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Miami Blues

From the Chicago Reader (April 1, 1990). — J.R.

People like myself who often despair of finding a cop-and-crime movie that isn’t encrusted in cliches should take to this wonderful sleeper by writer-director George Armitage (Vigilante Force), based on a novel by Charles Willeford (Cockfighter) and coproduced by Jonathan Demme. A small-time thief and ex-con (Alec Baldwin) arrives in Miami, latches on to a local hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and winds up stealing the gun and badge (along with the dentures) of police detective Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward) in order to pose as a cop while pulling off more thefts. Some of the characters and situations, such as the thief’s stylish chutzpah and his relationship to the hooker, recall Godard’s Breathless, but Armitage’s handling of the material is consistently fresh and pungent. The three lead actors all manage to be terrific without showing off — Leigh, in the course of an exquisite performance, does one of the best impersonations of a country southern accent I’ve ever heard — and the use of Miami locations is a consistent delight. The late Willeford wrote four Hoke Moseley novels, and this crisp, funny, grisly, and perfectly balanced adaptation makes me yearn for Armitage to film a few more of them. With Nora Dunn, Charles Napier, and Shirley Stoler. (JR)

A View From The Past [VALLEY OF ABRAHAM]

From the Chicago Reader (August 25, 1995). — J.R.

Valley of Abraham

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Manoel de Oliveira

With Leonor Silveira, Cecile Sanz de Alba, Luis Miguel Cintra, Rui de Carvalho, Luis Lima Barreto, Diogo Doria, Jose Pinto, and Isabel Ruth.

I think the most important intellectual discovery I’ve made in the past year came from the early pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. In a way, it’s an observation so obvious that I wonder why it never occurred to me before: “Unlike the ‘long 19th century,’ which seemed, and actually was, a period of almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress…there has, since 1914, been a marked regression from the standards then regarded as normal in the developed countries and in the milieus of the middle classes and which were confidently believed to be spreading to the more backward regions and the less enlightened strata of the population….Since this century has taught us, and continues to teach us, that human beings can learn to live under the most brutalized and theoretically intolerable conditions, it is not easy to grasp the extent of the, unfortunately accelerating, return to what our 19th century ancestors would have called the standards of barbarism.”

So thoroughly had I been brainwashed by the myth of perpetual progress that it didn’t even occur to me that the history of the 20th century might be one of regression. Indeed, capitalist notions of expanding markets and improving goods and services may now be so firmly entrenched that it’s become all but impossible to weigh such contrary evidence as the greenhouse effect, mass homelessness, and current congressional plans to give the Pentagon $7 billion more than it’s requested while cutting $9 billion from health, labor, and education funding. In effect our society has ruled that anything at all can be blamed for our troubles except capitalist greed and material progress. Add to that the belief that we have far outrun our 19th-century counterparts, and the likelihood of people deciding that the 19th century has something to teach us seems very remote. It’s difficult enough to find out what the 19th century actually was like.

Hobsbawm’s book affords a view of the 20th century framed by the viewpoint of the 19th — the period in which Hobsbawm as a historian clearly feels most at home. The same could perhaps be said of Manoel de Oliveira, probably the oldest filmmaker anywhere still working, whose “difficult” cinema is at once archaic and modernist. Born in 1908 in Porto, Portugal (where many of his films are set), de Oliveira is almost certainly the only living director whose first film was a silent one. One might think that this alone would make him an internationally celebrated figure, especially during this year’s “centennial of movies”; but actually, outside of Portugal, he’s celebrated only in old-fashioned countries like France that value noncommercial art and believe in state funding. (In fact, 1995 isn’t the centennial of movies, it’s the centennial of movie exhibition — which is why, as Jean-Luc Godard has pointed out, all the recent movie-centennial posters show projectors, not cameras. But in the world of movies, as we all know, estimated gross literally precedes existence, not merely essence.)

No movie by de Oliveira has ever been distributed in the United States, and alas, none of what makes him such an extraordinary figure can be assumed to be common knowledge. So the fact that Facets Multimedia is giving Valley of Abraham (1993), the 13th of his 15 features to date, a full week’s run shouldn’t be taken for granted; if you miss this movie now, you won’t be able to catch up with it or any other de Oliveira picture on video in the foreseeable future. It’s neither his worst movie nor his best, in my opinion; but it offers something no other movie in town can even approximate: a precise but complex sense of how the 19th century might look at the 20th (unlike Merchant-Ivory films, which at most give you a 20th-century view of the 19th).

