Stars: Jack Lemmon, Julie Andrews, Sally Kellerman, Robert Loggia
Director: Blake Edwards
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Life in a Looking Glass")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
Film is oftentimes a reflection of its creators; writers, actors, and especially directors infuse themselves into their movie. This is the entire basis of auteur theory. But there are limitations to that, particularly when it comes to the film being largely autobiographical. Oftentimes when you encounter a film that is deeply personal, especially from a filmmaker you like, there's a pressure to give them the benefit of the doubt-they're sorting through feelings & experiences that they have been reluctant to put onto the big screen. This is the case for Blake Edwards' That's Life!, a movie where Jack Lemmon takes on the surrogate for Blake Edwards, but Edwards literally casts both his real-life wife Julie Andrews and his real-life children in major roles within the film. The problem here lies in that the movie, by looking too much at real-life, cannot live up to the zany & madcap adventures we normally expect from Edwards, and it feels a bit rundown as he turns the camera around.
(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Harvey Fairchild (Lemmon), a wealthy architect who is a hypochondriac of sorts, about to celebrate his 60th birthday party. Except, of course, Harvey doesn't want to celebrate his 60th birthday party & is instead going through a crisis, which is causing him to lash out at his wife, children, & pretty much everyone around him. His wife Gillian (Andrews) is a famous singer who is going through a health crisis, as she has a lesion on her throat that might be cancerous. As the film continues, the movie shows them both coming to terms with their health problems (one mental, one physical), and going to some dark places with it (Harvey even has an affair with Madame Carrie, a fortune teller played by Lemmon's real-life wife Felicia Farr), before coming out the other end better & cancer-free for both of them.
The movie is a bit slow-paced, even if it's well-constructed. I thought that the biggest problem for the film, weirdly enough, was the plotting (considering that's not usually a problem in a Blake Edwards picture, this is a surprise). The film is too repetitive, the kids too undifferentiated (it's a neat gimmick hiring Lemmon & Andrews' real life children, but they don't stand out in a significant way), and Lemmon's journey too odd. We are meant to take his casual adultery with a cheeky bit of good humor, unable to understand if this is simply a midlife crisis or something that he's done for decades. As a result, the interesting bits (like watching a clearly strained marriage where the two people still love each other), fall along the wayside, even if there's definitely something to offer here.
The film won one Oscar nomination, for Best Original Song for the Henry Mancini number "Life in a Looking Glass." This is a strange nomination not just because it was the last in a long line of Mancini nominations (18 in all), but because it is one of only three songs to be nominated for both the Oscar and the (now discontinued) Razzie Award for best Original Song (the other two being from Con Air and Armageddon). Usually these types of nominations land somewhere in the middle, but here I'm siding with the Razzies. The song is arguably the worst part of a movie that toys with quality but can't get the seal-it's a treacly, maudlin number that even Tony Bennett can't get past the saccharine lyrics (plus, it's sung over the end credits...in a movie with Julie Andrews that could've used a musical number). That arguably the worst part of a rather forgettable movie got an Oscar nomination is proof that occasionally AMPAS just does its own thing.
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