NEVER AGAIN
Rating out of 4 stars: 2 Reviewed by Harvey Karten USA Films Director: Eric Schaeffer Writer: Eric Schaeffer Cast: Jeffrey Tambor, Jill Clayburgh, Caroline Aaron, Bill Duke, Sandy Duncan, Michael McLean, Suzanne Shepherd, Lily Rabe Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 6/25/02
Sex sells. Duh. But you would have scarcely noted this forty years ago, when I was afraid to assign "Paul Revere's Ride" to my high-school English class because it had the line "through every Middlesex village and farm." Today's public by contrast can't get enough of the word. "Sex and the City" scores big on TV. "Sex and Lucia" is the big offering from Madrid cinema. How to tuck in the tummy and enlarge the breasts" is the subject of every other women's magazine. One virtually untouched field, however, is that of sex over the age of 50. Yes, it exists, as proved by Charlotte Rampling in the role of Marie Drillon ("Sous le sable"), who at the age of 53 has sex with her new lover while imagining her dead husband Jean watching them from a corner of the room with a beneficent smile on his face.
There's such a gap in the sex-over-fifty subgenre that it's a wonder that more movies like "Never Again" have not cropped up. In Eric Schaeffer's story, a 54-year-old divorcee, Grace (Jill Clayburgh who in real life is 58 but made up to look even older) is pushed by her two best friends Elaine (Caroline Aaron) and Natasha (Sandy Duncan) to start dating again because she's been "dried up" for the last seven years. When Christopher (Jeffrey Tambor), an exterminator by day and Greenwich Village jazz pianist at night, meets her, they're two of a kind. And that's the trouble. Since Christopher is a mirror image, also 54, but a divorcee who, like Grace, has decided never again to fall in love, their relationship seems doomed to run for a year at best. Since "Never Again" is a romantic comedy, we know from the start that writer-director Eric Schaeffer will go with the convention of ping-ponging the lovers, now together, now apart until the happy ending.
"Never Again" is a product of the indie filmmaker Eric Schaeffer, who writes what he knows. Having grown up on Manhattan's Upper West Side where he drove a cab for a while, he writes about a working-class fellow from that area (we see the standard signposts of that hip neighborhood, Fairway and Citarella though no Zabar's or H&H Bagels). Moreover, Schaeffer's "My Life's in Turnaround" features a taxicab encounter with Phoebe Cates, and now, eight years later, Schaeffer is again knocking out an essentially New York tale. "Never Again" features top acting with good chemistry between the two fifty-something people who meet cute at a gay bar (Grace and her two pals do not realize the segmentation until they were seated and Christopher goes there to test whether he is in fact a bisexual). Though this "Marty"-like tale seems to have everything going for it, the movie is simultaneously too naturalistic, with pedestrian conversations that you might hear any evening at the next table; and too off-the-wall, unless you believe that Grace would twice go into a sex shop to buy a dildo and then an entire wardrobe designed for a medieval knight who has better things to whip than a stallion.
I couldn't help comparing Schaeffer's work with Bille August's superior "A Song for Martin," also about two fiftysomethings, but as critic Matt Zoller Seitz points out in the June 26-July 2 edition of The New York Press, "The excitement comes from getting to know this couple as they get to know each other...You truly do feel as though you know them, and you CARE WHAT HAPPENS to them because you feel as if it's happening to you. Who cares about Schaeffer's two weirdos? Christopher is an OK man when he's playing jazz piano with his friend Earl (Bill Duke) on the bass, but as an escort he's unappealing overweight, bald, a scruffy four-day beard, and a passive-aggressive manner in his conversation. (Bill Duke, by contrast, is a mensch). For her part, Grace is immature, relating a literal blow-by-blow account of her sexual liberation to her two oversexed friends in front of a group of others in a beauty salon.
Nor does the comedy stand up. Grace's vision of a knight in shining armor has no more appeal than the medieval fantasy in the miserable recent adaptation of "The Importance of Being Earnest." While Christopher says that he wants to spend his life with Grace, we in the audience can only hope that Grace thinks for a moment before retching.
Rated R. Running time: 97 minutes. (C) 2002 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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