The son of a prominent industrialist — the first Portuguese manufacturer of electric lamps — de Oliveira was an athlete, a prizewinning race driver, and a college dropout who helped run his father’s factories or went into farming when he wasn’t trying to make movies. (The censorship imposed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled from 1932 to 1968, put many obstacles in his way.) De Oliveira’s interest in movies and in the living conditions of the poor came together in his first completed film, a silent documentary called Hard Labor on the River Douro. He finished it when he was 23, though he’d been involved with movies since the age of 19, both as an actor and as an aspiring filmmaker. But apart from making a few minor documentaries and acting in the first Portuguese talkie, he didn’t make any further inroads in movies until his first feature, a 1942 children’s film, Aniki-Bobo. A whopping 21 years later he made his second feature, Act of Spring, a poetic rendering of a passion play. (In between he made two color documentaries.)

Shorts and documentaries followed, but astonishingly de Oliveira’s first full-length fiction feature for adults, The Past and the Present, wasn’t made until he was 63, in 1971. Since then, he’s made a dozen features and more shorts, many of them remarkable: Benilde (1975) and the four-and-a-half-hour Doomed Love (1978), probably his two greatest films; the nearly three-hour Francisca (1981) and the nearly seven-hour The Satin Slipper (1985), which have their champions as well; then My Case (1986), The Cannibals (1988), No or the Vainglory of Command (1990), The Divine Comedy (1991), The Day of Despair (1992), the three-hour Valley of Abraham, The Money Box (1994), and finally The Convent, which premiered at Cannes three months ago (starring John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve, it’s one of de Oliveira’s wildest, most aggressively modernist works and is scheduled to appear at the New York film festival next month). De Oliveira is a familiar sight at the major European festivals these days, looks a good 10 or 15 years younger than his 87 years, and shows no signs of slowing down. Reportedly his next feature is already in preproduction.

It’s an oversimplification to say that all or even most of de Oliveira’s work hinges on the European aristocracy of the 19th century, but a good deal of it is clearly shaped by upper-class 19th-century lifestyles and the narrative traditions that go with them: leisurely observation and contemplative treatments of drawing-room conversation. Three of de Oliveira’s major works involve the writings or life of Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-1890), widely considered Portugal’s greatest novelist: de Oliveira adapted his most famous novel in Doomed Love, adapted a contemporary novel about Castelo Branco’s unrequited love for an English girl (Francisca), and dramatized on the basis of Castelo Branco’s letters his progressive blindness and eventual suicide (The Day of Despair). If memory serves, The Cannibals is a contemporary opera with a plush 19th-century setting, done in a plush 19th-century style; The Divine Comedy is derived not from Dante but from various characters and themes in Dostoyevsky.

Many of de Oliveira’s features make striking use of impersonal offscreen narrators (Doomed Love has two, one male and one female), and their unhurried, sprawling commentary is perhaps what’s most 19th-century about his work, evoking the narration of Orson Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons, a film (and novel) explicitly concerned with the clashes between 19th- and 20th-century attitudes: “The only public conveyance was a streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the ‘girl’ what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.”

I assume that de Oliveira’s sprawl and slow pace account for the fact that his films haven’t been distributed in the United States. Those qualities are also what I cherish most about them — the fact that they allow me to muse about what I’m listening to and watching, which is almost invariably beautiful. One academic I know who’s written a book about French philosopher Jacques Derrida and works as a stringer for the New York Times saw No or the Vainglory of Command and told me he found de Oliveira impenetrable. If a Times writer considers de Oliveira tougher than Derrida — something that doesn’t correspond at all to my experience — one can rest assured that Michael Medved won’t find his films congenial either.

I won’t deny that Valley of Abraham sometimes sags — the middle hour in particular — but to my taste most current Hollywood movies are much harder to sit through and offer far less to think about. Moreover, de Oliveira’s too hip not to realize what he’s doing to the reflexes of audiences trained on bad commercial movies, the kind that guarantee meaningless movement at all times and at all costs; and he’s too playful not to tweak us about our impatience. At one point in the third hour of Valley of Abraham, during a character’s extended monologue about the decline of Western civilization — and the particular role played in it by the United States — another character suddenly lifts a blissfully purring cat from the heroine’s lap and flings it directly at the camera, as if to wake us all up. It’s a much wittier and more tactile moment than anything in The Usual Suspects; even the camera registers the unholy impact.

Still, de Oliveira isn’t simply trying to reproduce the warp and woof of 19th-century narratives, boring stretches and all. In fact, Valley of Abraham is based on a contemporary novel of the same title by Agustina Bessa-Luis — the same woman who wrote Fanny Owen, the source novel for Francisca. Bessa-Luis’s novel is itself a kind of adaptation of — or, more precisely, reflection on — Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose title character has been transposed to a 20th-century upper-class Portuguese setting. De Oliveira himself inspired Bessa-Luis to write the novel by suggesting this transposition to her. Moreover, the film is set in the Douro region and de Oliveira’s hometown of Porto. So Valley of Abraham is not so much a version of Madame Bovary as an appropriation of some of its plot: de Oliveira has eliminated the bourgeois pharmacist villain Homais and superimposed a 19th-century novelistic narration that’s quite different from Flaubert’s.

