Plot
Pete Seltzer (Matthau) is introduced to Tillie Schlaine (Burnett) at a party. Her friends Gertrude and Bert are the hosts and attempting to fix her up.
Pete is a confirmed bachelor with eccentric habits. When he isn't doing odd motivational research for a San Francisco firm, he plays ragtime piano and makes bad puns. He periodically pops in and out of Tillie's life, going days without calling but showing up spontaneously at her door. When they finally make love, he learns Tillie is a virgin.
It appears Pete might still be seeing other women, but when he gets a promotion at work, Tillie announces it's time to get married. They do, then buy a house and have a baby boy. Pete's affairs, however, apparently continue, Tillie even needing to discourage one of his young lovers at lunch.
Years go by until one day 9-year-old son Robbie (Lee Montgomery) is stricken with a fatal illness. Pete tries to shield the boy by keeping him in what Tillie calls "a world of nonsense," but the inevitable death destroys Tillie's religious faith and ruptures their marriage.
Tillie abstains from sex while Pete turns to drink and takes an apartment. Tillie's depression is alleviated a bit by a friendship with Jimmy (Rene Auberjonois), who is gay but willing to marry her if that would make Tillie happy. Bert makes a pass at Tillie as well. When she and Jimmy conspire to make Gert (Geraldine Page) reveal her true age at long last, the result is a public brawl between the two women.
Tillie ends up in a sanitarium. Her life has come to a standstill until Pete turns up one day. When she sees the way their son's death affects him, after years of his hiding it, Tillie and Pete leave side by side.
Read more about this topic: Pete 'n' Tillie
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)