Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams
Gilbert Cates (1973)
It may seem unfair to condemn a film for accuracy but Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is credible in such a drab, superficial way – and, eventually, so unilluminating – that it deserves the criticism. The original screenplay by Stewart Stern (who adapted Rebel Without a Cause and Rachel, Rachel for the screen) concerns Rita Walden (Joanne Woodward), an affluent, middle-aged New York housewife, at a crisis point in her comfortable, unsatisfying life. Rita is married to Harry (Martin Balsam), an optician and a decent man, whom she has never loved. Her daughter Anna (Dori Brenner) is married with a small child but Rita’s homosexual son Bobby (Ron Richards) has disappeared to Amsterdam indefinitely. We first see Rita during her own nightmare, trapped in a plane that’s flying through a thunderstorm, getting into difficulty and about to crash. In waking life, the pill-popping Rita is a handsome, somewhat hard-faced woman – anxious to fill up her time and her mind. The first half hour of Gilbert Cates’s film concentrates on her day in the centre of New York City with her mother, Mrs Pritchett (she isn’t given a first name). The two women have lunch (and some acid conversation) together before going to a movie. (It’s Wild Strawberries – an inspired choice only in the sense that Bergman’s film is evidently one of the inspirations for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.) As they cross a road on the way to the cinema, Mrs Pritchett (Sylvia Sidney) stops suddenly, gripped by a pain in her chest. Once Wild Strawberries is underway, Rita doses off into reminiscence of her discovery of Bobby and a male ballet dancer making eyes at each other. She comes to and witnesses her mother suffering a fatal heart attack in the seat next to her.
Rita is depressed by her mother’s death: first, because she’s unable to feel grief; second, because she has to face the prospect of selling the family farm and, as a result (so Rita sees it), relinquishing her nostalgically cherished childhood. Her resistance to the sale is strongly opposed both by her sister (Tresa Hughes) and by Anna. Harry takes Rita on a trip to Europe – a combined second honeymoon and convalescence – where she becomes suffocated by regret for her past and frustration at having squandered the best years of her life. In a London tube station, hot and hemmed in among rush-hour commuters, she imagines that she sees her mother on an escalator: Rita is overcome by irrational terror that, if she reaches the top of the escalator on which she herself is actually travelling, she too will die. She lingers in London, vainly hoping that Bobby will contact her. Eventually, she and Harry travel to Belgium and he returns to the site of the Siege of Bastogne, in which he fought in December 1944. Memories of the deaths there of men as young as or younger than him remind Harry of the promise he made at Bastogne to cherish and put to good use all the life he was given after this reprieve. As the film ends, the lonely, frightened Wardens realise that they need (and deserve) each other. Rita faces up to the future by agreeing to sell the farm. Her last line – the last line of the whole film – is, ‘When we’re old, I want a smaller apartment’. Although Rita and Harry have sort of renewed their marriage vows, she remains without hope and can take refuge only in material comfort and conversation.
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is a depressing and overrated film. Reasonably bright viewers, observing fairly real characters like Rita and Harry, can be relied upon to enthuse that they know people ‘just like that’. It’s also – although there’s no physical violence or bare flesh and hardly any bad language – shocking and even crude. Sylvia Sidney certainly makes a memorable screen comeback but this is partly because her wrinkled, painted face contrasts so sharply with her fresh, youthful looks in movies of thirty or forty years ago and partly because her character dies a horrible death. Sidney’s barnacle-encrusted voice works well for Mrs Pritchett’s charmless wisecracks but it’s the speed of her speech and the vitality of her movements that make a greater impression – and make sense of Rita’s stunned reflection on the evening of her mother’s death: ‘Five hours ago we were arguing over a corn fritter’. Rita’s immediate response to her mother’s death is accurate and affecting: she can’t believe that her mother no longer feels or thinks; nor can we, because our recollections of her, like Rita’s, are of a babbling, bitchy, very alive old lady. Because she dies of natural causes – in cinematic terms unspectacularly – it might be argued that Mrs Pritchett’s death is powerful thanks to the film-makers’ subtle restraint but I don’t think this is true. The stab of pain she experiences in the street is, in retrospect, shockingly believable – Rita almost scolds her mother for worrying her and attributes the pain to indigestion. The controversial corn fritter is overworked, though. During lunch, the mother says, ‘One corn fritter won’t kill me’. In a movie that was either squarer or more flamboyant than this one, the irony of such a line would be scorned; here, it passes for a bit of small talk that’s unthinkably, awfully right. And shortly before the scary moment crossing the road Mrs Pritchett begins a sentence with an alarming shriek, as if in pain (which she isn’t – yet).
The death itself is wrenching: Sylvia Sidney’s walnut face, with its poodle-like features, is shot in agonising close-up; the mother grips her daughter’s hands for support but the two women continue to argue until Mrs Pritchett loses consciousness. I was relieved to tell myself at this point it’s only a film: I didn’t like being reminded that I can’t conceive of nothingness after life and that I’m shocked by sudden death. It’s a mark of the shallowness of most commercial cinema that a sequence like this can have such unusual impact but is manipulation of a relatively intelligence audience any more admirable than the string-pulling in movies like The Exorcist or The Towering Inferno? I realise this sounds flippant but I think Mrs Pritchett’s death is too true to be good. Rita called her mother a snow-queen and, according to her own daughter, is now one herself. The loss of her mother makes Rita aware of her own coldness but also wakens the dormant emotional volcanoes of her life into sustained eruption: she is reminded of her own mortality and of her lost youth too.
