This adaptation of John Cheever's famous short story captures with ironic comedy and drama the pathos of middle-aged, middle-class America. At the age of forty, Michael Murphy, a slightly inebriated suburbanite, confronts his mid-life crisis by hurdling over his host's furniture, hoping to recapture the athletic prowess that made him a track star in his college days. Kathryn Walker plays his embarrassed wife who is unable to halt this obsessive ritual, with which her husband tries to hang on to his fading youth and vigor, and prove he's still a man and an athlete.