HELLO AGAIN
Date of publication: 11/06/1987
By Roger Ebert
I don't know about you, but I think that coming back from the dead should be a really big deal. And by making it into a little deal, the occasion for safe and predictable little laughs, "Hello Again" blows a great comic opportunity.
Meditate for a moment on the possibilities in the modern-day resurrection of the klutzy wife of a social-climbing plastic surgeon. Imagine what the supermarket tabloids would say, not to mention Jim and Tammy Bakker, not to mention the pope, not to mention Johnny Carson. Imagine what a person with a healthy sense of humor could do with a situation like that. Just for openers, you could reveal what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
There are the makings of a great comedy here, but you will not find more than scattered hints of it in "Hello Again," a movie that fails to pay off on so many opportunities that the whole film feels like an anticlimax. The story stars Shelley Long as the sweet but clumsy wife of Corbin Bernsen, the plastic surgeon. One day she chokes to death and is buried and mourned and then basically forgotten by all but her sister and her son.
The sister (Judith Ivey) runs the local occult bookstore, and in a quaint volume of forgotten lore she discovers a black magical incantation that can raise the dead. There are two catches: The ceremony must be performed exactly one year after the person has died, and the newly resurrected person must find true love within 30 days or die again. By the light of a circle of scented candles, Ivey reads from the old book, and Long materializes out of a vapor and perches on a tombstone.
The first place she visits after her resurrection is her former home, where Bernsen is already remarried to Sela Ward, her oldest friend. By blowing this scene, the director, Frank Perry, gives warning that he is going to blow many more scenes, and he does. The mistake is to go straight for the sit-com dialogue and the funny one-liners, instead of really dealing with the question of how people would respond to the reappearance of a dead person. Perhaps the challenge requires more gallows humor than this movie is prepared to permit.
It's hard to say whether the actors are to blame for the movie's low energy and slow pacing. There are scenes (notably one where Long confronts Bernsen on the roof of his hospital) that are so sloppily constructed that you wonder if they used the wrong takes. There are other scenes, such as the ludicrous final confrontation between Long and her archrival Ward, that Harriett Beecher Stowe would have found lacking in subtlety.
"Hello Again" is only truly alive when Judith Ivey and Austin Pendleton are on the screen. She plays a certified wacko who delivers her incantations with true, abandoned, conviction. He has a smaller role as a billionaire who helps out Long and falls instantly in love with Ivey. It is some kind of symptom of this movie's malaise that when Ivey and Pendleton lock eyes for the first time, it gets a bigger laugh than anything Long and Bernsen say to one another.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
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Hello Again
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 09, 1987
Not too long ago, in her execrable movie "The Money Pit," Shelley Long spent most of her time with her house caving in on her head. Watching her new movie, "Hello Again," all I could think of was, "Where is that house when you need it?" In her early days on "Cheers," Shelley Long was like a cactus with brains; she was all prickly spikes and soliloquies. Now she has become the actress most likely to draw fire from passing motorists. In "Hello Again," she plays Lucy, a housewife married to a social-climbing plastic surgeon named Jason (Corbin Bernsen). You only need to watch Lucy walk a length of carpet to know everything important about her -- carpet being one of the many things in life that she has trouble with. Lucy is, as they say, accident-prone, which is another way of saying that all things edible spring to her blouse with alarming frequency. Either that or she chokes on them and dies, which is what happens when she nibbles on a South Korean chicken ball at her sister's. The movie, which was directed by Frank Perry and written by Susan Isaacs -- the team that worked together on "Compromising Positions" -- is like a sorry updating of "My Favorite Wife." One year after her death, Lucy is brought back from the dead by her sister (Judith Ivey), an occultist who put on her gypsy regalia to attend a Grateful Dead concert in '67 and hasn't taken it off since. Naturally, many things have changed, and the movie follows Lucy's progress as she adjusts to her new circumstances, including her husband's marriage to her best friend (Sela Ward), her fledgling love affair with the emergency-room doctor (Gabriel Byrne) who tried to save her life, and, once the story gets out, her new-found celebrity. All of this is presented with a broad-stroked, sitcom raucousness that's pretty tough to stomach. The movie is a Disney production, and it has that special brand of tony brazenness -- the new Disney touch -- that a lot of its recent films have had. (If things keep up like this, Tinkerbell will have to exchange her wand for a sledgehammer.) There are some smart lines, but the scenes have no shape, and more often than not they're resolved by having Lucy knock something over. Somebody once said -- I think it was Plato -- that comedy isn't pretty, and "Hello Again" is absolute proof of that.