Like Flaubert’s character (and Cervantes’s Don Quixote before her), de Oliveira’s Ema grows up reading romantic literature. A beauty capable of causing car accidents by standing on her terrace over a curve in the road, she’s drawn into a loveless marriage to a tolerant doctor named Carlos de Paiva, then takes a long succession of lovers of various ages once she decides that attracting men is her mission in life. The male narrator recounts much of the offscreen action and adds commentary while the camera gazes placidly at Ema in decorous domestic settings or at the breathtaking local scenery: these beautifully framed compositions allow meaning to sink in slowly, as if by osmosis.

“This is a lyrical film,” Oliveira has aptly written. “It is so in the way a woman resists men, who represent power, on the strength of her poetic outlook on the world, even if it is mere illusion….This is the theme of Valley of Abraham: how poetry will lead Ema to her own agony, how she will construct her death on the basis of a poetic view of the world and finally, how she will, step by step, organize such agony poetically.”

Ema de Paiva, c’est moi, de Oliveira seems to be saying. His modernism — the necessary complement to his 19th-century digressiveness — resides partly in the casual disjunctions he creates between words and images, partly in foregrounding the arbitrary nature of the visual representation. Young Ema is played by one actress (Cecile Sanz de Alba), grown Ema by another (Leonor Silveira), and rather than attempt to minimize or rationalize their different appearances, Oliveira rubs our noses in the discrepancy, even to the point of having Silveira twice gaze at a photograph of de Alba as her younger self. The solo piano music that provides the score (apart from a jazz record at a party and a violinist performing Bach) recalls silent-movie accompaniment, though other facets of the film, like the color and the sound effects, make it clear that this is anything but a period piece.

If you’re interested in a pleasant three-hour escape from 20th-century barbarism, I can’t think of a better place to go. “Films, films,” de Oliveira wrote in a “Cinematographic Poem” nine years ago:

The best resemble

Great books

That are difficult to penetrate

Because of their richness and depth….

The cinema isn’t easy

Because life is complicated

And art indefinable

Making life indefinable

And art complicated.

If you agree with these sentiments, you should make tracks to Facets and let Kevin Costner die of green rot.

Female Perversions

From the Chicago Reader (May 2, 1997). — J.R.

An adventurous and sometimes sexy, if only fitfully successful, adaptation of Louise Kaplan’s celebrated nonfiction book by Susan Streitfeld, working with a script she wrote with Julie Hebert (1996). The focus is on the life of a successful single prosecutor (British actress Tilda Swinton, displaying an impeccable American accent) as she waits to discover whether she’s been appointed as a judge, her kleptomaniac-scholar sister (Amy Madigan), the prosecutor’s boyfriend, a lesbian psychotherapist she has a fling with, and other people in her orbit. Oscillating between everyday events in her life and her dreams and fantasies, the film is much more successful with the former than with the latter, which often get heavy-handed and obscure. But the freshness of Streitfeld’s approach toward gender anxiety and social conditioning fascinates even when the overall clarity diminishes. Not for everyone, but those who like it will probably like it a lot. With Karen Sillas, Clancy Brown, Frances Fisher, Laila Robins, Paulina Porizkova, and Dale Shuger. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, May 2 through 8. — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Short Cuts [COFFEE AND CIGARETTES]

This appeared in the May 28, 2004 issue of Chicago Reader. Coffee and Cigarettes, incidentally, proved to be one of the surprise hits of Jarmusch’s career — not as commercially successful as the subsequent Broken Flowers (though I prefer it to that), but more popular than anticipated. The overhead shots of expresso cups in a more recent Jamusch feature, The Limits of Control, recall those in Coffee and Cigarettes — providing even more of a contrast with some of the weird, transgressive, and uncharacteristic camera angles in the new film, starting with the very first shot. (Note: the first photograph below is by Jean-Daniel Beley, who has requested a credit.)—J.R.

Coffee and Cigarettes

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Jim Jarmusch

With Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joe Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach de Bankolé, Cate Blanchett, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, Bill Rice, and Taylor Mead.

At first Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, made over a span of 17 years, looks like a departure for him. It consists of 11 entertaining, mainly comic short films in black and white that show people mainly sitting around in coffeehouses mainly drinking coffee, mainly smoking cigarettes, and mainly talking. But four of Jarmusch’s seven previous fiction features were built out of similarly isolated episodes, and the remaining three—Permanent Vacation (1980), Dead Man (1995), and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)—are all episodic. Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down by Law (1986)—also in black and white—each concentrated on three characters seen in three separate settings. Mystery Train (1989) had three separate sets of characters and three episodes set during the same day in Memphis. Night on Earth (1991)—focusing, like Coffee and Cigarettes, on what might be called downtime—had five separate episodes featuring cabdrivers and their passengers, occurring simultaneously across the globe.

