Autumn Spring: Something's Gotta Give
Cooper, Rand Richards
NEVER SAY DIE 'Autumn Spring' & 'Something's Gotta Give' ome year's end, with Hollywood serving up another round of high-gloss, $100-million epics, it's nice to be able to turn to European movies....
...Time's passage looms...
...Inevitably the tall tales land him in trouble...
...At the film's outset he suffers a mild heart attack, requiring a recuperative stay at his girlfriend's family's house in the Hamptons, where the two have been cavorting—and where Marin's divorced mother, Erica (Diane Keaton), a renowned playwright, is trying to work on her new script...
...The film converts a heart attack into a change of heart, countering the ravages of age with a playful hope for romance...
...but there are plenty of surprises along the way...
...Still, director Michalek and his screenwriter, Jiri Hubac, keep upping the comic ante...
...SCHWADRON y comparison, Something's Gotta Give illuminates the American paradigm of old age...
...It's intolerable...
...corn if Christianity---without losing its soul—is yet to avoid losir g touch with the world, it must constantly update itself by dialogue with all the intellectual currents of today...
...What Emilie takes most seriously is death...
...He wants to fly around the world in a balloon, and he refuses to admit that our paths don't lead anywhere anymore," Emilie complains...
...With an irate real estate agent chasing them for $400 spent wooing them for an after-noon, Fanda and Eda trundle around town, trying to hit up various friends for a loan...
...He makes paper planes out of the death notices, and rolls his eyes in dismay during their walks to the cemetery where their son, Jara, has chosen a grave for them...
...She lives in a bustle of preparation for her own—and Fanda's—death, perpetually updating a file of materials that includes death notices and instructions for flowers, music, and casket...
...Central to it is the banishment of sorrow, and the defiance of death not in Fanda's brand of heroic play-fulness, but through a fantasy of undying eros...
...The outrageous stories they tell—in one, Eda has a prospective part in a major motion picture lined up, butneeds $400 of tap dancing lessons to get it—inevitably backfire, and the two end up helping out friends even shorter of cash than they are...
...With Eda, he roams the city pulling whimsical pranks and telling whopper lies...
...The truth is, it goes by fast, doesn't it...
...Commonweal 24 January 16, 2004...
...The spirit is willing, but the flesh...
...With Viagra hijinks, amorous scenes involving blood-pressure cuffs, and a romantic mix-up that centers on misplaced reading glasses, Something's Gotta Give provides an invigorating dose of American comic optimism...
...Nicholson has a gift for physical comedy, swaying dizzily in a hospital johnny that unflatteringly reveals his derriere...
...Yet all is not exactly as it seems...
...There's little doubt where all this is headed: toward a rearrangement that gently chides—and corrects—America's youth obsession...
...Nicholson exerts a lighter touch than usual, and for Keaton the role of Erica is a tour de force—her trademark ditziness joined to a focused intelligence and a mania for control that gradually, if reluctantly, yields to the imperatives of passion...
...Whatever you do, don't grow old...
...A rascal, a scamp, Fanda lives by his devotion to the grand gesture...
...Autumn Spring perches its tender comedy on a choice between the maturity that masks a meek acceptance of death, and a spirit that refuses to yield...
...He "borrows" the paper early every morning from a neighbor's mailbox, and returns it with the crossword puzzle filled in...
...It drove me nuts...
...Erica muses...
...Rand Richards Cooper C Commonweal 2 3 January 16, 2004 "My husband was sensitive, caring, and understanding...
...Later on, Fanda wheels Eda, stricken by a stroke, around a hospital garden...
...It drives his wife of forty-four years crazy...
...that what inspires can-not be extricated from what exasperates...
...In the later parts of the film, after she has given herself over to love, she shouts, wails, weeps, exults, and wails again...
...In truth, Fanda (Vlastimil Brodsky) is a retiree of modest means, and the would-be personal assistant is his best friend, Eda (Stanislav Zindulka...
...Erica, meanwhile, becomes the object of surprise attentions from Harry's handsome, if boring, young physician (Keanu Reeves...
