There's an intriguing idea here, and director Gary David Goldberg never gets anywhere near it. The idea is identified (after apparently one diagnostic session with a psychiatrist) as "successful schizophrenia." A seventy-eight-year-old retiree, almost paralyzed by age and unable to make the least little move without the sharp command of his wife, has manufactured and secretly maintained for thirty years a fantasy world that is as real to him as his real one. Regrettably, it is not as real to Goldberg, who pictures this imagined world, which retains but radically alters elements of the tangible one, in amber-flooded slow-motion: the rough visual equivalent of passages of italics in a Freudianized novel of the 1930s. (All the lessons of Bunuel, all the lessons of Resnais, all the lessons of the school of surrealism, are lost on our Mr. Goldberg.) Also regrettably, this idea doesn't intrude into the story until deep into the second half: our earlier glimpses of this pastoral hideaway, a New Jersey farm off the front of an old Saturday Evening Post, can only be interpreted as the character's actual past, presumably his own boyhood. And finally regrettably, once it does intrude, it fails to hold the screen, fails to cast its full and withering glare on the man's "real" life, but gives way meekly to COCOON-like material of dotty oldster going through a second youth: putting on loud clothes and getting horny, etc. This is, after all, an Amblin' Entertainment: official emblem of denial and repression. Jack Lemmon, Ted Danson, Olympia Dukakis, Kathy Baker. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd