Same Time, Next Year

Doris and George meet at a coastal inn in 1951, spend a night together, and although each is married to someone else, agree to meet in the same room on the same weekend every year. The film follows those meetings across twenty six years. It comes from Bernard Slade's play and never hides it, taking place almost entirely in one room with two actors. Its craft lies in how it shows time passing. Hair, weight, clothes and vocabulary change with each visit, America changes too, and the two of them keep landing on opposite sides of that change. One year she has joined the women's movement, another year he has turned conservative. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn both travel from youth to old age, and Burstyn was nominated for the Oscar. Its flaw is that the adultery goes almost unexamined. The spouses stay abstract, and the film accepts its own comfortable arrangement rather too easily. Who it is for: viewers who come for acting and dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a moral reckoning.