More Than Twice

TWICE IN A LIFETIME, director/producer Bud Yorkin's over-wrought anthology on divorce and middle America, is a movie that you've seen before. You won't remember where you've seen it, but you've seen it. Probably on late-night TV, after Letterman. Or possibly at the movies, for in an inferior sort of way, Twice in Lifetime will remind you of a diluted Kramer vs. Kramer (the male version of what happens to a family after divorce), An Unmarried Woman (the slightly fast woman with precocious child version), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (the strong, earth mother woman with normal child version).

You may have even seen this movie--albeit in a slightly different form--by the same director in 1967, when divorce was a prime subject for light-hearted cinematic fluff, in Yorkin's Divorce: American Style starring Debbie Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke and Jason Robards. Those were the good old days, when a husband and wife would have a fight, get divorced on the spur of the moment, get remarried in a similarly shot-gun manner, then realize that they had just made the biggest mistake of their lives and rectify it by getting back together with their own true love.

Unfortunately, in the hip, personality conscious 80's, married couples don't get back together after they've been divorced. They go their separate and sometimes adulterous ways, as does blue-collar steel worker Harry Mackenzie (Gene Hackman) in Twice after he meets up with Audrey (Ann Margret), the new vamp/bartender in town, on the night of his fiftieth birthday. (Of all the unromantic places in which to meet up with one's future lifemate, a run-down neighborhood bar takes the cake.)

ALMOST INSTANTLY and most unbelievably, Harry dispenses with family life, discarding his wife of nearly thirty years, the long-suffering and fabric-softener conscious Kate (Ellen Burstyn), and his two daughters, big-mouthed Sunny, wonderfully over-played by Amy Madigan, and big-hearted Helen, quietly gushed by Ally Sheedy. Conducting himself with all the maturity of a love-sick adolescent, Harry gurgles gleefully to his lover, "It's been so long since I had somebody I wanted to please," totally overlooking the fact that just as he utters those words, his wife stays dutifully at home, either starching the collars of his shirts or cooking his dinner, or otherwise trying to please him.

Apart from the estrangement between Harry and Kate, Twice in a Lifetime has two other principal subplots, one dealing with daughter Sunny marital problems and the other with daughter Helen's plans to get married to her nineteen-year-old boyfriend. (Why anyone would want to get married after experiencing what this family has gone through is entirely unclear, but the film does follow the wedding dress to the end.)

The film tries to show how dad's deflating marriage makes daughter Sunny rethink her own marriage to an unemployed steel worker. We don't see much reevaluation/reconsideration going on, just a lot of bitter recrimination and vociferous shouting matches between Sunny and her father, climaxing in the staple confrontation scene, as initiated by Sunny, between the three members of the romantic triangle.

UNLIKE SUNNY, the placid Helen bears no malice against her father, the ideal but unfortunately non-existent child of divorce. She doesn't seem to mind that her father has moved in with another woman, depleting the family finances so that she is no longer able to go to college. Working around the situation with admirable aplomb, she decides that the best thing for her to do would be to marry her boyfriend Tim, of whom she casually remarks, "Mom, I'm marrying a guy with no class."

Unoriginal plots have made good films before. Fine acting and unusual direction could transform this dry tale into an honest, intense look at a family in crisis. Yorkin, however, does as much as he possibly can to curtail any such developments, repeatedly placing his characters against technicolor skies as they set off to build new lives across the rainbow in Puget Sound.