Film

The Four Seasons

Name: The Four Seasons
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Released: 1981
Cast: Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Rita Moreno

Drama

Alan Alda's debut directorial effort, *The Four Seasons* follows three couples through a year of expensive vacations, watching comfort curdle into resentment. It's a warm-blooded ensemble piece that treats adultery, infidelity, and the slow corrosion of marriage with both comedy and genuine hurt. Ideal if you're curious how the seventies actually talked about divorce.

TMDb rating

3.2

If you liked this

The Big Chill1983

Another ensemble piece about long-term friendships and marriages in crisis, where the specificity of middle-class anxiety becomes universal. The weekend visit structure creates similar intimacy.

But Feels very much of its moment, and the grief plot that anchors it can seem like a device if you're not with the film's emotional wavelength.

Dinner at Eight1933

Cukor's masterpiece also braids together several couples across one evening, finding tragedies and comedy in the gap between social performance and private despair. Older but structurally identical in how it holds ensemble perspective.

But The pacing is deliberate; if you want plot propulsion over character observation, this will feel glacial.

Same Time, Next Year1978

Alan Alda again, playing against the film's own saccharine tendencies. Two people meet annually for a decade, and the film genuinely earns its sentiment through the accumulation of small, specific moments about how we change.

But Relies entirely on the charm of its two leads and the chemistry between them. If that doesn't work, you're stranded.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Four Seasons

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Tokyo Story1953

Both films trust that watching people fail to say what matters is the whole tragedy. Both move through seasons and locations as containers for small, permanent shifts in how people relate.

Ozu's masterpiece about aging parents visiting their adult children and the unspoken, irrevocable distances family time reveals. No plot, only observation—the same engine as *The Four Seasons* but running on grace instead of complaint. It's about presence and absence in the same sentence.

But Extraordinarily slow and patiently composed. If you need dramatic incident or even conversation to feel like drama, this will feel like it's barely there.

Kramer vs. Kramer1979

Arrived just before *The Four Seasons* and owns the divorce narrative of its era. Less interested in group dynamics but devastatingly precise about what ends marriages and what remains after they do.

But The ideological debate around parenting and gender now reads as period-specific in a way that ages the film unevenly.

Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams1973

Blythe Danner and Woodward as mother and daughter navigating middle age, regret, and the relationships that survive the distance between expectation and life. Intimate and quietly crushing.

But Very slight plot; if you need propulsion, this will feel like watching grass grow, albeit grass with excellent performances.

A Doll's House1973

Jane Fonda in a rigorous adaptation of Ibsen, colliding head-on with the question *The Four Seasons* orbits: what happens when you admit a marriage is a negotiation, not a fact of nature.

But Ideologically urgent in ways that can feel like argument rather than drama, and Fonda is not universally loved in this.

An Unmarried Woman1978

Mazursky's film about sudden divorce and rediscovery, with the same eye for how the upper-middle-class handle emotional crisis. Jill Clayburgh carries it with unsentimental grace.

But The romance subplot near the end feels tacked on and undercuts what the film had earned about solitude and self-knowledge.

The Poseidon Adventure1972

A disaster film that uses the ensemble crisis structure as literal disaster. Younger cast, different genre, but the same architecture of group dynamics under pressure revealing character.

But It's a movie where a ship capsizes. If you want realism over spectacle, this is the wrong direction.

California Suite1978

Four couples, four separate stories in a Beverly Hills hotel, observed with light comic touch but real emotional specificity. Less weightless than the title suggests; surprisingly touching beneath the surface.

But Episodic structure means it's uneven; you'll like some couples and lose interest in others. The tone wobbles between sitcom and pathos.

Scenes from a Marriage2021

Both dissect how functional, intelligent people can be completely incompatible, and both refuse to melodramatize. The difference is register: Alda adds comedy; Bergman removes it.

Bergman's miniseries (or feature-length film; it exists in both forms) is the philosophical ancestor of what Alda was attempting. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson across six episodes or ninety minutes of marriage corroding in real time, spoken with clarity that makes *The Four Seasons*' comedy-drama feel almost gentle.

But Deliberately punishing; Bergman does not offer reprieve or charm. If you want entertainment, this is the inverse—it's beautiful, but it does not love you.

A Serious Man2009

Both are about mid-life men watching their carefully constructed lives come apart during vacation. Both treat the couple's group as almost secondary to the central male anxiety. The difference: *Four Seasons* is warm, *A Serious Man* is cosmic horror.

The Coens' film about middle-class American anxiety and the family vacation (or attempt at one) as the container for metaphysical dread. Structurally loose like *The Four Seasons*, but the vacation is internal; the marriage is a Chinese box inside the larger crisis.

But Deliberately obscure in meaning; it's a shaggy dog about a shaggy dog, and if you want clarity about what it's arguing, you won't find it. Also Jewish-specific in register in ways that might not land.