Alan Alda was one of the first male feminists in Hollywood. He campaigned for the equal rights amendment, contributed to the star sex album Free to be … you and me– It is him and the initiator of the project, Marlo Thomas, telling the story of Atalanta, a Greek myth told in which a legendary hunting defies a male pretender to a trace of foot and, in this version, crosses the finish line next to him – and talked about what was then called female problems. “But Alda’s film in 1981 The four seasonsA sweetness -bitter comedy on the conjugal crises of the quarantine which he wrote, directed and embodies – and which has now been redone in a new Netflix mini -series – has passed with a pronounced sequence which, at least with more than four decades of hindsight, feels a lot of misogyny.
The configuration is simple: three long -term couples, played by Alda and Carol Burnett, Jack Weston and Rita Moreno, and Len Cariou and Sandy Dennis, meet for a wooded getaway in New York in New York in honor of the latter’s wedding anniversary. But, while Nick (Cariou) and Jack (Alda) bring together sticks for a fire, the first makes a confession: he is about to leave his wife, Anne (Dennis). The problem, “explains Nick is that” she does not TO DO Nothing. “It is a rising star, although in the little glamorous area of insurance sales, and it is not going anywhere. Nick throws her, and the next time the friends meet, he replaced it with a younger model, a very blonde edge agent who repeats his swollen boasts.
Nick turns out to be roughly and self -centered, if concerned about his new lease on life that he does not notice or does not care that his longtime friends are left to grimacted on the bridge of a cramped sailboat while he and his new girlfriend Ginny (Bess Armstrong) have harmful sex down. But he is not exactly wrong, at least with regard to his future wife. The way Dennis plays Anne, she is not only inert but practically non -functional, so ventilated and disconnected, it is as if she were three steps from a Victorian sanatorium. Her vulière husband that rather than taking a productive hobby, she “spent three years photographing vegetables”, and even if it looks like a nasty caricature of an unexpected spouse, the film never gives reason to question it. Kate (Burnett), who works in a brilliant magazine, offers him a concert of shooting portraits of the most influential people in the city, but Anne Demurs: she prefers her cruciferous subjects. And with that, the film is mainly made with it. Anne presents herself during the third segment of the film, when she uses her wedding name with imprisonment to check Nick’s room in a college town hall on the parents’ weekend, but she disappears shortly after, and we are not supposed to miss her. As Janet Maslin said in his contemporary review of the New York Times, “Nick gets tired of her almost earlier than the public.”
Both versions of The four seasons Discover marriage as a marathon, not as a sprint: when the film Nick announces the news of his intention to separate, Jack maintains that each relationship has its good and bad spells, and although Nick’s affection for Anne can be slowed down, he will surely feel it again. (Nick groans, “I never felt it.”) But the film is in a terrible rush to remove Anne so that Jack’s new love could arouse doubts in her still married friends. The anxious hypochondriac of Weston and the volatile painter of Moreno shouts mainly, but Jack and Kate fight like adults. Jack is a therapist, and although he makes his friends nuts by pressing them to reveal their feelings while keeping his own hidden, he seems to understand the importance of expressing anger without giving in-at least, that is to say until he finally blows his summit and waste the group’s winter cabin. Perhaps the film itself is a form of acting. The most obvious reading is to see Jack and Kate as the reflection of Alda’s long and successful marriage; He and Arlene Alda have been married since 1957. But it is difficult to resist the observation he has given to the profession of photographer of his wife not to the companion on the screen of his character, but to Anne, the creak of the film and the ex-jetable.
Alda appears in Netflix The four seasonsA remake of eight episodes created by Lang Fisher (I never have), Tracey Wigfield (Saved by the bell, Redux), and Tina Fey, who runs a casting that includes Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Marco Calvani and Kerri Kenney-Silver. But he is there – as Anne’s father, funny enough – just long enough to give the project his blessing, and to give the character of Fey, who is somewhere in his third wedding decade, his advice to keep things fresh: each often, you clean, you brush your teeth and inform your spouse without suspense, “Congratulations – TODAY is a sexual day.
The new version is more openly structured as a comedy – Fisher and Wigfield are both former students of Fey 30 rock– But it becomes more melancholy over time, because its characters dig more deeply in their own discomfort. As before, the catalyst is the rupture of the marriage of Nick and Anne, with Nick and Anne played by Carell and Kenney-Silver. (Fey and Strong take place the roles of Alda and Burnett; Domingo and Calvani constitute the third couple.) But this time, the humiliation of Anne is deeper and more public: rather than taking place in the middle of an intimate getaway with a few close friends, Nick has involuntarily chosen to drop the bomb for the day of a surprise vobing ceremony. realized that Anne assembled for their 25 surprise of Renouée de Vobage Répourieale that Anne assembled for their 25 around 25 years.th birthday. For a while, it seems that being forced to proclaim his dedication to a small army of friends and family could have reconnecting Nick with everything he loves in the woman with whom he spent half of his life. But when the story goes to the following season, he, like his predecessor of the Reagan era, has a new blond on his arm, this one played by Erika Henningsen, who currently plays the Sandra Dee in Bobby Darin by Jonathan Groff in Broadway on Broadway on Broadway Just in time.
This Anne, however, does not disappear. She continues to introduce herself, reserving a room in a neighboring hotel when Jack’s new girlfriend, Ginny, persuades him to let her plan a vacation for the whole group of friends during a hip eco-resort but lasts, then slide her suite on the parents’ weekend. It is desperate and a little pathetic, painful even for his longtime friends – the kind of agitation which generates a combination of sympathy and a fierce determination not to find yourself in the same place. But Anne remains both in history and in the television series, and our respect for her is growing while she recovers in herself. Her first attempts to flirt, with a pretty young paddleboard instructor, are so incompetent that you want to crawl under your sofa cushions, but ultimately she finds a new boyfriend, which is good, and realizes that it is not enough for her, which is even better. Over time, the shoulders and haircut of Kenney-Silver dust are replaced by a more confident serenity.
It would be wrong to say that the new Four seasons Do not judge his characters – in fact, he judges them all the time, weighing their attempts not to leave the comfort of a marriage of several decades to settle in the complacency, to greet the fifties with grace but not the resignation. It is a sign of time, surely, that if the underlying details of the plot have not changed – two of the couples still have girls who frequent the same college – the new version ages the characters of a full decade. In 1981, Danny de Jack Weston, who was 10 years older than his forty friends, was played for comic relief, so terrified by the prospect of his imminent death that he developed a morbid fear of the elastic in his underwear. But it is difficult to feel too panicked by the aging process when one of the 55 -year -old children you look at on Netflix is Colman Domingo, even if his character has a deadly heart disease.
The new Four seasons is more than double the length of Alda’s film, and it makes good use of its enlarged scope, expanding our understanding of each character, so that no one feels dismissed. Even Ginny appears as a character in its own right, not only the punchline of the crisis of the quarantine of Nick. But it is the marriage of Jack and Kate who feels most experienced. (The hetero couples joke about the way in which the characters of Domingo and Calvani have a completely different life with their most beautiful gay friends, but we never see it.) Fey and strong have a dynamic entirely different from that between Alda and Burnett, but he is immediately recognizable: he makes a fault, jovial and conflict; She is the bad cop and the resentment of being made to fulfill this role. Like their characters, the two actors have known each other for decades, and even if the conjugal spates of their couple on the screen become more intense – to the point where you do not know if you should root them so that they are reconciled or separate – you can feel them slip as a interpreters, allowing tenderness and spite to flow. If a good relationship allows each partner to become more himself, it is true for the actors as well as the lovers, and Fey and Strong make a perfect couple.
