A New Life movie review & film summary (1988)
The real answer may be that there is no story if the couple stays together. All happy families are alike, but only an unhappy family is interesting at the box office. What we get, then, is a series of interesting scenes, well-acted, sometimes funny, sometimes exciting and sometimes very moving - but all of them unnecessary. Take, for example, the movie’s emotional high point, when Alda is at last able to overcome his squeamishness to be with his second wife when she delivers their baby. This is a powerful scene, but it still leaves one question unanswered: Why are they married to one another? What’s best about the movie are its many moments of close observation, which are easy to identify with. After Alda develops a crush on Hamel, for example, she plays slightly hard to get, and when she finally agrees to go to a Knicks game, he lets out a whoop of glee.
(Is part of his joy inspired by the knowledge that he will not have to miss the game for the date?) The breakup of the relationship between Ann-Margret and the possessive sculptor is dramatized in a scene where she boards a plane for a conference in Washington, only to find him in the next seat. “I thought I’d come along,” he says. “Isn’t this a great surprise?” The look on her face is indescribable.
Other good moments are provided by the relationship between Alda and Hal Linden, as his business partner and best friend. Linden is an unreconstructed male chauvinist bachelor, still chasing skirts at 50, utterly convinced that marriage is a jail and men are the prisoners. He has lines so cheerfully sexist that they peal with the ring of truth. A parallel relationship between Ann-Margret and her best friend (Mary Kay Place) is not quite so entertaining; their conversations run more toward sincerity than cynicism.
Like “Four Seasons,” his debut as a writer-director, “A New Life” is Alda’s version of various rites of passage. His ambition is not to bring anything new or revealing to his subject matter, but to see it as it is. If you told him you recognized all of the characters, that would be a compliment. The result is a little hard to evaluate. Alda’s purpose is to show us fairly typical people going through fairly typical things. They live, we watch. On that voyeuristic level, the movie works.
