Mid-Life Crisis

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SUMMER WISHES, WINTER DREAMS

Directed by GILBERT GATES

Screenplay by STEWART STERN

The title has the sound of fake poetry, but the movie beneath it has the solid ring of truth. The good wishes of summer may be summarized as a desire to feel, and express more intensely, love in its several varieties. The bad dreams of winter are the products of life's thoughtless intrusions on Rita Waiden (Joanne Woodward).

Rita's ophthalmologist husband (Martin Balsam) is stolid and bumbling, and she can rarely bear even his lightest touches. A son has drifted into homosexuality, a daughter tolerates Rita impatiently. Rita's relationship with her mother (etched in dry point with just the slightest drop of acid by Sylvia Sidney) has become a series of long, grumbly quarrels. Rita, in short, cannot connect properly or rewardingly with anyone she cares about.

It is a banal problem perhaps. But it is also the stuff out of which millions of people create that awkwardly named but painful thing known as the mid-life crisis. For Rita it crests and breaks when her mother dies suddenly. Unmelodramatically but touchingly, Rita starts to come apart. This is not a subject that crops up much in movies aimed at today's youth-dominated market. Indeed, the central virtue of Summer Wishes may be that it is willing to dramatize such a human issue. But its carefully observed and delicately felt manner of doing so is also worthy of note.

When Stewart Stern wrote Rachel, Rachel for Miss Woodward, he displayed a gift for biting dialogue and for transforming ordinary situations into sequences that carry a sharp sting of recognition. The same ability is repeated here, notably at a family funeral where the mourners try to hide their dislike of one another. Gilbert Gates directed I Never Sang for My Father, an underrated film that was also about family tensions. He shows himself once again to be an unpretentious director with a talent for worming himself to the emotional core of characters and scenes.

As for Miss Woodward, there is no more authentic, believably feminine spirit on the screen today. In Summer Wishes she is brittle, cold, hysterical, but above all a woman who knows that she is lost and is in desperate search of herself. It is a lovely performance, almost matched by Balsam. Cannily holding back until he revisits Bastogne, where he fought in World War II--and where he was last fully alive--he shows us the center of a character deeper, more mysterious than we had imagined.

The film concludes satisfyingly but not resoundingly, its people merely having lived a little more and learned a little more--mostly about the need to accept themselves and those who are close to them. If she had her life to live over, Rita says at one point, "I'd still miss all the things I missed and I'd still do all the things I hated." Maybe so. But at the end one feels that, given a second chance, she might manage with more grace and with less pain for others. Meanwhile, her example is worth pondering--and seeing.

Richard Schickel

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