Decent Try

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CHAPTER TWO Directed by Robert Moore Screenplay by Neil Simon

One of the cliches that can be set aside is Scott Fitzgerald's notion that American lives lack second acts. We have become a nation of second-acters (or should it be actors?). Everyone seems to be scurrying about trying to re-create himself at least once before his final scene.

Neil Simon's screen adaptation of his Broadway success Chapter Two takes this touching phenomenon seriously. Simon's central characters, a newly widowed writer (James Caan) and a newly divorced actress (Marsha Mason), snap zingers at each other during a wary meeting, a breathless courtship and a marriage that almost fails before it gets started, conforming to the theatrical convention Simon has created for himself. But they have the good grace to be self-conscious about their verbal twitchiness. They understand there are more important matters at stake here. As a result, the movie is rather blurred--an owlish comedy, as it were. Yet, if Simon still does not quite trust himself to express his feelings fully, Chapter Two remains thought provoking.

Simon's most interesting theme is the accelerated pace of emotional lives today. These seem not to move to natural rhythms but at the speeds of the media, where the compulsion for at least one new sensation a week hinders the sensible sorting out of the significant from the trivial. Simon's lovers understand that they cannot stay the rush of their feelings: lives are so crowded, things pile up so rapidly that there is a compulsion to lurch after possibilities that might otherwise be explored more thoughtfully.

Caan's character particularly needs more time to digest the loss of his wife. His guilty anger and depression impose terrible requirements of patience on his new love after she has committed herself to the more cheerful persona he originally showed her. Simon, of course, is writing autobiographically here; Marsha Mason, now Mrs. Simon, is playing at least a version of herself in this film. This speaks well of everyone's bravery; Mason's speech accepting the notion that she is worthy of love and encouraging her new husband to embrace a similar self-acceptance is truly moving.

The flexibility of the screen allows Simon to integrate more smoothly than he did onstage a broadly comic subplot in which Joe Bologna, playing a brother, and Valerie Harper, as a best friend, fail to have an extramarital affair. Simon does not think much of those; commitments are the basis for the order he believes to be a personal and social necessity.

In short, there is an old-fashioned man beneath the smart patter of Simon's dialogue. Moore has given his work a flat, old-fashioned production. And although Mason and Caan are agreeable people, they (and Moore) seem not quite up to the large emotions the film's dark second half requires them to express. Everything is a little too gingerly. In the end, the film must be judged as muted, likable, not all it might have been, but a nice--and terribly decent--try. --Richard Schickel

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