BEFORE: Burt Reynolds carries over one more time from "Stroker Ace". I promise this makes sense and gets me one step closer to Mother's Day material. The Movie Year will be dark next week because we're driving down to North Carolina again so I can see my parents, we won't arrive until the day after the holiday, but it still counts.
THE PLOT: Black comedy about a man who finds that he hasn't much longer to live and his bungled attempts at suicide.
AFTER: You just have to file this one in the bad idea / "What the heck was somebody thinking?" department. Who sets out to make a comedy about suicide? How do you even arrive at that concept, let alone see it through to the final cut. You really need to believe in that idea, that the public's going to go along with you on that ride, like was suicide some big trend in the 1970's? People were doing roller disco boogie, getting high on pot, wearing tie-dyed shirts and then saying, "You know what would make all this even better? We should KILL ourselves, because we think we've done it all, there's really nothing more to accomplish now that man has walked on the moon and we've seen "Star Wars" and "Jaws"!" I don't think that was a thing, and anybody who went along with that trend missed out on "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Jaws II", so there you go. There's always another movie to live for, even if your life has turned to crap.
Sonny Lawson gets the diagnosis from his doctor that he's got a toxic blood disease, and worse, it's not even the same one that killed Ali McGraw's character in "Love Story". Ah, now we see where the trend came from, everybody in the 1970's wanted to be Jenny from "Love Story" - live fast, love hard, go to Harvard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. Right? Maybe not. Anyway, Sonny can't stand the idea of spending half of the next year in some hospital bed, waiting for the end like some decrepit elderly person, so he goes to visit his best friend, his ex-wife, his not-so-ex-girlfriend, his parents and his daughter, and meeting with all those people leads him to the illogical conclusion that suicide is the best way to go. Yeah, that tracks.
His ex-wife has a young Latin lover who doesn't habla Ingles, and his best friend/lawyer is too distracted by the food in the restaurant to really offer any advice. He visits Mary Ellen, his on-again, off-again fling, and she's a crazy cat lady with a messy house, so we kind of see why she and Sonny never really worked out. They do still have sex, though, so maybe it's some kind of friends-with-benefits situation, but they know how to push each other's buttons when they argue, so probably it's never really going to work out, and they kind of keep each other at arm's length. By the time Sonny gets to visiting his parents, he's decided he's going to "borrow" some sleeping pills from their well-stocked medicine cabinet, and that's how he's going to end it all.
One last day out for ice cream with his teenage daughter, who's learning stripper moves in dance class, but even spending time with her doesn't change his mind, so he gets the sleeping pills and tries to wash them down with milk, which turns out to be sour. Milk was a bad choice, so he switches to vodka, and next stop, the afterlife. Only it doesn't work, and he wakes up in a mental hospital, which is where they send people who try to commit suicide. Remember that suicide is a crime, but they can only prosecute you if you fail. If you die, they can't put you in jail, it turns out. In the hospital he meets Marlon Borunki, a paranoid schizophrenic who murdered his own father and also has dissociative identity disorder, and is overly sensitive when it comes to Polish jokes.
This is where the film turns all slapstick-y, because Marlon sets out to help Sonny kill himself (that's kind of a contradiction in terms, I realize now) and every attempt goes south in some fashion - the mental hospital has kept the facility free of razors and breakable glass, so they try hanging, pushing Sonny off a tall building, and smashing Sonny's head in the electric bed's frame. That last one almost worked, only Sonny's friends walked in and stopped him, and then the whole facility needed to change out all the beds, which caused way too much chaos. This almost turned into a remake of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at this point.
Sonny meets with a psychiatrist, played by Carl Reiner, who's got a fatal disease himself, but he tries to have a positive outlook, plays tennis, stays active, and encourages his patients to do the same. He's decided to make the most of whatever time he has left, and die at the most ironic time possible, so, umm, guess what. The odd thing about this scene is that both characters are dying, but Burt Reynolds would go on to live another 40 years and Carl Reiner lived another 42 years. Dom DeLuise, another 31. Sally Field is still with us, of course, but the majority of the cast from this 1978 film has passed on. Robby Benson's still alive but mostly retired, I think. Same goes for Kristy McNichol.
After every attempt fails, Sonny breaks out of the facility with Marlon in tow by stealing a gardener's truck and nearly dying by crashing into a car with an elderly lady taking driving lessons. Damn, that one almost worked, but almost doesn't really count. So Sonny heads back to see his girlfriend because he knows she's got a gun hidden in her house, just in case. That doesn't work out either, so Sonny decides to swim west in the Pacific and either drown himself or get so far from shore that it happens naturally. No spoilers here, but you just can't end a film with somebody swimming off to die, it's too depressing. Now, Benny Hill, there's a guy who knew how to end a scene.
Directed by Burt Reynolds (producer of "Hooper" and "Hustle")
Also starring Dom Deluise (last seen in "Bathtubs Over Broadway"), Sally Field (last seen in "Kiss Me Goodbye"), Strother Martin (last seen in "Up in Smoke"), David Steinberg (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Joanne Woodward (last heard in "Lucky Them"), Norman Fell (last seen in "Catch-22"), Myrna Loy (last seen in "The Best Years of Our Lives"), Kristy McNichol, Pat O'Brien, Robby Benson (last seen in "Wait Until Dark"), Carl Reiner (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Louise LeTourneau, Bill Ewing, Robert Rothwell (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Harry Caesar (last seen in "The Big Fix"), James Best (last seen in "Hooper"), Peter Gonzales Falcon, Connie Fleming (last seen in "Starting Over"), Janice Carroll (last seen in "Daddy Long Legs"), Ken Johnson, Frank McRae (last seen in "Licence to Kill"), Alfie Wise (also carrying over from "Stroker Ace"), Jerry Fujikawa (last seen in "Midway"), Jock Mahoney (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Patrick Moody (last seen in "Smokey and the Bandit II"), Carolyn Carradine, Queenie Smith, Jean Coulter (last seen in "A View to a Kill") with a cameo from Dana Plato (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture").
RATING: 4 out of 10 patients in the I.C.U.
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