Stewart Stern’s psychological insight is sacrificed in the name of moving the drama along in the graveside family argument at the mother’s funeral: it’s falsely histrionic that tensions and jealousies between Rita and her sister that have simmered for many years should boil over so suddenly and completely. Heartlessness and selfishness are evidently family traits: as Rita wanders sadly around the farm Mrs Pritchett owned, other relatives discuss a selling price and remember the dead woman with what Dylan Thomas called ‘mule praises’. This part of the film is remarkably lacking in originality: it culminates in Rita’s own madeleine-tasting as she conjures up sunny, perfect memories of childhood by eating some well-preserved strawberry jam. Stern’s dialogue, although it’s often skilful, tends to underline things too heavily. During her heated exchange with her mother over lunch about declining service standards in American restaurants (and thickly-cut lemon slices in particular), Rita says, ‘I don’t believe this conversation’. Anna castigates Rita for her addiction to the past in a forthright speech that’s well delivered by Dori Brenner – and well written until Anna caps her tirade by summarising it: ‘You can’t bring back the past by eating a jar of 1940s jam!’ The film itself is being sold to the audience as a pre-packaged product – a kind of psychoanalytical middle-age spread.
I liked the previous Joanne Woodward-Stewart Stern collaboration, Rachel, Rachel (1968), even while realising that its supply of frustrated spinster neuroses – fear of being lesbian, fear of frigidity, phantom pregnancy etc – were too much for one film. (The screenplay was adapted from a 1966 novel, A Jest of God, by Margaret Laurence.) Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is more ambitious in the sense that the protagonist isn’t likeable. In order to be sympathetic, Rita Walden needs her lovelessness to be linked to a larger malaise: Stern and Gilbert Cates don’t establish a link of this kind. Still, Joanne Woodward’s portrait of Rita is intelligent and her technique is very pure: the whining note in her voice is more effective because it’s used sparingly. Another fine element of the performance is how Woodward turns on the waterworks (with increasing frequency as the film goes on) – in such a face-crumpling, self-pitying way that you feel vaguely sad but not particularly sorry for Rita. Woodward won the Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics (for 1973) and the British Film Academy (for 1974) for her work in this film. The American Academy passed her over (although she was nominated) – largely, I think, because they tend to resist giving lead actor Oscars for performances as seriously dislikeable people. (Louise Fletcher, who won this year for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is the first Best Actress-ogress in a long time.) And Rita is an uncomfortable character: although she’s a shrew, she’s a self-critical shrew; although she’s hard, she’s also brittle.
While Rita isn’t black or white, Stewart Stern isn’t able to give the other characters shades of grey. Harry, in particular, is condescendingly written. In his lachrymose attack of self-awareness at Bastogne and the subsequent dialogues with his wife in their hotel room (two single beds of course), he’s a-little-man-doing-the-best-he-can. When unloving, morbid Rita tells Harry he should leave her and/or have an affair, he asks, ‘Who with?’ and Rita’s reply is, ‘I’m not going to find her for you’. Harry then launches into a sentimental monologue: he has found the girl of his dreams and it’s Rita. This is a shrewd piece of plotting and emotional manipulation (it clearly touched the sparse student audience I was one of): in spite of Rita’s cynical reaction, it lays the ground for the eventual affirmation of the Wardens’ marriage. Many people will feel this resolution is earned and avoids being slushy – thanks to the acerbic and angry exchanges that have gone before. It’s remarkable how audiences can be seduced in this way – blinded to a film’s changing its tone at the eleventh hour for its own convenience. Martin Balsam acts pleasantly and quietly and as an unselfish foil to Joanne Woodward: it’s offensive that the actor’s own looks are being used to make the man he’s playing the incarnation of unsexy ordinariness. (Harry is also a comical American-tourist-in-Britain on the side.)
Dori Brenner’s Anna is just about sanity personified: as she’s younger generation, she confirms the exclusively middle-aged nature of her mother’s disease. Stern’s characterisation becomes really annoying in the case of the Wardens’ son. I realise that we see Bobby’s homosexual unmasking through his mother’s horrified eyes but, as he never appears again, it’s impossible to put Rita’s nightmare-daydream in any context and it comes across as anti-homosexual. The sequence is shot in monochrome; the ballet dancer Bobby is with is practising serpentine leg movements; the leering expression on the faces of both men is there to torture Rita. I don’t understand what the emblematically queer dancer – a risibly obvious idea of a ‘typical’ homosexual – is doing in a supposedly realistic film. Or is Rita melodramatically embroidering her memory of what she actually saw?
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams isn’t too visually ugly for a movie of its type. (Domestic moral tracts are often thought by Hollywood to be made more sincere by slovenly production values and, especially, by watery photography.) But although Gilbert Cates and Stewart Stern have things to say that are true they’ve little to say that’s of value. The audience for a film like this will recognise the panic and emptiness that Rita feels and already knows there are no easy answers to such feelings. Within mainstream American cinema, Stern is no doubt a relatively thoughtful writer and Cates an unusually tactful director (his previous film was I Never Sang for My Father (1970)). There are good lines and strong performances to take away from Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams but it’s a lowering experience: it illustrates the stagnating, frightening consequences of having too much time – and time to think – without offering any new insights. The structure is clever: a lull before the storm which sparks problems the cumulative effect of which is overwhelming – then the gradual subsidence of the storm with rumbling, disconcerting reverberations echoing into the distance. Perhaps this is a better piece of work than most ‘escapist’ movies but Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams makes you want to get out of the cinema as quickly as you can.
[1976]