On Paul Mazursky

Before the internet and the death of home video we would’ve hosted revivals. Too old for the 1960s, Paul Mazursky wrote and directed movies whose older rumpled protagonists struggled with the new liberties. He scored a 1969 hit with the ya-had-to-be-there couple-swapping comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and as a follow-up made Alex in Wonderland, a muddled but often wry take on 8 1/2 that didn’t do well at the box office and whose reception reminds me of reviews and sales for Letting Go, Philip Roth’s own follow-up to a runaway hit.

But Mazursky didn’t look back. Blume in Love and Harry & Tonto are two of the gentlest comedies about menopausal men. They have their unexamined sexism, but the joke’s on the guys; thanks to the astute casting of George Segal and Oscar-winner Art Carney, respectively, the jokes don’t turn rancid, and the hurdy-gurdy of the Nixon era was a ride whose end his male characters wanted to end but from which not one wanted to exit. Lenny, Punchline, Mr. Saturday Night, The Man on the Moon — films about comedians whose chronological trudges through biography forgot to include laughs; Mazursky’s 1976 Next Stop, Greenwich Village didn’t make this mistake. This shambling, semi-improvisational view of an extinct subculture also boasts excellent work from Shelley Winters and a young and spooky Christopher Walken.

Creating characters who avoid Manichean conceptions by acting in contradictory ways is a strategy — a moral imperative — that Mazursky learned from his beloved Jean Renoir, who in the exquisite roundelay The Rules of the Game wrote a speech for his own character Octave in which he said, “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Writers often omit the crucial first clause. It imbues 1978’s An Unmarried Woman with its special poignancy. This modish box office hit about a Manhattan wife (Jill Clayburgh) whose rich milquetoast husband (Michael Murphy, the era’s King Milquetoast) earned several Academy Award nominations, and by rights the Best Actress trophy should have been Clayburgh’s. Like Jane Fonda’s Bree Daniels, Ellen Burstyn’s Alice, and Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall, Clayburgh’s Erica belongs in the pantheon of mixed up and screwed up ’70s film characters whose mothers taught them shibboleths about sex and men and spent the last ten years sorting the truth from the bullshit. Despite its flaws it’s one of the few American films written and directed by a man to evince curiosity about how women think.

Although critics often dismiss the eighties as the peak of a certain kind of middlebrow adult classiness, Mazursky flourished without compromising an inch. 1982’s Tempest, which I saw again two weeks ago, suffers from unexpected but ill-wrought casting (John Cassavetes as a Prospero type?) and tonal dysfunction, but Moscow on the Hudson (1984) is the best film about an immigrant’s response to America. Robin Williams plays the immigrant, a hairy and gregarious Russian who defects in Macy’s. The conceit of Mazursky’s film is treating this defector as defective: he’s as horny and acquisitive as other New Yorkers, and as funny and tiresome as the rest of us. His willingness to depict human nature without mitigation is worthy of Preston Sturges. His indebtedness to Renoir peaked with Down and Out in Beverly Hills, a remake of Boudu Saved from Drowning, remembered for reviving the careers of Richard Dreyfuss, Nick Nolte, and especially Bette Midler, was a fully deserved major hit. To consider how toxic the casting looked in 1985 is to realize how toxic it looks in 2014.

But Enemies, A Love Story was his best film: a quiet and rueful farce about a Holocaust survivor (Ron Silver) living in Brooklyn having a torrid affair with the powerful Masha (Lena Olin) while married the Polish Catholic housekeeper (Margaret Sophie Stein) who saved his life. Then the first wife he thought was dead (Angelica Huston) finds him. How did you survive? he asks. She crawled under a mound of bodies. What Mazursky learned about modulating comedy so that it deepened the serious he put into this adaptation of the great Isaac Bashevis Singer novel. What makes it a frustrating and endlessly watchable movie is Mazursky’s commitment to the Renoir dictum: everyone has his reasons. Enemies, A Love Story has the detachment of Otto Preminger, employing the irony of Thomas Mann.

That film, which garnered Oscar nods for its script, Olin, and Huston, and (he says) made back its money, hollowed him out. 1991’s Scenes From a Mall, my first encounter with Midler and Woody Allen in a new release, is an appalling movie. Not a single scene works. Plus, the audience has to accept Allen with a ponytail. I dare you to read the synopses of Mazursky’s other ’90s films without cringing. He did, however, leave a thin but literate memoir, Show Me the Magic, and as DVD caught on the older films started seeing releases: I didn’t see Blume in Love until 2007 and still haven’t seen the Jules & Jim “homage” Willie & Phil. Now’s your chance. Pauline Kael, who adored his work, quoted a friend approvingly; Mazursky’s films, she said, are cultural comment without hairshirts. To mourn him in 2014 is to mourn Hollywood’s reluctance to get this sort of film financed unless it’s out of a studio’s so-called indie division run by George Clooney. He needed big bucks backing him, just like he needed stars. There are no bigger fools than stars — the better to remind the rest of us of our foolishness.