Three couples, four holidays, one friendship
The Four Seasons, released in 1981 and written and directed by Alan Alda, is a film about friendship in middle age, told with the lightness and honesty that became Alda’s trademark as a filmmaker. Alda plays Jack Burroughs, a New York lawyer married to Kate, played by Carol Burnett, a magazine editor. Each year, Jack and Kate take four holidays with two other couples: Nick and Anne Callan, played by Len Cariou and Sandy Dennis, and Danny and Claudia Zimmer, played by Jack Weston and Rita Moreno. One holiday for each season, framed by the music of Vivaldi, whose four violin concertos give the film its title and its score. It sounds idyllic, and for a while it is. Then life intervenes, as it always does, and the friendship has to survive something harder than a change in the weather.
The disruption comes when Nick leaves Anne and arrives at the next holiday with a much younger woman, Ginny, played by Bess Armstrong. Suddenly the group, which has been stable for years, must decide how to behave. Do they welcome Ginny? Do they stay loyal to Anne? Do they pretend nothing has changed? Jack, who likes to ask deep questions and then answer them himself, becomes the group’s unofficial moralist. He disapproves of Nick’s behaviour, he worries about Anne, and he tries to hold the friendship together by talking about it, at length, whether his friends want to talk about it or not. Alda plays Jack as a man who is both right and irritating, a combination he understood very well. Jack’s lectures are often sensible, but they are also a way of avoiding his own feelings, including an attraction to Ginny that he will not admit to himself.
Carol Burnett is wonderful as Kate, the organiser of the group, the woman who plans the holidays and keeps the peace, and who grows increasingly tired of her husband’s habit of turning every feeling into a discussion. Burnett, known for television comedy, gives a performance of great warmth and restraint here, and her scenes with Alda have the ease of a long marriage. She knows Jack’s tricks, she loves him anyway, and she is not afraid to tell him when he is being pompous. Weston and Moreno, as Danny and Claudia, provide much of the film’s comedy. Danny is a hypochondriac dentist, Claudia a fiery painter, and their bickering is affectionate rather than cruel. Cariou’s Nick is charming and selfish in equal measure, and Dennis’s Anne is brittle, funny, and heartbreaking as a woman watching her marriage end in front of her friends.
A comedy about growing older, honestly
What makes The Four Seasons more than a pleasant holiday film is its willingness to look at middle age without sentimentality. These characters are not old, but they are no longer young, and they know it. They worry about their health, their children, their careers, and whether the lives they have built are the lives they wanted. The seasonal structure gives Alda a perfect way to show that passage of time. In spring, the group is together and hopeful. In summer, tensions surface on a sailing trip. In autumn, a trip to the countryside brings arguments about honesty and loyalty. In winter, a skiing holiday forces a reckoning, including a painful and funny scene in which Jack, overwhelmed by his own emotions, loses his temper in a way that shocks even himself.
Alda directs with a confidence that is surprising for a debut feature. He lets scenes breathe, he trusts his cast, and he uses locations beautifully, from a Vermont farmhouse to a Caribbean island to a snowy ski lodge. Vivaldi’s music, far from being a gimmick, becomes a kind of commentary on the action: the same themes return each season, just as the same friends return each holiday, but they sound different each time because the people playing them have changed. The film’s visual style is warm and unshowy, and Alda’s camera stays close to faces, where the comedy and the drama both live.
The screenplay, which was nominated for awards, is full of the kind of dialogue Alda excelled at: witty, literate, and revealing. Characters talk about marriage, fidelity, ageing, and friendship in ways that feel like real conversations rather than speeches. Jack’s famous habit of asking a question and then answering it himself is both a joke and a character trait. It shows a man who is afraid of silence, afraid of what might be said if he stops talking. By the end of the film, Jack has learned, a little, to listen, and that small change is the film’s quiet triumph.
Alda behind the camera
The Four Seasons was a significant commercial success, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of 1981, and it established Alda as a film director in his own right. He would go on to direct Sweet Liberty, A New Life, and Betsy’s Wedding, but The Four Seasons remains his best-loved film as a director, and it was later adapted into a television series and, decades later, a new streaming series, a testament to the durability of its premise. Audiences recognised themselves in these couples: people who had been friends for years, who loved each other, and who still managed to hurt each other in ordinary, forgivable ways.
For Alda as an actor, Jack Burroughs is a revealing role. Jack is not Hawkeye Pierce. Hawkeye used jokes to survive a war. Jack uses talk to survive middle age. Both men are intelligent, humane, and a little too fond of their own cleverness, but Jack is more flawed, more recognisably ordinary, and therefore more touching. Alda does not make Jack a hero. He makes him a husband who is trying, a friend who is trying, and a man who sometimes gets in his own way. That honesty is why the film still works. It does not promise that friendship lasts forever without effort. It shows the effort, the arguments, the apologies, and the laughter that keep a friendship alive through the seasons.
Watch The Four Seasons with friends you have known for years, and you will recognise the dynamics at once: the organiser, the joker, the worrier, the moralist, the couple who argue in public and make up in private. Notice how Alda, as director, gives each actor room to shine, and how, as an actor, he lets Jack be wrong. It is a film about the second half of life that refuses to be gloomy about it, and it remains a perfect introduction to Alan Alda the filmmaker: warm, clever, humane, and always interested in what people say when they think no one is really listening.