Credit Photograph by Avco Embassy Pictures/Getty
It would be too much to say that Mike Nichols contained multitudes, but, whatever was going on in there, it must have been a h**l of a party. Now that he has died, those of us who never met the guy are left to ponder just how many guys there were to meet: Nichols the comedian, Nichols the director of movies and TV, Nichols the director of plays, Nichols the producer, the writer, the guy with four wives and close friends called Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and little Tony. He was certainly a man about town (a breed that is going the way of the Javan rhino), but what town would that be? Berlin, where he was born? Chicago, where he grew fluent in improv and joined the Compass Players? Or New York, to which his needle so naturally swung?
To pick one item from his many rsums seems impractical, not to say unfair. The Nichols filmography is extensive, and it represents more than forty years of work, but whether it actually represents the best of himwhether cinema, as it were, occupied more than a couple of octaves on the keyboardis another matter. Many readers of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmanns majestic 1989 biography, were left with the disarming suspicion that, however crystalline Wildes plays are (and one of them is without flaw), they somehow fall short of maximum Wildeness, and that the importance of being Oscar outshone even the dazzle of his dramatic prose. Nichols, of course, was far less tempted to self-dramatize than Wilde, and the regular striking of a public pose did not concern him; nonetheless, when you survey the richness of his gifts, a movie like Working Girl (1986), deft and diverting as it was, feels a little limitedlacking the gleeful pulse that Sydney Pollack brought to Tootsie, for instance, earlier in the decade. The smoother the expertise that Nichols displayed, the more you found yourself wondering if his passions lay elsewhere, and, indeed, what they might consist of. At a distance, it seems bizarre that a filmmaker of such well-tempered urbanity was ever considered the right choice for the rousing, barely controllable comic indignation of Catch-22. Why should anyone expect an antiwar broadside from a director whose idea of an antibourgeois, as enshrined in The Graduate, was a polite young fellow with excellent grades and a well-pressed jacket and tie? As the wicked parody of Benjamin Braddock, in Mad magazine, put it, to Nicholss bemusement and delight: Mom, how come Im Jewish and you and Dad arent?
That is one of many tales retold in Pictures from a Revolution, Mark Harriss delectable book on the Oscar-nominated pictures of 1967. One of them was The Graduate, and addicts of counterfactual history will lap up Harriss disclosure that Nicholss early choices, for the roles of Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, were Ronald Reagan and Doris Day. How much would you have paid to see that movie? (Calamity Jane, are you trying to seduce me? ) The only surprise is that Nichols failed to snag them. His eye for casting never dimmed, and actors swarmed to him, as if unbidden. Meryl Streep was there for Silkwood (1983), Heartburn (1986), and Postcards from the Edge (1988). Later, in the same vein, though on a smaller screen, Nichols turned to Emma Thompson, for Primary Colors (1998), Wit (2001), and Angels in America (2003). We should expect no less, from a guy whose climb to fame began in the company of Elaine May. Their duologues stand up astoundingly well, even now, and the equality and fraternity of their act, as they strop their eager wits on one another, has grown more touching with age. If anything, by a hairs breadth, she has the edge.
Nichols and May were managed by Jack Rollins, whose stable also included Woody Allen. Rollins, who will be a hundred years old next March, went on to co-produce the bulk of Allens films, and its instructive to see how, over time, so many of the obsessionsnot to mention jokesthat coursed through Allens standup riffs, and through the humor pieces that he wrote for this magazine, were parlayed into his work as a director, and burnished with new dramatic form. How much of Nichols and May, by contrast, survives in Nicholss collected movies? Well, Anne Bancrofts acting duel with Dustin Hoffman, in The Graduate, always struck me as a victory on points for her (the antithesis of the plot), and, as I say, Nichols continued to make room for women of substance, and for actresses of the top rankmore room than many male directors half his age find themselves willing to grant. Yet the movies themselves, too often, run short of the lightness and economy that he, in consort with May, discovered in the fine art of the sketch. Tried watching Regarding Henry (1991), recently? As for Heartburn, it more than fulfills the ache and sourness promised by the title, although, to be fair, it retains a crowd of loyal devotees, and, if you crave reassurance that spaghetti can and should be eaten in bed, deux, then its still the film for you.
Beds mattered to Mike Nichols. Not so much because of the mischief that is made in them (there isnt a whole lot of s*x on view in his work) but because, when you arent in them, the thought of them keeps floating through your mind, like goose down, and because, even when you are in them, they can be an awfully tight fit. The image that abides with me, from Catch-22, is of Alan Arkin lying in bed with a young woman. She is, in the fullest sense, his squeeze, because they are having to make do with a single beda hard and paltry cot, the opposite of the pillowy rumpus-room that lovers dream of. So why does the vision linger? Because its funny and foolish, and touched with that sigh of resignation that Nichols, a connoisseur of the rueful, so often added to his setups, even the farcical ones; but theres more to it than that. Nichols made Closer, based on a stage play, in 2004, and in retrospect I think that closeness was his subject all along. The power of intimacy both to bind together and to bruise: if he did nourish a passion, that was it. He frequently drifted away from it, in the middle years, and returned to it only in fits and starts, but it never ceased to needle and inspire him. He was interested in human animals not when they were licensed to roam free, but when they were cabind, cribbd, confind, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears. Give Nichols an average Sunday night at the Macbeths, with the guests all dispatched, the wounded feelings still fresh, and a tray of watery Gimlets to be finished off, and hewith a trusted film crew in towwould be in his element. Offer him a soaring landscape, on the other hand, plus a major international conflict, and, like any self-respecting city boy, he would let his mind stray elsewhere. In Charlie Wilsons War (2007), most of the warring is hived off into the background, or reported in news footage, whereas the office sequences in that movie, with Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Tom Hanks are genuinely combative, and blissful to beholdas are those in Wolf (1994), at least before the fur begins to fly.
