Unsentimental Journey That's Life!

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

There is only one mid-life crisis that really counts. It occurs when the doctor decides on a biopsy and permits you the privilege of contemplating your mortality while awaiting the test results. This is the situation in which Gillian Fairchild (Julie Andrews) finds herself on a Friday afternoon, with the lab scheduled to close for the weekend that now stretches endlessly before her. Her three children, all lost in the self-absorption of young adulthood, are arriving to attend the party she is throwing for her husband's 60th birthday. Under these circumstances she decides to keep the terror to herself.

Wise idea. Husband Harvey (Jack Lemmon) is himself contemplating the last available mid-life crisis, the one that happens when you can no longer hide the fact that mid-life is actually disappearing and you are about to be irrevocably old. He is aquiver with outrage over this unseemly development. Harvey has other specific worries: he is impotent; he is a hypochondriac; he is self-pitying because as an architect he has become only prosperous, not great. In the course of the weekend he flirts with suicide, Roman Catholicism, other women and fortune telling -- everything but an honest confrontation with himself.

Harvey's mental circuits are overloaded, and as a result his tongue has short-circuited. He cannot stop from flapping out the news about every new affliction, every false hope of a cure. But this man's self-created problems are an actor's opportunity, and Lemmon responds with what is unquestionably the greatest of his portrayals of the middle-class American male at bay. His Harvey is a grotesquely funny monster, one who somehow engages our sympathy without once asking for it.

Lemmon, however, is not going to have only himself to thank for his umpteenth Oscar nomination. As the long-suffering Gillian, Andrews provides a sane contrast to the frazzle-dazzle of Lemmon's performance. There is more than mere discipline in her work. Her tart, get-on-with-it Englishness stiffens the spine of her characterization -- and makes the one moment when she gives in to her dread all the more poignant.

Above all, discipline may be the crucial element in the success of That's Life! There is always a strong temptation in pictures of this ilk to provide the stars with thumping self-recognition scenes. But if the scales finally fall from Harvey's eyes, they do not clang loudly to the floor but slither there ambiguously. Although Gillian surely understands that she is a kind of human sponge, sopping up all her family's messy emotional spillovers, the script never gives her the sort of revolutionary speech that would make a feminist stand up and cheer. Such words would be out of character and would not make the point as effectively as her steadfastness does.

When Director Edwards is at his best, there is something bracing and, these days, unique about his comedy. He is uninterested in sentimental- izing characters like Harvey and not much interested in seeing them rescued from the consequences of their passionate irrationality. He really wants to save the world by showing just how stupid some of its creatures can be. He may go about his task with cool and stylish professionalism, but he stokes a crusader's fire beneath his admirably calculated wit.