...The maestro is distinctly unimpressed...
...Jara has his own agenda...
...I really don't want to play up-tight nurse to your bad-boy patient," Erica informs Harry, appalled at his en-tire act...
...To this end, the author proposes a necessary two-way dialectic between theology and the world: an ongoing dialectic ultimately essential to both church and world...
...In a gourmet food store he greedily scrutinizes his twenty-something girlfriend, Marin (Amanda Peet), and in his lasciviousness he all but makes love to his ice cream cone...
...It's fun to watch writer/director Nancy Meyers turn the tables on the B hapless playboy, confounding him with intimations of mortality...
...The scenes of Nicholson and Keaton walking on the beach glow with warmth, as Nicholson's grizzled sensualist confronts the dawning of an intimacy founded in the shared predicament of age...
...Simply conceived and executed, Autumn Spring dishes out scenes that touch the heart with a surprising deftness...
...Stop playing the fool and takelife seriously...
...Jack Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a sixty-three-year-old record mogul and notorious bachelor proud to have been profiled in a magazine article titled "The Escape Artist...
...Like the Hugh Hefner lifestyle he emulates, however, Harry is a little outdated...
...They make life grand, and that makes it worth living...
...For the maestro is an impostor...
...Her complaint, she herself half-realizes, is an inadvertent profession of love, and bit by bit the film moves toward a spouse's recognition that her husband's will to live is it-self incorrigible...
...Not only for a change of scale, but also a different palate of emotions and ideas...
...he wants to move them into senior housing, so he can have their apartment for his ex-wife and kids...
...Something's Gotta Give takes as its starting point the American horror of decrepitude...
...Autumn Spring, which opened in the United States a few months ago and is now available on DVD, begins with the visit of a wealthy retired conductor to the vast estate he's viewing for prospective purchase in the Czech countryside...
...his old age is a perpetual boyhood...
...As Eda's health declines, the movie turns increasingly poignant...
...It is a hilariously winning depiction of love's insane vitality...
...Take the idea, for instance, that con-fronting old age—the waning of energies and options, the loss of a best friend—might form the basis of comedy, and that spry absurdity might be wrung from the themes of aging and grief...
...Very shabby," he sniffs to his person-al assistant, as the real estate agent frowns in dismay...
...Fanda wants no part of it...
...He'll ride the train without a ticket, then, when caught, cordially pay the fine—and give the conductor a big tip...
...Welcome to the Central European sensibility and to Autumn Spring, Vladimir Michalek's feisty and bittersweet comedy of life after seventy-five...
...Ahhh," he muses in a lusty voice-over, as we watch glam girls sashay sexily toward a Manhattan club, "the sweet uncomplicated satisfaction of the younger woman...
...The Dialectical Development of Doctrine A Methodological Proposal by Charles Dickinson $25.00 Hardcover to order call 313.624.9784 Dove Booksellers 13904 Michigan Avenue Dearborn, Michigan 48126 www.dovebook...
...Eventually Emilie's frustrations lead the couple to divorce court and a hearing before a skeptical judge...
...Yet the lies, we understand, have a purpose all their own...
...Meyers keeps things peppy with strategic uses of bossa nova, Eartha Kitt chansons, and images of Paris on a snowy night...
...Seen through Harry's eyes, the world is a garden, crowded with ripe young women free for the plucking...
...No one does this kind of thing better than Nicholson...
...When Fanda chivalrously helps a much younger woman with packages in the hallway of the apartment building, the two exchange a look of warmth, and a sweetly haunted sympathy extends across the gulf of age...
...Touring mansions they can't possibly afford to buy is a favorite con of theirs, one pulled just for kicks...
...Emilie (Stella Zazvorkova) commands her incorrigible husband...
...she has turned responsibility into a substitute for life itself...
...It's gone too fast," Eda says, simply...
...Like the blink of an eye," says Harry...
...It is a numbing crunch of late-life pressures, and Fanda responds with flights of grandiosity and guile...
...His life is about getting away with things...
Vol. 131 • January 2004 • No. 1
