Because
he was an actor first if not foremost (he has 76 credits as an actor on IMDb
but only 19 directorial credits), Paul Mazursky’s own movies as a director live
and breathe and bloom with the air and abandon of human behavior in all its
contradiction and all its starry glory. Think of his movies and you immediately
think of the people in them and the actors who played them. Mazursky knew how
to play to his performer’s strengths, so that Natalie Wood is not outmatched by
the more comedically expert Dyan Cannon in his first film “Bob & Carol
& Ted & Alice” (1969) but brought gently into the fold of the movie’s
jokes and warmth and sexual glow.
“Bob
& Carol” is a sex comedy that is actually sexy and actually funny and also
tenderly sad, underneath. Remember Cannon’s hilarious scenes with her therapist
in that movie, and then remember the far more sincere and exploratory therapy
scenes that Erica (Jill Clayburgh) has in “An Unmarried Woman” (1978), where
she goes all-out with her feelings and Clayburgh herself doesn’t care how she
might look or how she might be coming across. Clayburgh’s Erica is one of the
signal triumphs of Mazursky’s career as a sharp and discerning director of
actors. She is funny and flaky, irritable and sometimes irritating,
good-hearted, selfish, petty, and aware that time is passing by, but determined
to stay true to herself and whatever dreams she might still have.
“An
Unmarried Woman” is a feminist movie, one of the very few made by a male director
in this period. Unlike Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”
(1974), this is not a film that ends with the liberated heroine finally
deciding to settle down with a man. Yes, Alan Bates’s painter Saul is an
attractive and talented guy and a giving lover and much else besides. But Erica
cannot stay with him. Why? Because when they are walking in Washington Square
Park together, Saul casually mentions that he would “allow” Erica to work. This
is a red flag for a woman who has managed to pull herself out of a long
marriage where she was in essence sleepwalking and letting herself be
supposedly cherished and cared for. How does Mazursky choose to end his movie?
Not with Erica trying to tame Saul and settle down, which would be the result
in most movies and which would even be the result for a lot of women in life.
She breaks up with Saul and he gives her one of his Big Male Paintings as a
parting gift and she is left to find out a way to struggle down the street with
it, the ideal visual metaphor for her situation in life.
Do
you remember Bill Conti’s score for “An Unmarried Woman” and the way that it
swells as Erica tries to walk down the street with that painting? Or the way it
swells when Mazursky films Erica ice-skating? “An Unmarried Woman” is a film
devoted to both a character (Erica) and an actress (Clayburgh), and it sees the
difference between them (because Mazursky takes the separation of actor and
role very seriously), but it lets each of them blossom in their own way. The
same could be said for George Segal’s Stephen Blume in “Blume in Love” (1973),
who is in some ways like a male version of Erica, and an apotheosis for Segal.
Blume has many fine qualities, as Erica does, but he is capable of far worse
things than she is because as a male he has more power in society, physical and
otherwise. Mazursky does not step away from Blume’s behavior and let us off the
hook. He is a real artist because he always seeks to implicate us in what his
characters do. We can like them and we can dislike them, and what it all adds
up to is a ledger that is up to us individually. Some directors make this
weighing of pros and cons depressing. Mazursky fills it with sunshine and life
and joy and makes it very entertaining. He was like a chef who always knew how
much of each ingredient was needed to make a complicated and wholly satisfying
dish.
This
is the fantasy and the art of Mazursky, but the facts are these. He was born in
Brooklyn to a Jewish family and married his wife Betsy in 1953; they would
remain married until his death today. He studied acting at the Actors Studio
and appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s first feature “Fear and Desire” (1953) and
played a juvenile delinquent in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955). This period of his
life was dramatized in one of his best movies, “Next Stop, Greenwich Village”
(1976), a heartfelt ensemble piece that paid affectionate but clear-eyed
tribute to acting coaches, friends and enemies, the Café Reggio, and a Jewish
mother to strike fear and pity in the heart of us all, Shelley Winters’s Faye
Lapinsky, a woman who is always trying to get you to eat some rye bread and
apple strudel and write every day and call once in a while, will you? Mazursky
films Winters with awe and understanding and affection, and this extends to the
lead, Lenny Baker (a talented actor who died young), Ellen Greene as his
prickly girlfriend, and even the icy young Christopher Walken as the kind of
nasty Village poseur who assures you that you “must read Pound.” When Baker
tells Winters, “You’re a funny lady, Mom,” and she quietly says, “My life has
not been very funny,” it’s clear why comedies are the movies that can break
your heart far more than most heavy dramas.
But
Mazursky could do heavy drama, too, and he proved it in his masterpiece,
“Enemies, A Love Story” (1989), a movie based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s very
tough book about survivors of the Holocaust in post-war New York. The Singer
material was not so much lightened as enlivened by Mazursky’s touch, so that
Anjelica Huston and especially Lena Olin were brought to full, quivering,
sexual, unbearably sad and funny life. “I’m not dead,” Huston’s Tamara says at
one point. “I’m not alive and I’m not dead!” she quips, with heroic gallows
humor, something that percolates up through Olin’s Masha, a hedonistic landmark
of a woman who speaks up for pleasure amidst the most unspeakable degradations
of life and then says, “To hell with it.” Never has self-destruction on screen
seemed more earned and more alluring than in Olin’s Masha, one of the truly great
screen performances, the height of Mazursky’s skill and feeling for the humor
in tragedy and the tragedy in humor. And a smile and a grope along the way.
There
are some duds in his filmography, like most of the films he made after
“Enemies,” and maybe there came a point where he had run out of material or
actors or need. But his warmth and insight come through in Sam Wasson’s
excellent book of interviews “Paul on Mazursky” (2011), and his work should
stand the test of time. Even though most of his movies are billed as comedies,
I was surprised at how emotional I got thinking about Erica walking with her
painting down the street, or Larry in “Next Stop, Greenwich Village” sweetly
saying to his mother, “No, I’m not angry at you. I’m crazy, but I’m not angry.”
Or Olin’s lush but burnt-out Masha confronting herself in a mirror in her last
scene, finished with life and even with pleasure. Paul Mazursky gave us all of
these moments and all of these people, and he did that by never being
judgmental and never giving up and always welcoming the fun and nonsense and
personal idiosyncrasies that can make up for so much in the hard lives that all
of us lead. The problems that Erica has in “An Unmarried Woman” are pitifully
small next to Masha’s problems in “Enemies, A Love Story,” yet Mazursky loves
them both equally. That is no small feat.
