Alda Alan

While at the height of his M*A*S*H fame, Alan Alda starting appearing in a series of movies, generally comedies, that he wrote and usually directed: The Seduction Of Joe Tynan,

The Four Seasons, Sweet Liberty, A New Life and Betsy's Wedding. I'd describe the best ones as mildly enjoyable.

By chance I caught two of them on TV recently, Joe Tynan and Sweet Liberty. In both Alda plays an earnest, intelligent liberal, which was already his image. Tynan is kind of interesting as a political film made during the last gasp of the 70s (and in some ways feeling even older), not knowing certain political assumptions were about to be shaken up. But it's not that political, really--certainly not compared to the stuff Aaron Sorkin would come up with. Sweet Liberty has Alda as a professor who wrote a bestseller about the Revolutionary War (hard to buy, but I'll accept it) and Hollywood people are coming to film it in his town (sure, why not).

Alda is a charming actor who more recently has shown his effectiveness with other directors, often playing against type. His direction seems efficient if not inspired (he didn't direct Tynan, by the way). But where he let's us down, I think, is in the writing.

He'd already written a bunch of M*A*S*H episodes and I can imagine he was excited by a new and larger canvas. But TV habits die hard. Now I think it's often a cheap and lazy accusation that TV writers can't do movies. I'd like critics who make this claim to take a blind test to see if they can distinguish such screenwriters. But Alda's movies honestly do seem to be too much about text and too little about subtext. Or, when there is subtext, it's laid out all too clearly. He has a plot, and a subplot or two, and everything is very evenly told, so you always know where you are, and what the characters are feeling. By the end, each story is clearly resolved. This may not sound bad. It may even sound pretty good. But when everything is too neat, the whole experience doesn't leave much of an impression.
 

In fact, the best parts of his movies seem to be when the actors are capable of doing something that seems beyond what's merely in the words of the script. Yes, I know they're still performing what Alda wrote, but some seem able to take what he put down and fly with it, while most seem stuck on the ground.