MOVIE REVIEW : ‘LIFETIME’ CAST NEEDS LIFE LINES

You could probably not assemble a finer cast, person for person, pound for pound, than the actors who make up the “Twice in a Lifetime” blue-collar family: father Gene Hackman; mother Ellen Burstyn; their daughters Amy Madigan and Ally Sheedy, and son Darrell Larson. Add to these Brian Dennehy as Hackman’s longtime steel mill crony and Ann-Margret as the new waitress at the local bar and you have a killer lineup (the Regent in Westwood).

These are strong, positive, uniquely American actors. You believe them as a family; you believe them as their characters; they are a notable unit (except possibly when Burstyn works so hard at being Just Plain Folks that she seems, instead, downright simple.) Yet believability isn’t enough. These characters need rescuing from screenwriter Colin Welland’s view of life in middle-class America as oppressively banal. By the time he gets finished sketching in the deadening of the American family, you may feel like beating Hackman to the front door.

“Twice in a Lifetime” is a dreary masquerade of a serious movie. The subject is the shattering of the family unit, something director/producer Bud Yorkin treated memorably in “Divorce American Style.” This time, right on the stroke of his 50th birthday, Hackman, like a goofy Cinderella, celebrates by kissing barmaid Ann-Margret, and that’s it for the close-knit, not to say stifling, fabric of his family life.

A touchy, painful separation ensues. Like “Divorce American Style,” there is the sense that in the end nobody has won; that the losers are the confused or angry kids, and that starting all over again--even with Ann-Margret--may not be the unalloyed delight it might seem.

We are supposed to take heart at Burstyn’s discovery of her very real strengths, post-separation. Yet Welland and Yorkin deny her the juices of life: She doesn’t seem to cook with gusto or bowl or square dance or do much else for fun except watch “The Price Is Right.” (How can Bud Yorkin , of all people, give us someone numbed by endless reruns of “All in the Family”?) There’s the faintest hint of condescension in pineapple-Spam kebobs on a wedding dinner hors d’oeuvres platter, or as “the girls” shriek with the thrill of snapping a jockstrap at a Seattle Chippendale’s. So much for self-discovery.

Welland originally set his script in the coal-mining district of Manchester, England, where it may have made a lot more sense. A British wife who’s a whiny dullard has been a stock character in English movies since Deborah Kerr got rid of her cardigans and her post-nasal drip in “Vacation From Marriage,” and that was 1945. It might fit, too, that a mill town wife in England would have almost no contact with her surroundings. That’s a lot harder to believe about someone in the environment-conscious Pacific Northwest.

Then there’s the other side: crazy love as personified by Hackman and Ann-Margret. It’s hard to see in Hackman’s character the sort of man who would have this divine redhead pulling him off to the bedroom every other second. He’s had 30 years practice being boring, of rolling into bed from work, unwashed, in his undershirt and skivvies. Why is he suddenly catnip to the ladies? (He doesn’t convey the sense of sweet, tortured, bottled-up passion, for example, that John Lithgow did in “Terms of Endearment.”) Ann-Margret has more than her share of dreadful lines and sappy life’s wishes. Her character seems to evaporate before our eyes even before she leaves the screen, as though even the film makers knew she was only an animated plot device all along.

A few of the actors are stifle-proof: Brian Dennehy, wonderfully alive behind his eyes and expansively comfortable in this milieu, and the spiky Amy Madigan, almost incandescent in her fury at her father and her realization of what her marriage has come to mean: two children at 27 and a loyal but unemployed husband (Stephen Lang, fine in this small role). Brilliant as these actors are, you might wish them more felicitous surroundings next time.