not about rich kids at all, this movie is about kids dealing with their parents' divorce. And, a little with budding love, age 12.Franny is a 12 year old girl, an only child from an upper middle class, two-income family in New York City, who knows that her parents' marriage is about to fall apart. She's guided by a classmate whose parents already are divorced 3 years earlier, he's new kid at her school. She's mildly precocious, she reads "The Joy of Sex", the illustrated edition, no less, but she's also a topographical nitwit.The two best things about this film are Trini Alvarado's acting and the scenes of New York which depict a dreamy era. It wasn't so innocent a time, Iran hostage crisis, Reaganomics, and a time when police brutality against minorities was worse than now, but we didn't know about it then. But still. This offers a peek into a somewhat magical New York where 12 year olds demand to walk to school alone, because they're well...12 and not babies, where a class of 25-30 pupils goes to do PE with just ONE teacher in Central Park and where kids walk their dogs solo. (To be sure, this is the 'good' part of town, and 2016 crime is actually half now of what it was in the 80s New York City. Of course this is not what it FEELS like these days. There's the socio-economic paradox of 'the less crime there actually is, the unsafer 'people' - read: whites - .... FEEL'........I digress.)The movie is dated in the displayed attitudes towards women, Jamies mother doesn't care if her 12 year old SON "screws the brains out" of a 12 year old girl (!), which points to severe unbalance: boys can do what they want, but girls are floozies. Also, there's like 5 gratitutous (and unflattering) shots of Alvarado's butt. That seems a bit unfriendly. The dated attitude towards gays which we see in the vehement denial of Franny that her father might be gay. Nowadays it would come with an obligatory addition of "It would be okay if he was, of course". Not so much in 1979.8 oth 10, The Melancholic Alcoholic.

Who can not like John Lithgow even when he is an adulterer? But that isn't the main theme of this movie. Kids dealing with divorce in a very touching way is the real story here. I saw this when it was released and was so struck by it I went back and saw it again the next day. In Lawton, Oklahoma, no less. Not my fault, I was in the Army stationed there at Ft. Sill. Years later I got a copy of the VHS and watched it again. Trini Alvarado is just excellent in this. It is what a movie should be, a thoughtful look into people's lives, with the plus of beautiful cine of NYC. Being from the wide open spaces, the whole NYC thing is pretty fascinating to me. Anyway, this is a really good movie that stands up pretty good over lo, these many years.

They know their IQ's are near genius. They know that the capital of Kansas is Wichita. They know where Mom hides `The Joy of Sex'. But they don't know why their parents have all split up.This modern look at adolescence rings sad but true. The `Rich Kids' of the title are smart in all of the commonly accepted ways and they are smart enough to realize that there is more to love than what they can see in their parent's sad relationships. In many ways it's the kids in this film that are acting like adults. Perhaps that's the point. Perhaps the `Rich Kids' of the title are not the two adolescents at all, but the adults that are complicating their lives.