Twice in a Lifetime is a Bud Yorkin movie about a fifty-year-old guy who is bored with his very boring wife and finds someone much more fun and attractive who is actually interested in him and wants to leave the house and stop watching television. But here's the thing, everyone in this movie is a sad-sack. I think maybe this would be interesting if this weren't scripted like a kind of Hallmark thing with tidy endings and silly platitudes, but it is scripted like that.
The worst part about Twice in a Lifetime is that Amy Madigan, who plays the main couple's oldest daughter, is furious about her parents breaking up and can't seem to be even remotely reasonable about it. Instead she shrieks at her mother, shrieks at her father, shrieks at her little kid and just generally makes things much, much worse. It's really painful. And most of the movie I was saying oh, grow up, kid. She plays a twenty-seven-year-old who behaves like a teenager. It's embarrassing. What's odd about this is that I am not sure how the movie feels about this foolish woman. Her point of view is sort of treated as if it's reasonable. It isn't remotely reasonable.
Anyway, this was a bit of a slog. It's just not very enjoyable to watch. And of course that's fine in a movie, but this one doesn't have a point of view about any of it. It's just a story of a marriage that broke up and the two people in it got a new lease on life. Good for them, I say, but not much fun for the viewer.
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