SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES (1980) *** You can't fool the great ones. Neil Simon presses his pen, gently, on the spirit of the moment that the gloriously slapstick time that we remember as the '70s (though so much of it felt different from the ground) devolutionized into the sombre responsibility (to the extent that greed can be so decorated) that we think back on as the '80s (though many of us managed to immunize ourselves, at least for awhile). Every review I've ever read says something about "bankrobber," or " innocent bankrobber," which is why it's very good that I'm writing this now. Bankrobbing has virtually nothing to do with it, and innocence even less. Neil lavishes the lines, situational lines, on Chevy Chase (to the past) and Charles Grodin (to the passed). Goldie Hawn swings between them, an angel of a pendulum spent between duty and inevitability and romance and curse; between stalling and accelerating, and accellerating into irreversible intertia; beyond irreversible inertia into a future that shines in that familiar way; in that way that can never be lost. They're all tremendous. Chevy's character would have been too easy to discolor in a manner calculated to appeal to temporal momentum and mutually negotiated sensibilities at the studio, but Chevy wouldn't have wanted to play it like that. Goldie is possessed of such winsome wit that her very performance defines some new criteria embracing unnecessary, redundant, perfect, and incalculable. Even Grodin manages to be a kinder, gentler version of what was really coming. It's all very silly, really, which is much of the point. All of it, actually, except for the most important part, some portion of which is the exaltation of silly.
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