The short form looks like a genuine alternative in Jarmusch’s hands because of what he does with it. He’s a master of minimalism, and his close attention to the form contrasts sharply with the isolated and detachable sequences that have become the calling card of film technique, the be-all and end-all of movie art. The fondness for fragments can be traced back largely to Sergei Eisenstein in the 20s, when famous set pieces began to define the “art of cinema” in many minds—the Odessa steps sequence in Potemkin (1925), the bridge-raising sequence in October (1927), and the cream-separator sequence in The General Line (1929), all eventually supplanted by the shower-murder sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). This tendency was further institutionalized by popular magazines such as Premiere and by countless “the making of” TV documentaries, which applauded the notion of separating sequences from their contexts.

The fragmentation of narrative form in current movies encourages the disassociation of the parts of a film. This may be fine when putting together a trailer, presenting a clip on a TV show, or making a point in a film class, but it undermines any sense of classical proportion or harmony. Few people would call Jarmusch a classicist, yet his fiction features show a concern for these qualities that isn’t shared by many of his contemporaries.

A few critics have shrugged off Coffee and Cigarettes as slight and inconsequential, calling it an exercise in style, done in Jarmusch’s usual “hip” idiom. But I think its form and content are much more notable and consequential than its style.

The film is certainly less ambitious than Dead Man or Ghost Dog, though it’s by no means less personal. The main themes are the ethics of celebrity, the tensions and irritations that can arise between close friends and family members, and two Jarmusch standbys, shyness and loneliness. These themes and the recurring formal elements—ranging from inserted overhead shots of coffee cups and checkerboard tablecloths or tabletops to abstract patterns in the dramaturgy—give Coffee and Cigarettes an overall artistic coherence that’s far from common in current movies.

Having known Jarmusch for over two decades, I think his celebrity status—he can’t walk down the street in many cities around the world without being recognized—is something he both likes and dislikes. He loves the attention, but he’s bothered by the inequities that arise from stardom. A lot of this movie is given over to some very funny observations and ethical reflections on that subject. In the segment titled “Cousins” we see Cate Blanchett playing in the same shots herself during a movie junket and her fictional punk cousin Shelly, who’s seething with jealousy and resentment when Cate meets her in the lobby of her luxury hotel. It’s a technical tour de force, flawlessly executed by Blanchett, Jarmusch, and his crew. I’ve heard that when Jarmusch posed for publicity photos during the shooting of this sequence he chose to be photographed with Shelly rather than Cate, a telling indication of whom he feels more allied with.

Twenty-one of the 27 actors play some version of themselves with the same name, and most of these actors are at least minor celebrities. (For the record, the six who don’t play themselves are Joie Lee, Cinqué Lee in two separate parts, Blanchett when she’s Shelly, Steve Buscemi, E.J. Rodriguez, and Mike Hogan.)

The project started when Jarmusch was invited to contribute a comedy sketch to Saturday Night Live in 1986, shortly after shooting Down by Law, and he cast one of that film’s three stars, the then relatively unknown Roberto Benigni, along with stand-up comic Steven Wright. He shot the film’s second sketch in Memphis (where he was shooting Mystery Train) three years later, and the third one four years after that. The remaining eight were all shot recently over a relatively brief period, meaning that Jarmusch had had plenty of time to plan these episodes individually and develop them as an ensemble, letting them echo and interact with one another and build a whole that’s much greater than the sum of its parts. In this respect Coffee and Cigarettes resembles a cumulative, organically interrelated short story collection such as James Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, or Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, rather than an assortment of loose pieces rattling around inside a common container, such as Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, Nelson Algren’s The Neon Wilderness, Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, or Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner.

One of the more mysterious aspects of Coffee and Cigarettes is whether the form creates the content or the content suggests the form. A good example of what I mean can be found in one of the most provocative, though not best-known, stories of Franz Kafka, “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” The first part of the story recounts a comic fantasy: the grumpy title hero comes home to his sixth-floor walk-up, and “two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes” begin playfully following him around the room, coordinating their moves with his and with each other’s. They bounce after him for the remainder of the evening, then resume their teasing play in the morning—until he lures them into his wardrobe and locks them inside. The second half of the story prosaically recounts his dull morning at the linen factory where he works, dominated by his irritation with the two assistants who share his tiny office. This story is remarkable not just for the fantasy that precedes the depiction of everyday normality, but for the playful form itself—the subtle and disquieting rhyming of the bouncing balls and the two assistants. One wonders whether Kafka’s concept began with the bouncing balls, the assistants, or the echoes between the two.

There’s a similar ambiguity in Jarmusch’s playful two-part inventions. His second episode, “Twins,” features Joie and Cinqué Lee, two of Spike Lee’s siblings, playing twins (which they’re not in real life); their petty bickering consists mainly of each contradicting and echoing the other. Their dialogue with a waiter (Buscemi) concerns the legendary twin of Elvis Presley who died at birth and the siblings’ charge that Elvis ripped off the music of black musicians such as Otis Blackwell and Junior Parker (another form of duplication).

