Fidgets at 40

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MIDDLE AGE CRAZY Directed by John Trent Screenplay by Carl Kleinschmitt

Is there anything more tedious than someone else's mid-life crisis? The answer, sadly, is yes. It is a movie about that familiar anguish made without a trace of humor, intelligence, originality or perspective. To put the matter more sim ply, Middle Age Crazy more than lives up to its blunt and witless title.

It seems almost pointless to describe the plot. Anyone who has not been lost in a galaxy far, far away for the past decade or so could describe it sight unseen. Bobby Lee Burnett (Bruce Dem) prospers building taco stands. His wife ( Ann-Margret) is driving him slightly bananas, but she is pleasant enough beneath her Southern accent and her kittenish sexual ways. Bur nett has his 40th birthday and, having received his Betamax, wonders if that is all life has to offer. Next thing he knows he has bought a Porsche, had an affair with a Dallas Cowgirl and told off his best client.

Along the way he entertains various fantasies of telling off not just the client but the whole damn world. That's about it. Di rector Trent has no sense of style; Writer Kleinschmitt pencils in obscenities for his characters to spout instead of lines that the actors might savor delivering. Neither Dern nor Ann-Margret is ever able to get into character. They try gamely, but they remain sociological abstractions pasted into a tasteless, materialistic milieu that has been overexplored by novelists and moviemakers.

If there is any lesson to be learned from ventures of this sort, it is that middleclass, middle-brow people should not try to show their superiority to other middleclass, middle-brow people by at tempting to satirize them. In the process they only prove the truth of Pogo's immortal cry: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

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