In his third directorial effort, playwright David Hare has the cheek to pose questions the size of: "How is one to live?" Or: "What is one to live for?" Or: "Would it be possible to change one's life?" More than mere cheek, he has also artfulness, so that the questions (never as baldly stated as above) are posed in a context and in a terminology likely to have meaning to the great majority of potential moviegoers. He, in other words, situates the pursuit of Happily Ever After against a broad and fully filled-in backdrop of the workaday world, setting up a colloquy between emotional hankerings and practical necessities. The questions plaguing our heroine in midlife -- a never married American doctor practicing in England -- get pinched between those of two subplots concerning a cancer patient at the heroine's scandalously underfunded hospital and a soon-to-be-pregnant would-be dress designer who happens also to be the heroine's younger sister and flat-mate. These supplementary questions (to put them again more baldly than the movie ever does) could be phrased as "How is one to end up?" and "How is one to start out?" Both these questions complement and play off the central ones in a way that can get the susceptive moviegoer thinking in terms of a unity, a wholeness: birth, death, everything in between. To do this sort of thing without it seeming forced and schematic, without it rupturing the realistic canvas on which it's done, is one sure measure of the artfulness of the job. Blair Brown, Bruno Ganz, Bridget Fonda. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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