THIS IS MY LIFE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
THIS IS MY LIFE is a film directed by Nora Ephron and written by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron. The film stars Julie Kavner, Samantha Mathis, Gaby Hoffman, Carrie Fisher, Dan Ackroyd. Rated R, due to safe-sex scene.
THIS IS MY LIFE was a mostly disappointing experience, I regret to say. Julie Kavner has been one of my special favorites ever since she first essayed Brenda Morgenstern on THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW and then on the spin-off RHODA. Since then, she's been in five Woody Allen films and has played both Allen's mother (in RADIO DAYS) and his girlfriend (in the Allen segment of NEW YORK STORIES), and she is in the forthcoming Allen movie FOG AND SHADOWS. Of course, she's also the voice of Marge Simpson and was on THE TRACEY ULLMAN SHOW for three years before The Simpsons took off. She's a funny woman and I really looked forward to her first role in which she carried a whole movie.
Unfortunately, I failed to allow for the Ephron sisters, either singly or in tandem, who first of all produced a completely unoriginal, entirely predictable script that features the worse parts of PUNCHLINE (the Tom Hanks & Sally Fields movie about stand-up comics) and MERMAIDS (the Cher-Winona Ryder-Bob Hoskins confection of a couple of Christmases ago--Samantha Mathis even looks like Winona Ryder). We have definitely seen this movie before.
Nora Ephron's direction stretches out a half-hour sitcom into a full-length snoozer, unfunny, dull, with hardly a joke in it. Ephron has provided not one but two competing voice-over narrators, one usually being bad enough of an idea. Each claims that this is her story. Maybe that's the problem, nobody ever figured out whose story it was, after all.
The script was adapted from a novel by Meg Wolitzer. One can only assume the novel was funnier, or at least more focused. Dottie Engels (Kavner) is never allowed to do a monologue; her voiceover upstages her every time she gets on stage except when she has a couple of very unfunny, very tired old jokes to tell about placenta creams and her dead Aunt in Heaven; where's a voiceover when you need one? Dan Aykroyd, who is supposed to be some great shakes of an agent, seems mostly asleep -- he has one shtick and it ain't good enough. Carrie Fisher comes closest to being actually funny, but even she is at a loss of what do with her underwritten part. The greatest problem with the script is that Dottie goes from demoing makeup to getting third billing in Vegas in the course of a year, she suddenly gets the Agent to Die For for no perceptible reason, and she makes $130,000 go further in Manhattan real estate than anyone since Peter Stuyvesant. In other words, the script is unmotivated and unrealistic. And shame on the Ephron sisters for this mess!
Bobbie Byrne's cinematography is dull and lifeless, even as he steals a shot or two of Vegas signage from RAIN MAN. Carly Simon's songs add nothing excepts an unnecessary recapitulation of the "story so far." I hope she's not counting on a lot of MTV airtime with the inevitable video outtake.
Finally, you have got to wonder about the MPAA when they slap an R on a movie for one scene in which a teenage boy fumbles with his first condom, a scene with no nudity and no concupiscence.
I cannot recommend THIS IS MY LIFE to anyone at any price unless the person is a diehard fan of Julie Kavner and she or he has to see her first starring role, regardless.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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