Five episodes later we get “Cousins” (one of my three favorite episodes), followed by “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil,” which features musicians Jack and Meg White, a former couple who pose as siblings. Then we get the hilarious “Cousins?” (one of my other favorites), in which Alfred Molina and British TV star Steve Coogan meet for tea in an LA restaurant, and Molina, hoping to establish some intimacy with Coogan, says he recently discovered that they’re cousins. (In more ways than one, this is the most brilliant episode in the movie–an acute examination of showbiz and celebrity pecking order.) And in the episode after that, “Delirium,” GZA and RZA, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, introduce themselves to Bill Murray as cousins.

Did Jarmusch think first of using twins, siblings, and cousins, or did he start off aiming for rhyme effects? I’m not sure it matters, but the pairings and doublings don’t stop. Many lines of dialogue recur, and the movie opens and closes with separate versions of “Louie Louie” (whose title is already a repetition). The sixth episode, “No Problem,” begins and ends with Alex Descas taking a pair of dice from his pocket and rolling them three times; the results we see are all doubles. The ninth and tenth episodes both have two characters who order tea instead of coffee.

That Jarmusch’s film registers as loose and offhanded despite so much formal control is one of the characteristic achievements of his minimalism. As in Eugen Herrigel’s book Zen in the Art of Archery, he doesn’t appear to care whether he hits the target, though he seldom misses. The only episode that strikes me as being undernourished is the fifth, “Renee,” which lingers over a young woman (Renee French) smoking and drinking coffee while looking through ads in a gun catalog. She’s interrupted by a waiter (Rodriguez) giving her an unasked-for coffee refill and later trying unsuccessfully to make conversation. Yet even this relatively meager segment manages to repeat some lines of dialogue and some formal elements from other sketches, and by focusing once on a character who prefers solitude to conversation, Jarmusch offers a meaningful contrast to the other episodes.

I assume one reason Jarmusch decided to home in on electricity pioneer and maverick Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) in another offbeat episode is that Tesla represents so many “alternatives”—not just alternating current and an alternative to Thomas Edison, but an alternative, utopian history that encompasses Tesla’s ideas about free electricity, free transportation, and free communications. This also occasions what is probably the most poetic of the movie’s recurring lines: “He perceived the earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance.”

The many self-referential details increase the clubhouse atmosphere, and some of the reviewers who dismiss the film may be responding to this. For example, we get blackouts at the end of each section, as we did in Stranger Than Paradise. In the fourth section—which features Joe Rigano and Vinny Vella, who played aging Italian gangsters in Ghost Dog—there’s a framed photo on the wall of Henry Silva, one of their colleagues in that film. And in the eighth segment, with Jack and Meg White, there’s a framed picture of Lee Marvin; Jarmusch and some of his friends once founded a jokey, semisecret club they called the Sons of Lee Marvin.

Other gags can be traced to allusions of one kind or another. (Two that appear to have been studiously avoided: Jarmusch once played a coffee addict in Alex Cox’s 1987 comic western Straight to Hell, and in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s 1995 Blue in the Face he ruminated on what he claimed would be his last cigarette.) Jarmusch has noted in an interview that Tom Waits’s speech to Iggy Pop in the third episode—about having just performed “roadside surgery” by delivering a baby and about combining “music and medicine” in his life—was improvised; when Jarmusch later discovered that RZA was into alternative medicine, he decided to duplicate parts of Waits’s monologue in the episode that focuses on RZA and GZA. This mixture of improvisation and formal patterning justifies Jarmusch’s description of Coffee and Cigarettes as “series of short films disguised as a feature (or maybe vice versa),” as well as his formally pitched remark that the film is photographed “in black (coffee) and white (cigarettes).”

People who object to the in-jokes should consider that they might be just part of a dialectic with what could be termed the out-jokes—the more populist and obvious bits of humor. There’s a close parallel in the dialectic between celebrities and nobodies that runs throughout the film, and there’s the suggestion that inside every apparent improvisation is an element of determination, that juxtaposed with every conspiracy theory is an abyss of meaningless absurdity and chaos, and that next to the political incorrectness of the addictive coffee and cigarettes are politically correct demonstrations of social etiquette. Paradoxically, a certain kind of social chaos becomes most apparent whenever the characters are being most polite: when Isaach (Isaach de Bankolé) meets Alex for coffee at Alex’s request, he can’t believe he’s been summoned just for the pleasure of his company, even though they’re supposed to be best friends. This paranoid misunderstanding is played for comedy, but the fear of a gaping void remains.

