Show Fizz

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ONLY WHEN I LAUGH Directed by Glenn Jordan Screenplay by Neil Simon It's been coming for some time, but with the release of Only When I Laugh one can make the statement definitive: Neil Simon has ceased to be a relatively harmless, relatively cheerful pop entertainment phenomenon. He is now an imposition--and a tedious one at that.

In this instance he has chosen to abuse the power that has flowed to him as the most commercially successful playwrightscenarist in human history not only by fobbing off a retitled and rewritten version of his old demi-flop show, The Gingerbread Lady, but also by casting his wife Marsha Mason in the leading role. It is hard to say which is the more unforgivable act.

The story concerns an actress attempting a double comeback from alcoholism--professionally and as the mother of a teen-age child she had virtually abandoned. She has two friends, a ne'er-do-well actor and homosexual (James Coco) and a wealthy woman desperately afraid of aging (Joan Hackett). They are all self-pitiers and nonstop talkers, mostly in a manner that might be called show-biz fizz, a stylization that works all right for Simon onstage, but seems on the naturalistic screen an inhuman strain. This is especially so since most of his zingers are not as funny as the writer thinks they are and distinctly not worth the body English the players put on them. They're always winding up as if they were about to deliver a high, hard one, only to send a blooper ball vaguely plate ward.

Mason is an actress who tries hard, God knows, but she is not really attractive enough to make one forgive (or even ignore) her inadequacies as a performer.

There is about her the uncomfortable air of a plain girl unaccountably forced to fill in for the homecoming queen. One also feels her pushing, pushing, pushing to fulfill the demands of wit and style that are made on leading women in dramatic comedy. She comes as close as conscious craft can bring her, yet succeeds mainly in communicating her own edginess. What's missing, very simply, is the kind of natural charm an actress like Irene Dunne used to bring to roles like this, an ability to modulate from humor to rue almost, it seemed, without thinking.

Indeed, one of the many discomfiting things about Only When I Laugh is the contrast between Mason and Kristy McNichol, playing her daughter. The youngster has an ease and grace (and a lovely physical presence) that make her scenes with Mason strictly no contest, and grant the film such warmth and human interest as it contains. Maybe Simon should consider adopting her. --By Richard Schickel

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