All of Me

I recorded several of the movies that TCM ran in their programming tribute to Carl Reiner back in July. I've been slow in getting around to watching them, and only recently watched All of Me.

Steve Martin plays Roger Cobb, a lawyer hitting his midlife crisis. His girlfriend Peggy (Madolyn Smith Osborne) is the daughter of the head of the firm where Roger works, Burton Schuyler (Dana Elcar). Meanwhile, Roger has always had a dream of being a professional musician, even if that hasn't worked so well up to now. But Roger seems willing finally to put his life in order, by no longer pursuing his dreams of the music business, and proposing marriage to Peggy.

To move up in the firm, Schuyler has a rather unusual client for Roger. Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin) is an extremely wealthy woman who has unfortunately been sick since childhood with some sort of undisclosed illness which never let her live a normal life the way other people got to. She's nearing the point where she's going to die soon, and is getting her affairs in order with an extremely unorthodox will.

Edwina believes in reincarnation, and has found a swami, Prakha Lasa (Richard Libertini), who claims to have developed a method of taking one person's soul and putting it in the body of another person. Now, there's the ethical question of whether the person in the body intended for Edwina's soul can truly consent, but that's not the legal question to be discussed in All of Me. After all, who really believes this nonsense? Instead, Edwina has found a woman who seems interested in the idea, Terry Hoskins (Victoria Tennant), who is the daughter of Edwina's stableman, Fred (Eric Christmas). Roger's job is to make certain that the will is in order, with Terry inheriting everything since, after all, Edwina believes that Terry is going to become Edwina.

Sure enough, Edwina dies, but it's not at home where it would be easy to arrange everything just so for the ceremony involving the transfer of the soul from Edwina's body to Terry's body. Instead, it happens at the law firm, and hasty, ad hoc arrangements have to be made. Prakha has a special bowl which will hold the soul while it's being transferred from one body to the other. Things don't go according to plan, and the bowl is accidentally knocked out a window, hitting Roger on the street down below.

And wouldn't you know it, but this soul transfer nonsense actually works! Edwina's soul winds up in Roger's body, but Roger is still very much there. Basically, Edwina gets control of one half of the body, while Roger has control of the other half, at least when they're both awake. To talk to the other half of his soul, Roger only needs look in any mirror and he'll see Edwina staring back at him.

Needless to say, all of this is quite disconcerting. And as you can guess, it causes all sorts of havoc in Roger's life. He doesn't particularly care for having a woman in his body, or at least in his head. Edwina certainly doesn't like being trapped in a man's body either, especially not the body of a man who is sex-obsessed.

There are two problems for Roger to resolve. The obvious one is getting Edwina out of him, and into Terry's body, where Edwina had intended to go. But the other one is with Rogers personal and professional life. Edwina's on again, off again control of Roger's body disconcerts everybody around him, as they don't get what's going on, and who can blame them. Also, Roger is being asked to defend his boss in a divorce case, which means showing probity in the court room, which Edwina doesn't necessarily want, since Edwina sees the wife's side of the case.

But it's just as important to get Edwina's soul into Terry's body. It's at this point that Roger learns that Terry never had any intention of giving up her soul in favor of Edwina's. To be fair to Terry, she probably accepted this arrangement figuring that the soul transfer would never work, and that it was a way of getting easy money, assuming that all of the legal difficulties over whether Edwina was competent to sign such a will in the first place could be worked out. But seeing that the transfer actually does work, she's not intending to give up her own soul.

All of Me has an interesting premise, and one that frankly presents all sorts of problems in pulling off. The sort of lies that Roger has to engage in in his professional life to keep people from knowing that Edwina was talking and not him can be grating. Also, there's the challenges for any actor in trying to portray two completely different people in one body. The script doesn't always work in Steve Martin's favor, and frankly there are times where I felt myself cringing at what I was watching. The movie does wind up working, more or less, if you stick with it. And other people may not have the sort of problems I naturally have with what I've always called the "comedy of lies".

The last time I looked All of Me is available on DVD. However, the print TCM ran was panned-and-scanned to 4:3, when it should be a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The print also looked a bit fuzzy and unstable. I have no idea of the quality of the print on the DVD.