Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams

In the early seventies, the social liberation of the '60s was still expanding the lives of young people and the generation of WWII was full into middle age, with all its potential malaise. Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973) covers the generational spectrum of the era, with a focus on the older side. Joanne Woodward portrays Rita Walden, an aging New York wife/mother/daughter struggling with her place in a world that seems at once dull and unnavigable. She is a dissatisfied, unhappy person, combative with the people in her life – her grown daughter, mother and sister. Martin Balsam is Harry, her oculist husband, a mild man, patient with his wife's chronic bitterness. When Rita's mother (Sylvia Sidney) dies unexpectedly, Rita falls headlong into a midlife crisis that recalls many painful memories of the past. If the film title and its existential probing seem Bergmanesque, it's no accident. In one scene, Rita and her mother see a Bergman film together, Wild Strawberries (1957), in which the lead character, like Rita, faces his dawning mortality and begins to question his relationship with his family and the choices of his past. Like that character, Rita has frightening visions, mostly involving her adult son, who has fled to Amsterdam to be free of his parents' conventions and live with his boyfriend. Her regrets of how she's dealt with her son's homosexuality are a recurring theme in the film. Eventually, perhaps spurred on by his wife's crisis, Harry begins to gr... more