The wistful and moving final episode, “Champagne” (my third favorite)—featuring Bill Rice and Taylor Mead in a dimly lit SoHo hangout called the Armory, drinking out of paper cups during their coffee break—seems at first to be at the farthest remove from Jarmusch’s universe, yet it’s a kind of tribute to his roots in the underground filmmaking scene of downtown Manhattan. Rice and Mead are closely associated with those roots through their roles in films by Scott and Beth B., Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe, and Andy Warhol, and they drink a toast at one point not only to “Paris in the 20s” (Mead’s suggestion) but also to “New York in the late 70s” (Rice’s suggestion), which is when these films were being shot.

Certainly there’s no better evocation of chaos in the film than the title of the beautiful Gustav Mahler song heard in this episode, “I Have Lost Track of the World.” The overall abstractness of the location and the absurdist dialogue—including Mead’s when he’s periodically forgetful—call to mind Samuel Beckett’s doleful tramps in their own sketchy settings. Curiously, Rice and Mead seem more settled and “placed” than any other characters in the film, perhaps because they seem older and wiser than everyone else—and perhaps because knowing who you are often entails knowing where you are.

Bridge Over Troubled Water [THE GRADUATE]

This originally appeared in the March 28, 1997 issue of the Chicago Reader.-— J.R.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

The Graduate **

Directed by Mike Nichols Written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham With Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katherine Ross, William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, Elizabeth Wilson, and Brian Avery.

If I feel myself as the producer of my life, then I am unhappy. So I would rather be a spectator of my life. I would rather change my life this way since I cannot change it in society. So at night I see films that are different from my experiences during the day. Thus there is a strict separation between experience and the cinema. That is the obstacle for our films. For we are people of the 60s, and we do not believe in the opposition between experience and fiction. –- Alexander Kluge, 1988

The Graduate opened in December 1967, the same month the first successful human heart transplant was performed. It was a few weeks after the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde and about three months before the launching of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Among the albums that came out the same year were the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and the Mothers of Invention’s Absolutely Free. Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme had both come out in ‘66, and The Graduate appropriated tracks from both of them on its sound track. (The “Mrs Robinson” lyrics were added for the sound track album.)

For many fans, including myself, of Mike Nichols and Elaine May who had seen them perform live or heard their ferociously funny records, Nichols’s early career as a director seemed tame, considering both his comic gifts and the political cast of the 60s. The Graduate, his second feature (his first was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in ‘66) was entertaining, but hardly the rallying cry of a rebellious youth explosion that some claimed it to be once it took off at the box office (it was the second highest grossing movie of the 60s, after The Sound of Music). Even now, when new prints of the movie struck from the original internegative are being released, the only “revolutionary aspect” of The Graduate described in the press book is the use and impact of the Simon and Garfunkel songs–not the songs themselves but the new marketing possibilities derived from transplanting “found” material into a Hollywood hit, which clearly set a lot of wheels spinning.

“She was always brave,” Nichols said of May during their partnership as a comedy team. “But I became more and more afraid.” This certainly appears to be the case if one compares their subsequent careers as directors. (For a candid look at the complex dynamics of their relationship during the height of their fame as a team, see Edmund Wilson’s posthumously published journals, The Sixties.) On the other hand, according to Janet Coleman in her book The Compass -– a fascinating study of the mid-50s Chicago improvisational comedy workshop from which Nichols and May sprang -– they both, along with comedian Shelley Berman, lost some of their edge when they became famous:

“On becoming stars, each member of the trio once referred to as ‘Two Cocksuckers and Elaine’ had unwittingly pulled some plugs from the main currents of ordinary life that had charged their improvisations with humanity. They had been almost instantly isolated from the ensemble work of their peers, the extraordinary improvisational foot soldiers. Thus, their passage into celebrity did not return to the political comedy of the improvisational theater any insights into the issues of status and money, or hard looks into the workings of power in the arts and society, or revelations about the entertainment industry. Without the focus and urgency of the improvisational theater, they were atomized from their most integrated and revealing work. Substituting for commonality and spontaneity the narcissism and obsessions of show business, they grew silent in the society they once had satirized.”

As a passionate fan of the four features May directed –- A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, and Ishtar -– who finds plenty of “insights into the issues of status and money,” “hard looks into the workings of power in the arts and society,” and even a few “revelations about the entertainment industry” in these dark, vibrant movies, I feel that Coleman’s basically sound observation applies differently to the careers of May and Nichols. In many ways, May, unlike Nichols, is too large and unwieldy a talent to accommodate herself to the entertainment industry in a manner that can easily translate into fame and success, and given the complex and tortuous skirmishes she had with studios on all four of her features, it is hardly surprising that she has worked in Hollywood chiefly as an anonymous script doctor. More recently, she has teamed up with Nichols again as a writer on The Birdcage and, as reported in a lengthy article in the March 3 New York Observer, on an adaptation of Primary Colors budgeted at $65 million and starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson as the Clintons -– a project that seems highly political. It will be interesting to discover to what degree May’s dangerous satirical gifts and Nichols’s commercial savvy can work in tandem.

