One weekend a year, for twenty-five years
Same Time, Next Year, released in 1978 and directed by Robert Mulligan, is built on one of the simplest and boldest ideas in romantic comedy. George Peters, a New Jersey accountant played by Alan Alda, and Doris, an Oakland housewife played by Ellen Burstyn, meet by chance at a Northern California inn in 1951. Both are married to other people. Both have children. They spend a night together, and instead of parting with guilt and regret, they make a pact: they will meet at the same inn, at the same time, once a year, for as long as they both shall live. The film then follows them through six meetings, spaced five years apart, from 1951 to 1975, watching two people grow older, change, argue, laugh, and fall more deeply in love with each other while remaining married to other people.
The film is adapted by Bernard Slade from his own stage play, which had been a Broadway hit. On stage, the story was a two-character play, and the film keeps that intimacy. Apart from a few small appearances by inn staff, the screen belongs almost entirely to Alda and Burstyn. That is a demanding structure, and it works because both actors are superb. Burstyn, who had originated the role of Doris on Broadway opposite Charles Grodin, brings warmth, earthiness, and a wonderful comic timing to a woman who changes more, on the surface, than George does. Alda brings a nervous, decent, guilt-ridden charm to George, a man who is constantly trying to be honourable about a situation that is, by definition, not honourable at all.
George is a fascinating character for Alda. He is a certified public accountant from New Jersey, a man of routines and ledgers, who finds himself living a secret life that has no place in a ledger. At their first meeting in 1951, he is 27, earnest, and terrified of being caught. By 1975, he is a man in his fifties who has lived through the deaths of parents, the growing up of children, the changing of America, and the slow, surprising discovery that the woman he sees once a year knows him better than almost anyone else in his life. Alda charts that journey not with big gestures, but with small ones: the way George’s jokes get kinder, the way his guilt softens into something more like acceptance, the way he listens to Doris with increasing attention as the years pass.
A love story told in five-year jumps
The five-year structure is the film’s genius. Each visit is a snapshot of America as well as of a marriage that is not a marriage. In 1951, George and Doris are young, formal, and shocked by their own boldness. In 1956, they are more confident, and Doris is pregnant, a complication that leads to one of the film’s most moving scenes, when George helps deliver their child in the inn room. In 1961, the early sixties bring new confidence and new clothes. In 1965, the shadow of Vietnam and the changing roles of women enter the conversation. By 1970 and 1975, both characters have been through loss, and their annual meeting has become less about passion in the narrow sense and more about companionship, honesty, and the rare comfort of being fully known by another person.
Mulligan, best known for directing To Kill a Mockingbird, directs with a light, unobtrusive hand. He trusts the actors and the writing, and he lets the inn room itself become a character: the same walls, the same view of the sea, but different furniture, different fashions, and different people sitting on the bed. Marvin Hamlisch’s score is gentle and unobtrusive, and Robert Surtees’s cinematography gives the California coast a soft, romantic glow without turning it into a postcard. The film is not trying to be spectacular. It is trying to be true, and its truth lies in the accumulation of small details: a shared joke that returns years later, a gift that is remembered, a hurt that is apologised for long after the fact.
The moral questions in Same Time, Next Year are real, and the film does not dodge them. George and Doris are unfaithful to their spouses, and the film never pretends otherwise. It also never pretends that their spouses are monsters. George’s wife and Doris’s husband remain off-screen, but they are spoken of with affection and respect, and both George and Doris feel genuine guilt about them. What the film suggests, gently, is that human beings are complicated, that a marriage can be good and still leave a person lonely, and that a connection formed in secret can still be a real and honourable part of a life, even when it cannot be the whole of it. Audiences in 1978 argued about that suggestion, and audiences still argue about it today, which is a sign that the film touched a nerve.
Two actors, one room, twenty-five years
For Alda, George Peters was a perfect showcase. He had spent the 1970s playing Hawkeye Pierce, a man who talked fast and joked constantly, and George allowed him to slow down and play a man who is often at a loss for words. His comedy in this film is quieter: a raised eyebrow, a guilty smile, a carefully worded excuse that fools no one. His dramatic scenes are equally restrained. When George learns of a death in Doris’s family, or when he confronts his own fear of growing old, Alda does not reach for tears. He lets the feeling sit in his face, and the audience feels it all the more for his restraint.
Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, and Alda’s work deserves to be remembered alongside hers. Their chemistry is not the fireworks of a conventional screen romance. It is the chemistry of two people who have learned each other’s rhythms over decades, who can finish each other’s sentences and tease each other about old mistakes. That kind of chemistry cannot be faked. It has to be built scene by scene, and Alda and Burstyn build it with patience and humour. By the final meeting, when they are older and greyer and still meeting at the same inn, the audience understands why they keep coming back. It is not just habit. It is love, in a form that does not fit any simple category.
Same Time, Next Year was a commercial success and received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Burstyn and Best Adapted Screenplay for Slade. It remains one of the most unusual romantic films of its era, a film that believes adults can be both flawed and sympathetic, and that time itself is a character in any love story. Watch it for Alda’s quiet, evolving George, a man who starts as a nervous young accountant and ends as someone who has learned, over twenty-five years of annual weekends, how to be honest with at least one person in the world.