ONCE AROUND
With Holly Hunter, Richard Dreyfuss, Danny Aiello, Gena Rowlands, Laura San Giacomo, Roxanne Hart, Danton Stone, and Tim Guinee.
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After Joe retires and Renata becomes pregnant, however, Sam’s assertiveness about his Lithuanian background and his overall brashness begin to grate more and more on Renata’s family, leading to increasingly bitter conflicts . . .
For: I’ve only recently caught up with My Life as a Dog, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom’s sixth feature (Once Around, his first American picture, is his ninth), the only one of his Swedish movies that’s had a general release in the U.S. It clearly has much in common with Once Around, in style as well as subject. Both movies are based on autobiographical fictions about growing up, whose heroes are painfully adjusting as they separate from their parents and make the transition from one family household to another. Both films abound in warm, sympathetic, and humorously eccentric characters. Both employ repeated visual motifs that serve as philosophical and emotional reference points for the larger implications of the narrative–including long shots of the houses that represent home for the leading characters and camera angles that imply “cosmic” overviews of the action. Both use popular songs almost obsessively in their plots (My Life as a Dog uses an old 78 recording of “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” in Swedish; Once Around uses “Fly Me to the Moon”). And both make memorable use of snowy landscapes and cheerful festive gatherings.
For all its slickness and visual ingenuity, Once Around is basically sitcom, unlike My Life as a Dog–wide-screen sitcom with four-letter words and off-color asides, but sitcom nevertheless. Many of the best character notations in the film (such as Joe’s ire at the sounds of Renata and Sam laughing late one night while they’re staying at his house, reflected in his announcement of how late it is quickly changing from 2 to 3 to 3:30) are worthy of Archie Bunker–and just as two-dimensional.
From another point of view the story is about Sam, the odd man out in the tight family circle, and Dreyfuss hurls himself into the part in a way that’s calculated to confound our responses. Some viewers may find him so obnoxious that they wind up rejecting the film in toto, but his overbearing vitality motors so much of the action that we may be carried along by it in spite of ourselves.