The Graduate, Nichols’s main ticket to mainstream success, replays various aspects of the Nichols-May partnership in telling ways –- as does The Heartbreak Kid (1972), May’s own second feature, which can be read in many ways as a response to The Graduate. Both movies chart the hero’s ditching of a dark, overpowering woman for an inaccessible WASP princess (each monomaniacally pursuing her to the university she’s attending, where he hangs out on the campus), echoing Nichols’s abandonment of the dangerous side of his routines with May. Furthermore, Charles Grodin, who plays the lead in The Heartbreak Kid, was originally cast by Nichols to play the lead in The Graduate, and Jeannie Berlin, who plays the ditched woman in The Heartbreak Kid, is May’s daughter.

The two movies take notably different approaches toward ethnicity: Nichols pretends it isn’t there and May flaunts it. Though Nichols and May are both Jewish, May grew up in the Yiddish theater, and the anomaly of a Jewish New York actor playing Waspy Los Angeleno Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate has to be weighed against the explicitly Jewish New York wedding at the beginning of The Heartbreak Kid –- and the explicitly WASP Minneapolis wedding that closes it. In other words, May accentuates ethnic difference whereas Nichols muddles it. The Graduate ends with a Christian wedding of its own, but in this case, significantly, the hero isn’t the groom; and the fact that Benjamin winds up using a cross both as a battering ram and as a tool for escape can be read allegorically as Nichols’s own determined flight from his roots in courting mainstream success. Even the uses of pop songs as anthems of their hero’s aspirations have ethnic implications: in contrast to the euphoric Jewish assimilation (and mainstreaming of folk music) of Simon and Garfunkel in The Graduate, The Heartbreak Kid offers multiple versions of a pop single associated with the Carpenters, “Close to You,” and each successive version registers as more bitterly ironic.

“Don’t trust anyone over 30″ is the only 60s counterculture motto honored in The Graduate, though the picture has only two under-30 characters of any importance, neither of them especially well defined apart from their southern California affluence, and the innate corruption of all the over-30 characters is more felt than analyzed. Dustin Hoffman wears a jacket and tie throughout the picture (his first movie role), and his rebellion relates exclusively to personal rather than social or political issues -– his determination to marry the daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), of his father’s law partner after having an adulterous affair with her mother, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft, whose style and authority make her a clear stand-in for May). Indeed, one of the film’s running gags is the erroneous impression of a suspicious rooming-house landlord in Berkeley that the straitlaced Benjamin is some sort of campus radical.

In fact, Benjamin has no convictions, no politics, no ambitions, no ideas, no friends, no professional interests, and, apart from sex and romance, no nonprofessional interests of any kind. He doesn’t take pot or acid, his exemption from fighting in Vietnam is assumed rather than spelled out, and apart from the conspicuous affluence of his background, his remoteness from the world around him, Berkeley included, is defined iconographically rather than ideologically: it’s a movie-star pose. Yet somehow he’s perceived as a social rebel, and Nichols’s transplant of the “heart” of counterculture, not to mention the “heart” of his satiric routines with May, into the Hollywood mainstream clearly struck some kind of elemental paydirt. To borrow the title of a subsequent Simon and Garfunkel album, his movie provided a bridge over troubled water that millions were happy to take.

To understand this alchemy, it’s helpful to consider what the other top moneymaking pictures of the 60s were that had some relationship with “rebellious” youth culture: Splendor in the Grass (1961, set mainly in the late 1920s), Bye Bye Birdie (1963, an adaptation of a stage musical about the impact of a rock-and-roll singer on a small town), A Hard Day’s Night (1964, a film about and starring the Beatles), The Wild Angels (1966, an exploitation feature about a motorcycle gang), Blowup (1966, Michelangelo Antonioni’s art film about “swinging London”), 2001, and Easy Rider (1969). None of these pictures with the possible exception of the last can be described as an expression or even an accurate representation of 60s counterculture apart from a few passing elements. When Antonioni dealt directly with American counterculture in Zabriskie Point (1970), the film was a resounding flop with audiences and critics alike, and the same could be said of Otto Preminger’s grotesque if fascinating Skidoo the previous year; perhaps only Woodstock (1970) succeeded both in dealing directly with the counterculture and in reaching a wide mainstream audience.

No doubt the sense of “newness” projected by The Graduate came less from the film’s subject matter than from the offscreen Simon and Garfunkel songs, from the comic dialogue (the obvious legacy of Nichols’s satiric routines with May, adroitly adapted by screenwriters Buck Henry and Calder Willingham from Charles Webb’s source novel), and, above all, from the eclectic, free-wheeling, and attention-grabbing visual style. Much of that style had clear antecedents in some of the better-known art films of the early 60s –- work by such filmmakers as Truffaut, Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, and even Cassavetes.

