Even with a running time of just over ninety-minutes, when the closing credits roll you'll find yourself repeatedly (and gratefully) shouting the film's title.
"At Last," a vanity piece based on the real life romance of the film's screenwriters, never rises above the level of a made-for-TV families-in-crisis melodrama. Set in Bayou country, Martin Donovan, doing a fine mid-period Fred MacMurray, plays an unhappily married father of two. Rummaging through a box of memories, Donovan happens upon a stack of romantic correspondence between himself and a teen flame that was denied the couple by his prison warden of a mother (Brooke Adams). Of course Donovan and Kelly Lynch meet, of course they are both in miserable romances, and of course they make it work in the end. If only this path to true love was not paved with so many pothole-sized clichés.
Each actor is assigned two or three instantly recognizable characteristics that define them. Donovan sells cars, lives in his father's shadow and longs to chuck it all and sail around the world. His wife (Jessica Hecht) is a cold, bottled up workaholic whose bun hairdo reflects her tightly-wound personality. Lynch is a social worker who constantly fights with her daughter while despising her husband's (Michael Arata) alcoholism. Aside from being a drunk, Arata loves practicing his golf swing, and when pressed, is able to let loose a powerful backhand across his daughter's cheek. Mother Adams chain-smokes and drinks. If her profound inability to apply eye make-up is any indication, this is one mama with a bad case of the shakes.
First time (and does it show) director Tom Anton can't resist cheap linking devices: Lynch in the kitchen dousing her onion-stung eyes with cold water, match cut to Hecht over a basin trying to cool down after discovering her home pregnancy test came up positive. Nor is the director skilled at side-stepping hackneyed plot devices: the lovers' first kiss is interrupted by the wake of a passing boat. Anton even has the giggly film school chutzpah to have his name paged over the airport loudspeaker.
Donovan and Lynch give it their all, but the film's only salvation arrives in the form of M. C. Gainey. From Swamp Thing in "Con Air" to the bouncer in "Terminator III" to the full-frontal rampaging hubby in "Sideways," Gainey has carved his niche as a character actor willing to take chances in the most ungainly roles. As Donovan's pot-smoking, law defying older brother, Gainey has the role of his career as a Cajun artist whose gravelly, booze-bathed voice plays Jiminy Cricket to Donovan's guilt-ridden adulterer.
The film's most disturbing element has nothing to do with its dutiful structure. Timing is everything, and in light of the recent devastation in New Orleans the couples' climactic shipboard reunion backed by the bouncy ditty "Hurricane Party" gave me chills.
