Once Again
Written: Jul 31 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cute love story. Fine work by Jeffrey Tambor.
Cons: Ham-handed filmmaking
The Bottom Line: It's nice to see actors playing love scenes who are actually of the same generation for a change.
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| houstoncritic's Full Review: Never Again |
Earlier this week, as it was reported in my fair city’s local media (though, no doubt its sensational nature has propelled it into national coverage by now), a middle-aged woman, having caught her husband red-handed as he was about to engage in a hotel tryst with a younger woman, brought their marriage to a swift end when she rag-dolled the philanderer with her car—not once, but three times—finally parking her Mercedes on top of the man. Later, in a statement loaded with metaphor and minimalism, she told the police that “It was an accident.” In this era of crumbling marriages and skyrocketing divorce rates, it’s refreshing to see a film showing a man and a woman, both of a decent age, meeting and falling in love. The flip side is always grist for the tabloids.
Grace (Jill Clayburgh) is a divorced woman who has just packed her only daughter off to college. At fifty-four, she immerses herself in her work as a foster parent caseworker, goes to bars with her bawdy and otherwise happily married friends, and then sits at home, alone and painfully lonely, convinced that she will never again fall in love; vowing never again to allow her heart to be broken.
Christopher (Jeffrey Tambor) is a bug exterminator who has inherited the family business. Also fifty-four and divorced, and estranged from his only son, he wiles away his evenings playing jazz piano in a smoky Greenwich Village club. He is also unfulfilled from a constant onslaught of female fans; women it seems, several years his junior. Sex alone, even as frequently as it happens for him, just isn’t enough to fulfill his life. And after one particularly uneventful sexual encounter, he is awakened from a dream of sublime sexual fulfillment only to discover that his dream partner was a man.
A revelation settles upon Christopher that he might, in fact, be gay, though his friend and bass player sideman Earl (Bill Duke) suggests to him he would certainly have known this many years earlier before the odometer of life had flipped over so many times. Not convinced that he is not gay, Christopher answers a sex advertisement and arranges a tryst with what he presumes will be a transsexual bombshell, Alex (Michael McKean, in an unnecessary scene of comedic horror). Escaping with his life and (essentially) his virginity, Christopher flees to the local gay bar.
This is coincidentally the same bar that Grace has picked to commiserate with her friends after her disastrous blind date with a dwarf. Meeting by happenstance at the bar, Grace presumes that Christopher is a gay man, and Christopher presumes immediately that Grace is a transsexual. When they finally overcome their own embarrassing presumptions of each other, they decide to have dinner together. Limiting their conversation to the hypotheticals of dating—though never actually admitting the two of them are on a date—Grace and Christopher seem to hit it off. He walks her home. And in a few days he picks up the phone and calls her. They arrange a real date this time. The story proceeds accordingly, and rather predictably, after this.
What really sets this film apart from the usual meet-cute formula is its depiction of a romance between older folk. Not people in their thirties or even forties, but a man and woman in their mid-fifties. Past a certain point in one’s life, once a person is well entrenched in all the nasty habits of that life, the thought of once again finding rapacious sex and classical romance seem as remote as the idea of ridding one’s body of beta blockers and anti-inflammatories. (Speaking for myself, were I to stumble across just the right mate once again—and I speak here of a woman willing to endure my consistent intake of cigars and scotch, not to mention my constant outpouring of word-strewn opinion—then I would gladly endure a few peccadilloes of personality from her: bourbon drinking, perhaps…or, say, her annual pilgrimage to anticipated landing zones at Roswell?). Had the script addressed the clash of personalities that would necessarily have arisen between these oldsters, and not concentrated instead upon the two character’s fear of commitment and the exhaustions of love, the viewers would have been better served.
Displaying little more, in my opinion, that a minimum of cinematic competence as a director, Schaeffer, nonetheless has his heart in the right place. He certainly did well in casting his supporting characters with Sandy Duncan, Caroline Aaron, and especially with the maddeningly taciturn Bill Duke as Christopher’s homunculus, Earl. But this chair filler was distracted by the craggy and stringy appearance of Ms. Clayburgh’s Grace, bolstered, a bit too often, by much younger and more lithe body doubles.
But the really captivating character in the film, in fact what kept this film afloat, was the sheer pleasure of watching Jeffrey Tambor’s Christopher. Blessed with a sense of timing that would make a figure skater envious, Tambor captivates his every scene. So elastic is his miraculous sense of timing that I found myself leaning forward in my chair, anticipating his exact moment of release. With the possible exceptions of Geoffrey Rush or Brendan Gleeson, no other actor working today can so overwhelm a scene to the point of excluding whatever beauty or other distractions that might share the camera with him. Though to her credit, Ms. Clayburgh did manage to hold her own most of the time.
Though this film’s dramatic efforts may have fallen flat—not to mention suffering technically from an often less-than-deft touch with the camera—I certainly do not fault director Schaeffer for his overall efforts in this often slapstick, sometimes sexually vulgar comedy. And it is certainly nice to see a light-hearted romance between two real adults. Don’t expect meat and potatoes with this film. Popcorn and candy will do nicely.
(As a personal note, I must thank my tiny but loyal cult of readers for propelling me into the lofty ranks of Top Reviewer. I'm sure I must have set a new record for the minimum number of readers required to achieve this rank. Thank you, each and all. I promise to keep juggling words just for you).
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
houstoncritic
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Member: Chris Raney
Location: Houston
Reviews written: 35
Trusted by: 19 members
About Me:
Aesthetic crusader from the muddy, third coast. Championing the small but worthy.
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