New York. After months in a rehab clinic, actress Georgia is finally released and sent back home, vowing never to succomb to alcoholism again. Her teenage daughter Polly moves in to live with her, and Georgia's friends, unemployed gay actor Jimmy and socialite Toby, support her. Georgia is shocked that her ex-lover, David, wrote a play based on their arguments, but she accepts to play the leading role. Georgia resumes drinking alcohol, and thus often argues with Polly. Jimmy is excited to get a role in a new play, but is then fired, whereas Toby's husband divorces her. Georgia is almost raped by a stranger she talked to in a bar, but escapes and has to hide her bruises. Polly moves out. However, Georgia accepts to have lunch with Polly and her dad.
"Only When I Laugh" was released right after the playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon was on a roll in the 70s with his film adaptations ("The Sunshine Boys", "The Goodbye Girl", "California Suite") and managed to promote his specific comic taste through his witty, snappy, tantalizing dialogues, but this film somehow marked the end of it. It consolidated an unwritten rule about inveresly proportional creative effort: as much as Neil Simon's scripts are greatly written, so much are they underwhelmingly directed. The director Glenn Jordan directs the entire film in the most bland, conventional manner, filming everything in medium shots and failing to insert some more visual creativity or ingenuity, which makes the film look old-fashioned. Some plot points were also left underused (for instance, James Coco's gay actor Jimmy always looks for a job, so wouldn't it have been nice for Georgia to hire him in a supporting role for her play? Wouldn't it have been good to connect Georgia's performance in the play with her arguing with her daughter and ex-lover in the finale?), but Simon accumulated so many effervescent lines and dialogues that its rate surpasses even his best films: "Getting healthy really gets you out of shape." / "Do you know how it feels to be turned down by a hemorrhoid commercial?" / "It is 90$ per tube. Do you notice how you never see a single pore on my face?" - "I've never even seen your face!" / "On prom night, I ran off to New York with a boy from my class." - "You never told me that before." - "You were never 17 before". The film is overlong and without a clear story, since it is a 'slice-of-life' observation of life, yet Simon's sharp dialogues are so good you enjoy crunching them down in your mind, and this translates to the characters who become alive and always feature a personality, from the main actress Marsha Mason up to Coco's Jimmy, like in the scene where he confesses that, if he could choose to be anyone in the world, his first choice would be A. Hepburn, his second choice L. Olivier "in his prime", and his third choice would be "anybody else but me".
Grade:++
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