Grave Mistake

Hello Again

Written by Susan Isaacs

Directed by Frank Perry

At the USA/Somerville

DISENCHANTED housewife...white house in Long Island fully-equipped with bounding sheepdog and Lincoln Continental...chic cocktail parties in Manhattan that one expects Robin Leach to attend...and other cliches of the Yuppie generation ad nauseum. "These are a few of our favorite things," croon the directors and producers of today's American film industry. With Hello Again, Director Frank Perry takes off on these themes and runs with them in circles.

Hello Again abuses the talent of its cast with an inexcuseably trite fairy tale of a plot. Lucy Chadman (Shelley Long) is a frumpy, suburban housewife who feels somewhat displaced in the glitzy Manhattan cocktail set that she mingles with for the sake of her ambitious husband (Corbin Bernsen). "Isn't this party just suhblime!" coos Lucy's best friend and society beauty, Kim (Sela Ward). But nervous Lucy commits one social faux pas after another, culminating in a grand exit down the balustrade where she exposes more than just her sheepish grin.

Unfortunately, Lucy's day doesn't get any better. Having nibbled on a fatal Korean chicken dumpling, Lucy finds herself dying on an emergency ward table. After a year of experimenting with spells and incantations Zelda (Judith Ivey), her clairvoyant sister, somehow manages to resurrect her from the grave. Lucy returns only to find Jason aloft in a slick Manhattan high rise in bed with his new wife. And with that cold realization. Lucy puts Jason behind her and embarks on a new life.

Like a phoenix rising from its ashes, Lucy pulls herself together. With the help of eccentric millionaire Hastings Lacey Jr. (Austin Pendleton), she opens up her own daycare center and becomes the focus of her own publicity campaign--all in a day's work. To make the fairy tale complete, on to the scene arrives the handsome prince, Dr. Scanlon (Gabriel Byrne), whose swarthy good looks win over Lucy's affections.

Hello Again often succeeds at being funny, but maybe too deliberately so. The relentless barrage of one-liners tends to inspire nervous laughter. The "death" jokes, for example, prove to be of the worst taste: "I wouldn't have been caught dead in that dress," "I thought I'd never live to see the day," "Conquering death, that was a killer!"

Though Long and Ivey cannot be blamed for the mediocrity of the script, both actresses tend to overcompensate for its weaknesses, making things worse Fearing that these lines would not be funny in themselves, Long and Ivey try to play up these jokes physically.

But perhaps the blame lies more in Hello Again's genre than in the acting or the script. Yuppies are just not very funny people, and this holds true even for the resurrected ones.