Don't Dream It's Over

Twice in a Lifetime is an unassuming anonymous movie from 1985 I remember seeing when it first came out and I was completely enraptured by its ability to be exactly what it was:  a realistic and sad but somehow optimistic drama about a working-class guy celebrating his 50th birthday by leaving his wife and family for a red-headed barmaid.  

Upon first viewing I was floored.  It wasn't necessarily the novelty of the concept:  it was soap-opera territory of course.  It was the way the concept was delivered, not the content.  Every actor in this thing works it; you feel like you are inside somebody's family album, claustrophobically connected to their whims, wishes and hurts.  Amy Madigan as the outraged daughter got most of the applause (even an Academy Award nom for Best Supporting Actress), but it is the whole gang that delivers the goods. An ensemble masterpiece. 

Gene Hackman is the lead:  his sorry-eyed take on a working-class nobody finally getting his chance to love somebody feels authentic not because it is studied or performed, but because Gene seems to want to escape the fractured psychology of it all.  He doesn't want to be in a movie; he wants to be in life.  He conveys the happiness of a breakup, the freedom of it, like no one else, and while he also feels the horrible ripples and guilt there's this vigor in the way he moves that lets you know the escape is worth it.  Ann-Margeret plays his mistress with that same sort of natural abandon, but her performance is informed by a hunger that lets you know it's not a decision as much as a drive.  It's worth it even if it's not.  

But it's Ellen Burstyn who truly gives the whole enterprise its spine and soul.  She's the abandoned wife, the woman who has no idea why, and yet as the movie moves toward a conclusion you feel Ellen's Kate begin to understand it was not abadonment as much as her husband knowing something before she allowed herself to.  Ellen gives Kate an energy that presupposes tragedy.  She has such a sense of life and humor and luck that you know she's going to be OK.  You can count on that.  Which is life-affirming.  

When something is over, you never want it to be.  You want all of it to be sucked back into itself, but the genie never goes back into the bottle of course.  This movie gives you that necessary insight, a vantage point mostly missing from life.  The worst happens, and then you move on, and you try to make something else happen, something better.  The dream isn't about succeeding; it's about surviving what you thought was success.  

This sad, sweet, unpretentious little movie allows relief and reprieve; you feel better about life when it's over.