Which brings us to Jack. If there isnt, even now, a lonely grad student in the Midwest, preparing to submit a paper entitled Nichols(son): Paternalism and Resentment in the Director/Star Nexus, I want to know why. It was a shame that Wolf had to morph, halfway through, into a horror film, because horror, like war, was a barren field to Nichols. Moreover, he sensed instinctively that Nicholson had no need to howl or grow long in the tooth, because there was more than enough beast in him to begin with. That bristle of the feral and the uncivilized was braided into the actors genes, and open for inspection in his carnivorous grin, and his whole person, as such, mounted an appealing challenge to a filmmaker whom so many would define, and revere, as a sophisticate. As a director, what the h**l do you do with Jack: fear him, envy him, follow his lead, let him loose, or try, however uselessly, to tamp him down? Hence the deep discomfort of Carnal Knowledge (1971)the most bothersome movie that Nichols ever made, as well as the saddest, the most provoking, the most pretentious, and, despite all that (or because of it), the best. If someone were to show it next week, in homage, at Film Forum or Lincoln Center, and invite a bunch of college kids, split fifty-fifty between male and female, to hang around after the screening and talk it through, the evening might still simmer into an argument, or a fight. You wouldnt say that about Working Girl or Biloxi Blues (1988), or, for that matter, most of the movies we have seen this year.
The film, written by Jules Feiffer, tracks a couple of friendsJonathan (Nicholson) and the bashful Sandy (Art Garfunkel)from college to middle age, and thus from one disappointment to the next. Women are pursued, seduced, berated, swept away and then aside; listen with care, especially to Jonathan, and you will hear an undying aria of misogyny, replete with every quaver of l**t and every known crotchet of fear. Yet the film is not misogynistpartly because its pervading mood is one of equal-opportunity misanthropy, and partly, also, because Nichols takes such pains to demonstrate that Feiffers script is, and never can be, the whole story. Consider the infamous slide-show sequence, in which Jonathan takes Sandy and Jennifer (Carol Kane) through a roster of his conquests, near-misses, and the occasional never-was: This ones Rosalie, he says. Rosalie looked just like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. Had a crush on Rosalie from fourteen to fifteen, and I never went near her. In those days, we had illusions. And so on, up to the scabrous final flourish: Heres a sixteen-year-old I gave twenty bucks to one night in the Village. Maybe you know her, Jennifer, she gave me a dose. The screen goes blank.
Nicholson is extraordinary here, and his sign-offa stammering Thats All Folks, in the wholly appropriate tones of Porky Pigstill makes me catch my breath. Would the scene work onstage? Yes, but we would miss the ways in which Nichols, striving to think his way outside and through the theatrical box, shoots Jonathan in a string of different ways: from the side, in silhouette; stranded in the cool white room, in velvet slipper and no socks, as Sandy and a weeping Jennifer rise from the couch and soundlessly leave; alone at last, with the fun over, gently refreshing his Scotch. No man is an island, reportedly, but this one is. We dont feel sorry for him, but we have no doubt whatever that hes lost. Any movie buff watching in 1971 would have grasped, from the framing of the scene, that Nichols had been keeping up with Fellini and Antonioni, perhaps too dutifully so, and, indeed, the cameraman on Carnal Knowledge was Giuseppe Rotunno, who had already worked with Fellini on Satyricon and elsewhere. This blending of a new visual method, unfamiliar to many eyes, with the stream of verbal acidity is hardly an unqualified success, but the ambition is an honorable one, and the unhappy land that the film reveals is not one that Nichols cared to revisit, on the big screen, for too long.
And now he is gone, and there are many people more eligible than I am to assess the light that has gone out. Theatres will be the darker for his passing. My hopes, for what happens next, are marginal and modest. First, that nobody forgets, on the solemn occasion of his obsequies, the heavenly time when he and May, in one of their most enduring routines, pulled a knowing rug, forever, from under the feet of solemnity. Im Miss Loomis, your Grief Lady, she says to the mourning Nichols, and proceeds to offer him a choice of caskets, on top of the sixty-five-dollar base cost of a funeral: We have to have a casket, he says, clutching his sodden handkerchief. Yes, she replies. It looks better.
Second, a coda of hope: of the many sound reasons to believe in the afterlife, one of the most consoling is that, round about now, Mike Nichols should be hooking up with his third cousin twice removedor, in round numbers, Albert Einstein. They both got removed to America, of course, for much the same reason, and Princeton to Central Park is not exactly a long hop in space-time, but, as far as I can gather, they never met. So, at last, Nichols will have his chance. Someone can give him directions: Third meadow along, take the first babbling rill, then its the olive grove on your left. Hes right underneath, playing gin rummy with Heraclitus. Theyve been at it for seven years. Euler was in for a while, but one day he threw his cards on the grass and walked off, saying it was a waste of his time. What time? Those Swiss, you know So Nichols goes up to Einstein: Albie? Cousin Albie? Its Mike! Third cousin twice rem Oh, yeah, I heard about you. You know what they say about you? Hes the smart one of the family. Just what I need. O.K., kid, youre here, so you might as well take a seat. Now shut up and deal.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/postscript-mike-nichols
