Older but not wiser

>> Let’s hope they meant it when
they called it Never Again

by MATTHEW HAYS

Let’s not mince words. For the most part, the wonderful world of movies has become increasingly youth-oriented and tends to ignore anyone over a certain age. It’s laudable, of course, to try and correct this wrong. But noble intentions do not necessarily a good film make.

Witness Never Again, the latest film from indie director/
actor Eric Schaeffer. Whoa, I guess someone was trying to put fiftysomething people in sexual and romantic situations, which is somehow supposed to humanize them. But really, do the characters have to lose all their dignity in the process?

Jill Clayburgh plays a 54-year-old woman who laments that she
“hasn’t been laid in seven years.” Her buddies-including an unrecognizable Sandy Duncan-set her up on an Internet date. Clayburgh finds that her knight in shining armor is a dwarf and-to her devastation-he rejects her. Depressed and eager to get trashed, she meets up with her friends in a corner bar, which turns out to be a gay club. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Tambor is a man questioning his sexual orientation. After having an ambiguous dream, could he be gay? He enters the same club, and as film fate would have it, Tambor and Clayburgh strike up a rapport.

Dating follows, as does romance, as do various kinky sexual scenes (I never thought I’d see a movie in which Clayburgh dons a strap-on dildo, but here it is) as do the obligatory break-up and make-up sequences.

I’m all for rebelling against the tyranny of Freddie Prinze, Jr. The idea that studio execs have pinned so much content in and around horny teens is a pretty narrow view of human existence-that much is obvious.

But a film like this remedies nothing. The characters have no credibility (Tambor’s questioning of his sexuality, for example, is soon a forgotten thing), there is no suspension of disbelief, and the film’s conclusion is rife with sad clichés. There is a great argument to be made about including older people in film scripts. Never Again inadvertently makes just the opposite argument. :

Never Again opens Friday, July 26

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