pretty bad

Hollywood loves a good mid-life crisis, just look at “American Beauty” or the much better “City Slickers” (yeah, I believe that’s true), but “Middle Age Crazy” is just trite and predictable.


Based off that 1972 Jerry Lee Lewis song of the same name, the film stars Bruce Dern and Ann Margaret as married Houston couple who see their lives go to hell suddenly when Dern’s Bobby Lee turns 40. He’s a successful businessman who freaks out over being middle age and begins to start living for himself a little bit.


This begins with a long string of fantasy sequences where he daydreams about all sorts of things- from buying that $40,000 porsche, changing his clothes to look more like a cowboy, or even spending the night with his teenage son’s girlfriend. The guy barely seems to be able to keep up with his racy wife Su-Ann’s sexual exploits, but hey, I guess you can dream.


The dream sequences continue to mount- giving a eulogy at his own funeral, imagining himself as a keynote speaker at his kid’s High School graduation where he tells them all your lives are probably going to suck (the only truly funny dream sequence I thought)- at one point he winds up in Dallas ast the Cowboy’s stadium where he looks on admirably at the Cowboy cheerleaders, though I guess the film didn’t have the budget for a dream sequence with them. No worries. Characters seem to cheat so easily in movies like this, mostly because the screenwriters can think of no better way to add conflict to married life. He cheats, Su-Ann cheats, in both cases we hardly ever consider this anything more than a screenplay contrivance. Very little is actually believable about either Dern or Margaret's performances- they put on these corn pone Texas accents but mostly they seem to be going through the motions here.


And they are. The film has nothing to really say and it wraps up with a sitcom-ish “everything’s gonna be fine” artificialness. The movie has all the wisdom of a beer commercial and even less of the laughs and when it tries to be sincere, it loses you completely. If this is 40, then the film is more in crisis than the characters.