Film

That's Life! (1986)

Director: Blake Edwards

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A none-too-edifying examination of middle-life crisis, much in the autobiographical vein of S.O.B and set in Edwards' own home in Malibu, where he has gathered around him a veritable plethora of real-life friends and family. Lemmon plays a hypochondriacal architect, panicked at the thought of his impending 60th birthday, who is too obsessed with his fear of failing sexual and creative powers to notice the real anxieties of his family. While his singer wife (Andrews) busies herself organising a family get-together in his honour (while awaiting, unbeknownst to him, the results of a biopsy for suspected throat cancer), he is off indulging himself in a little extra-marital shenanigan with a seductive client, dabbling with a return to the church, or finding solace with a sexy fortune-teller's therapeutic line in massage. Lemmon, though presented with funny lines and set pieces, is irritating rather than sympathetic, and allowed to coast in a hackneyed retread of the neurotic he has been playing for too many years. The rest is a thinly veiled tribute to Edwards' wife Andrews, which shows him at his most embarrassing.

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