Word: burstyn
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Edna Mae (Ellen Burstyn) is a faith healer without an orthodox faith. Though the deaf and the halt are cured at her touch, she is no manic Holy Roller, no snake-shaking spellbinder invoking God's immediate intervention for the sake of a fatter collection plate. She is a sensible Kansas widow, retrieved from a brush with death, who restores health "in the name of love." Love is all she wants to give to the two men in her life: her stern pa (Roberts Blossom), who responds to her proffered caress both as a seduction and a slap...
...characters are Doris (Ellen Burstyn) and George (Alan Alda), strangers who meet at a motel and end up in bed. Though married to others, the hero and heroine continue their affair on a one-weekend-per-year basis. Luckily, Writer Bernard Slade monitors the couple at five-year rather than annual intervals...
...only dignity in the film comes from Ellen Burstyn, who skillfully recreates her stage role. Playing the part originated by Charles Grodin, Alda gives a surprisingly weak performance: his usual warmth is vitiated by too many shrill farcical tantrums. Still, it's hard to blame an actor for this debacle. The only way to win playing Same Time, Next Year is to refuse to play...
...Hitchcock, or even a DePalma. Friedkin and Blatty successfully induce nausea, not terror--unless you're one of the impressionable innocents who gave this film its reputation, in which case, frankly, you have no taste. An excellent performance by Max Von Sydow, a pretty good one by Ellen Burstyn, a lifeless one by Jason Miller (who should stick to--or rather go back to--writing plays), and one by Linda Blair that is as disgusting as anything else in the movie...
...Burstyn's understated performance as a simple, Bible-spouting woman driven crazy by her husband's philandering is the movie's single redeeming feature. Otherwise there is nothing emotionally or intellectually involving here. Unless, of course, one is interested in some "personal statements" about the state of the movie business, contemporary issues and the star and director themselves that they manage to tuck in along the way. It perhaps need not be added that these are of a piece with the rest of A Dream of Passion-awkward, pretentious and empty...