Probably as near to verisimilitude as Blake Edwards is able to come: a serious, sometimes altogether somber comedy, with none of the lapses into boorishness and buffoonishness that marred such other serious efforts of his as 10 and S.O.B. (or at least fewer and less severe lapses). The "life" pointed out so sweepingly in the title will surely seem to some people more specifically and exclusively that of the Malibu good life -- but that's only a measure of the movie's "personalness." This is life, make no mistake, as Blake Edwards knows it best, faithfully photographed by Anthony Richmond (in and around Edwards's own home, by the way) in commodious, loosely framed wide-screen images and crisp, succulent, saturated color, such that the movie looks like a movie should, or in other words like only a movie can and television can never. Still more specifically, this is just one weekend of the Malibu good life: the sixtieth-birthday weekend of a successful but unfulfilled architect with an unending litany of minor ailments and complaints. He (Jack Lemmon, at his most justifiably but still most insufferably motor-mouthed) is too self-absorbed and self-pitying to be aware of the movie's (and life's) central verity: that everyone has his problems. These, which include the architect's wife and part-time professional singer (Julie Andrews) waiting in stoic secrecy to hear the pathology report on a possibly malignant throat culture, are lifesized and well-defined and -- for anyone who does not actively wish Malibu would slide into the Pacific Ocean -- tolerably interesting. The big-bash finale is no doubt a cliché, and Andrews's rousing multiple-choice speech -- she herself would choose life! -- fails to rouse. But before all that, the movie clambers to a fairly rarefied peak with a French-type dinner scene on birthday eve, with the entire clan gathered for the occasion. There, the weblike lines of tension and ties of emotion woven across the table, and the well-timed swelling of background music to obliterate the babble, are worthy of one or the other of those two Claudes, and coequal connoisseurs of the good life, Lelouch and Sautet. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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