Muddling Along in Middle Age

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FOUR SEASONS Directed and Written by Alan Alda

In the spring, a middle-aged man's fancy ponderously turns to thoughts of airline hostesses. This despite the fact that Nick Callan (Len Cariou) is engaged in a less taxing rite of renewal--joining with his wife (Sandy Dennis) and their best friends the Zimmers (Jack Weston and Rita Moreno) and the Burroughses (Alan Alda and Carol Burnett) to open the latter's vacation house for the season.

By summer, when the group has chartered a boat in the Caribbean, Nick's wife, a neurotic photographer, has been replaced by Ginny the stewardess (Bess Armstrong), who is pretty and sensible but who rocks their boat with her enthusiastic lovemaking. Not only does it keep the other couples awake all night, it makes them wonder where the magic of their marriages has gone.

In autumn, the friends spare a thought for their children, particularly Lisa Callan (Beatrice Alda), the college-student daughter of the newly broken marriage. Depression has rendered her almost completely inarticulate, well beyond the reach of parental jolly-ups. Meantime, Kate Burroughs has reached the crockery-throwing stage. The unfailing reasonableness of her husband, she decides, is a mask for emotional impoverishment.

By winter, the stewardess is pregnant, and she feels excluded from real intimacy with the other couples. Danny Zimmer, older than the rest, is convinced that he is skating on the thin ice of mortality. When he falls through a frozen pond, in an unnecessary effort to rescue Ginny, the irony of one life's beginning as another starts to close down is contemplated.

The Four Seasons is Alan Alda's promising, if imperfect directorial debut. The promise and the very real pleasures of the film derive from its eagerness to explore the mid-life passage with good-humored civility. Alda is particularly good at examining the male sensibility. Cariou's philanderer is troubled by the directions in which his sexuality has driven him, puzzled by the ways in which marriage has ill used his wife as well as himself. Weston's worrier is rich and touching as it becomes clear that his comic fussings over his diet and his money are a way of raging against the dying of the light. Alda is perhaps hardest on the man he plays, showing that the very characteristic that has made him one of the country's most popular actors -- sweet common sense -- can sometimes prevent one from feeling anything very profoundly.

Alda is less secure in dealing with the women. Moreno has no role. The Sandy Dennis character is excessively loony even for a person caught up in the crisis of separation. Except for the confrontation scene with Alda, Carol Burnett is a bystander, but without being intrusive, she creates an appealing character through her intelligent responses to the action swirling about her. But it is Armstrong, playing the young intruder, who gets to comment on the habits and assumptions of these old friends and so has the best female role.

It may be that as a writerdirector, Alda is too eager to please. He goes for big laughs where a small smile would perhaps be truer to the rueful mood he tries to establish. One feels he is sometimes easing away from the tougher implications of his tale. There is also an empty prettiness to his shooting, especially in the transitions from season to season. Still, American movies are rarely as alert as The Four Seasons is to the tensions implicit in friendship, to the social conventions by which people try to control the anxieties of ordinary life, and one cannot help responding warmly to the good work of an obviously decent man. --By Richard Schickel

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