Movies, COMING UNCOUPLED

When An Unmarried Woman ended, I couldn’t decide if it was just a good slick commercial film or the closest that Hollywood has come to Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Some of each, probably, though by now my admiration for Paul Mazursky’s daring and directness has grown considerably. Ever since Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, he’s been one of the sharpest, as well as most compassionate, observers of middle-class moral confusion. His characters aren’t always likeable, or even particularly bright, but they’re never simply caricatures because he has such an instinctive feeling for how human relationships work, or don’t. He’s not glib or sleazy, and he doesn’t try to hide his kinship with the Bobs and Teds and Blumes of the world. He directs from ground level. An Unmarried Woman deals with the problems of middle-aged divorcees who’ve been catapulted out of supposedly secure marriages into the unstable world of the swinging singles. It’s no fun trying to act 21 when you’re pushing 40, yet in no other American film have we been shown just how traumatic the situation really is.

Erica (Jill Clayburgh) and Martin (Michael Murphy) have been married seventeen years. He’s a successful Wall Street broker, she’s a mother, part-time secretary, and closet ballet dancer. Theirs is a typical upper-middle-class, urban arrangement until Martin meets a young schoolteacher at Bloomingdale’s, moves in with her, and leaves Erica to make her own way. For someone who’s been taught that marriage is forever and a good home a noble life’s goal, the experience is shattering. All of a sudden she’s scared, lonely, depressed, consumed with guilt and self-doubt. And there isn’t a great deal of support outside, either. Her psychiatrist, who’s also probably a lesbian, is sympathetic yet remote; all the men she meets are on the make (“I was practically raped,” she tells her daughter after one of them has made an innocent pass), and her women friends, though well-meaning, are so embittered and frustrated as to be only marginally helpful. Early in the film they meet at a restaurant to anatomize their lives. Conversation centers on periods, orgasms, sexual fantasies, performing, topics not often dealt with candidly in films. One woman has taken a nineteen-year-old lover. It’s a remarkable scene, too simplistic perhaps in suggesting that all a divorced woman wants or needs is a good man, but shattering in what it says about the importance of “coupling” in our society. “Everywhere I go I see couples,” Erica says later. “I’m so jealous, just so jealous.” Nobody disagrees.

At its best, An Unmarried Woman is a story of self-discovery and painful self-definition, one told largely through intimate conversations at dinner, in bars, or in bed. Mazursky works hard to keep things on a human scale. The pacing is deliberately slow, there’s little distracting technical experimentation, a great deal is conveyed by gesture and nuance. Talk is drama. At times we feel that we’re watching a documentary film in which the camera has slipped unobtrusively into other people’s lives and caught things not meant for us. At such moments, and there are quite a few, we can forgive Mazursky some of his slickness. He has taken a common problem and presented it in an uncommonly frank and personal way.

Too bad he couldn’t maintain this focus throughout. Erica eventually meets Saul (Alan Bates), an English painter with fairly conventional ideas about women yet sense enough not to impose them blindly on Erica. Much as I admire Alan Bates, however, his presence sabotages the film. Suddenly things become tritely romantic. We have walks in the rain and dancing in the dark. Erica begins to look more and more like the Clairol girl with each round of lovemaking. And the dialogue becomes pat and predictable, as though taken verbatim from a primer on women’s lib. He wants her to spend the summer with him in Vermont, she insists on remaining by herself in New York. He offers to support her, she refuses to be dependent on a man, especially a famous artist. They argue. Dishes fly. At last a compromise. He’ll go to Vermont, she’ll come up for weekends and holidays. Credits roll. It’s a cute coda to a film that has previously been quite hard-headed and uncompromising. One wishes that Mazursky had followed his instincts instead of giving in to a latent romantic streak that has undone the endings of his other films, notably Blume in Love. A little more follow-through, Paul. Still, An Unmarried Woman has remarkable things in it. It’s a serious, as distinguished from a soap-operatic, look at the traumas of separation and divorce. It may turn out to be a breakthrough film as well.



In High Anxiety, Mel Brooks takes an old joke – psychiatrists are invariably crazier than their patients – and turns it into a moderately amusing film. Not a masterpiece of crudeness and lunacy like The Producers or Blazing Saddles, which depend so much on old-fashioned sight gags and Brooks’ special brand of grotesque overstatement, but a cautious, somewhat subdued film that, in spite of its polish, never quite comes off.

Part of the problem may be the story material. Brooks plays a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist named Richard H. Thorndyke who arrives to head a hospital for The Very Very Nervous. The place is a sham, of course, run for the sadistic pleasure of the staff instead of the welfare of the patients. Thorndyke will shape it up. A promising situation, except that these days we all know so much about mental illness, the horrors as well as the hype, that it is impossible to make the subject funny without stylizing it, turning it into some kind of wild fantasy that seems to have little connection with the real thing. Brooks doesn’t do this, at least with any consistency, with the result that some of the jokes have a grim seriousness about them.

In one scene, a feckless doctor (Dick Van Patten) is terrified into a fatal hemorrhage for threatening to reveal the skeletons in the hospital closet. As the blood trickles from his ears, the camera moves steadily closer, as though recording the event for a medical textbook. Later, a straight-jacketed patient, who turns out to be Madeline Kahn’s missing father, is shown crawling around on all fours, barking, chasing a ball, lifting his leg.

Both scenes drew more gasps than laughs from the audience, as though Brooks had moved too close to literal truth. Some crucial notion of comic distance had been violated.

Not that the whole film is this way. There are plenty of zany self-indulgent moments, like an inspired send-up of nightclub performers and torch songs, and some deliriously nutty conversations between Thorndyke and his mentor, Professor Lilloman (Howard Morris), that could set the cause of psychoanalysis back several decades. But there’s also a general slackness about the whole undertaking, not to mention the played-out quality of some of its basic strategies. Like Brooks’ previous films, High Anxiety is about old movies, in this case Hitchcock thrillers. He’s lifted many of the master’s dramatic cliches and constructed some witty parodies of famous scenes, like the shower sequence from Psycho and the climax of Vertigo. Good moments, though how well the jokes will go over with people unfamiliar with the Hitchcock canon is an open question. It’s one thing to parody a popular genre, as Brooks did in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein; it’s quite another to focus on the work of one director, where so much depends on picking up on allusions. Not that High Anxiety is esoteric, but it is clubby and self-conscious and, finally, no more successful than other recent acts of homage like Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black and Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam. Brooks is essentially an anarchist, a master of the unpredictable. In High Anxiety, we not only see the jokes coming, we can hear the machinery creaking as well.

Oddly enough, the film’s biggest surprise is its technical virtuosity. If Brooks’ previous work was structureless and visually dead, High Anxiety is full of tightly composed scenes and arresting camera work, including parodies of close-ups and tracking shots that indicate a new directorial confidence. Yet to think of one of Hollywood’s certifiable crazies becoming preoccupied with technique isn’t especially comforting. It’s like trying to imagine Thomas Wolfe as Flaubert. Let’s hope it’s only a phase.