The film’s first extended sequence is a party given for Benjamin by his well-to-do parents (William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson), attended exclusively by the parents’ friends, filmed almost entirely in claustrophobic closeups and hand-held camera movements. The style has a great deal in common with the style of party sequences in Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959) as well as in his subsequent Hollywood feature Too Late Blues (1962), although Andrew Sarris, in his contemporary review of The Graduate, noted that these “bobbing, tracking, lurching heads in nightmarishly mobile closeups looks like an ‘hommage’ to Fellini’s 8½,” which indeed may be a likelier source. Either way, it looks nothing like standard Hollywood filmmaking of the early 60s. (Pointedly, in his same review of The Graduate, Sarris noted that “A rain-drenched Anne Bancroft splattered against a starkly white wall evokes images in [Antonioni’s] La notte.”)

An even more striking example of this mainstreaming of New Wave techniques comes at the end of the protracted comic seduction of Benjamin by Mrs. Robinson (the only name he or the dialogue ever assigns her), who orders him to drive her home from the party and issues a series of commands to him when they are alone in her house -– to have a drink, to accompany her upstairs, and so on -– as she proceeds to remove her clothing. This climaxes when Benjamin, alone in Mrs. Robinson’s daughter’s room, sees reflected in a framed portrait of Elaine the nude figure of Mrs. Robinson entering the room and closing the door behind her. When Benjamin spins around to face her, this single gesture is broken up into four separate dovetailing shots, each filmed from a different angle, all but the last of which is so brief that the effect is mainly subliminal. (The successive lengths of the four shots -– at least in my un-”restored” video copy -– are 15 frames, 13 frames, one single frame, and then, as Benjamin says “Oh, God!,” 70 frames.) Insofar as the early features of Godard and Truffaut can be said to have visual tropes, this is clearly one of them, though the use of it here is more pointedly tied to the viewer’s identification with the subjectivity of a single character than it would have been in the French originals.

This is followed by other shots of Benjamin’s frantic responses to Mrs. Robinson, punctuated by other near-subliminal shots of her nude body -– ten frames of her midriff, four frames of one of her breasts, and five frames of her navel -– which effectively suggest the sources of his panic without spelling them out. In this case, it is more difficult to point to precise New Wave counterparts and more likely that the pressures of studio censorship led to some of the subliminal abridgements of shots. (The Graduate came out after the far-ranging revision of the Production Code in 1966 and prior to the launching of the rating system in 1968 -– a transitional period in more ways than one.) But the titillating effect of these brief inserts and their stylistic eclecticism point to the inroads made by New Wave films on Hollywood thinking and practices.

And the same could be said for many of the movie’s other stylistic flourishes, ranging from sound overlaps (such as the beginning of a scene’s dialogue over the end of the previous sequence) to fancy camera setups (e.g., Mrs. Robinson appearing at a hotel bar rendezvous with Benjamin as a reflection on a glass table) to extended uses of first-person camera (such as the sequence featuring Benjamin inside a deep-sea diving suit, nearly all of it seen and heard from his vantage point).

The differences between the uses of such techniques in New Wave pictures and their uses in Hollywood usually have to do with the mechanics of storytelling and the identification of the viewer. The stylistic play of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player generally had the effect of making the viewer identify with the filmmakers, while the stylistic play of The Graduate made the viewer identify with Benjamin -– even if a greater awareness of the director’s role ensued from the process.

Seeing The Graduate again recently, I enjoyed pretty much the same things that I enjoyed 30 years ago: Bancroft’s robust, superlative performance (until the script turns her into a one-dimensional monster she’s the only real character in the movie); the smoothness and assurance of the sketch humor, most of it having to do with Los Angeles affluence and sexual embarrassment; the graceful, dreamlike transition between Benjamin emerging from his swimming pool at home and entering a hotel room with Mrs. Robinson for another bout of lovemaking; the foregrounding of the ebullient and wistful Simon and Garfunkel music (recently appropriated and parodied in Albert Brooks’s Mother, and so integral throughout The Graduate that when Benjamin’s car runs out of gas at a climactic juncture, the guitar vamps slow down).

What I don’t enjoy is the cruelty, the glib mindlessness, and the insulated, pampered narcissism that makes the whole thing possible. (If Benjamin had run off with Mrs. Robinson, the movie would have been genuinely rebellious.) By studiously avoiding everything about the 60s that is worth remembering today, apart from some of its energy, Nichols can flatter the audience for its knowingness only by assuming the audience knows nothing at all. “The small triumph of The Graduate,” Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, “was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate –- which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him….Mike Nichols’s ‘gift’ is that he lets the audience direct him; this is demagoguery in the arts.” As a bridge over troubled water and a clever piece of merchandise, The Graduate is at best only following the same escapist principles followed today by Independence Day –- or The English Patient, for that matter.

(Published in the Chicago Reader, 28 March 1997)