Film

Table for Five (1983)

Director: Robert Lieberman

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Prodigal parent Voight comes to reclaim his kids from their mother and her new husband, and scoops them off on a plush Mediterranean cruise. Yes, it's another of New Hollywood's hymns to the Joys of Fatherhood, though this time potential custody tussles are forestalled by conveniently dispatching the wife in a car crash. Voight's shipboard romance is kept safely marginal too, and the final happy family - three kids, two fathers - looks decidedly bizarre. Lieberman pads out thin material with a welter of reaction shots and sequences of Voight mooning around looking very, very sad. What's worse, he seems to have scant confidence in the potency of his characters' emotions, attempting to make them into something monumental by having Voight's life crumble amid the more spectacular ruins of Western civilisation. This is essentially soap opera with fancy production values and grandiose pretensions: the result is the purest kitsch.

---

• 
•