Breakup

By Richard Schickel

Infidelity in the movies, in all contemporary fiction, is seen as a mostly middle-class affliction. The other ranks may be portrayed as beery bigots or cheery peddlers of homely wisdom, and they may be permitted any form of luxury that can be purchased on the installment plan. But the indulgences that are paid for in painful scenes and sleepless nights are usually denied the working class.

Twice in a Lifetime would deserve respectful attention if all it did were redress that imbalance. But the story of how the 30-year marriage of Steelworker Harry Mackenzie (Hackman in another solid performance) and his wife Kate (Ellen Burstyn) sunders has another dimension. Scenarist Welland (who wrote Chariots of Fire with another kind of class consciousness) and Director Yorkin (who created All in the Family with Norman Lear) want to use the Mackenzies' disorder to explore sympathetically an entirely unfashionable layer of life.

To the filmmakers, the disintegration of a marriage is not at all an occasion for faultfinding or for a highly compressed dramatic crisis. Everyone in Twice in a Lifetime is decent. Harry only reluctantly concedes the validity of his need for emotional renewal, and he never entirely forgives himself the pain he causes. He is, in fact, as surprised as anyone when, while celebrating his 50th birthday with his fellow mill hands, he falls passionately in love with a barmaid (Ann-Margret). Stunned, Kate is tempted toward but fights off a state of permanent victimization. Helping her to remobilize are a married daughter (Amy Madigan), who ferociously expresses the anger her mother represses, and a younger sibling (Ally Sheedy), whose wedding, in suddenly straitened circumstances, requires some ingenuity from all three women.

Family dramas are always an invitation to fine ensemble acting, and these players are up to it. Hackman brings life to realism as effectively as he brings realism to fantasy in Target. Burstyn clarifies her character without oversimplifying. She finds both repose and luminosity in Kate. Madigan is not afraid to let the audience dislike her abrasiveness, while Sheedy uses patience and stillness as a counterpoise. Only Ann-Margret is somewhat shortchanged by the script: her motives are never made fully clear. Sometimes, too, the movie feels overly tidy and pleased with its own humanism. But it unashamedly keeps scratching away at small behavioral truths, and draws some blood in the process. --R.S.