“The Heartbreak Kid” (1972)
Hard to believe that such a short filmography can have an outlier, but May’s “The Heartbreak Kid” is just that—the only film she directed which she didn’t write (it’s Neil Simon’s screenplay), and by far, her most out-and-out successful, both financially and with critics: in fact, it’s made the AFI’s list of the 100 Greatest American Comedies at #91, sandwiched between classics “Ball of Fire” and “Woman of the Year.” “The Heartbreak Kid” is a masterpiece of that kind of understated, character-based comedy-of-awkwardness that elicits groans of recognition and occasional winces, as opposed to guffaws. It’s a tone that also pervades May’s ex-partner Mike Nichols’ own comedy classic (#9 on the AFI list, if you’re keeping score) “The Graduate” and the similarities between the two films are striking. Both deal with nebbish, self-absorbed and not terribly likeable characters with a degree of intellectual snobbery, as they vacillate and prevaricate in their romantic lives and future career plans; neither film is afraid to temper any teaspoonful of sweet with a sackful of bitter. Lenny (a superb, pitch-perfect Charles Grodin) marries Lila (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter, cast in some sort of act of vicarious masochism it can only be guessed) in a Jewish ceremony and they promptly head to Miami Beach for their honeymoon. But even on the way there, Lenny starts to notice things that irritate him about Lila that their whirlwind courtship hadn’t shown him, compounded when Lila gets terribly sunburned their first day at the beach and is confined to their room while Lenny is first distracted and then smitten by sultry daddy’s girl Kelly (Cybill Shepherd).
The humor initially derives largely from Lenny’s increasingly ludicrous excuses to his new wife for constantly going out, but where the real genius of May’s subtle direction can be felt is in how natural all of it seems, yet how affectingly it develops. Lila, for example, could have been a one-note harridan millstone round Lenny’s neck, but during the scene in which he finally breaks up with her in the lobster restaurant, it is she who unexpectedly breaks your heart (Berlin was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Because as much as the situation is a comedic one, the film is really a character study, and if you need proof of the difference a sensitive director and the freeing environment of ’70s filmmaking can make, look no farther than the 2007 Ben Stiller remake where all subtleties and ambiguities are hammered out in favor of broader moments and a more twisty plot. In fact, just compare the endings: where the 2007 film has an extended convoluted series of “oh no, she’s married! Oh no, now I’m married!” contrivances, May’s far more assured take simply ends with Grodin on a sofa. The moment is held for a long time, almost too long, until it starts to make sense again. It’s a shot that shows the genius and uniqueness of May’s approach in miniature: hold on a shot of a guy by himself on a sofa at his own wedding and you get comedy; hold a little longer, and suddenly, it’s tragic irony. [A-]
“Mikey and Nicky” (1976)
A neglected near-masterpiece of 1970s filmmaking featuring two titanic performances and a screenwriting approach that’s about as far from the rules of Three Act Structure and Incident, Climax, Resolution as you can imagine, Elaine May’s third foray into direction is “Mikey and Nicky” starring Peter Falk and John Cassavetes as the titular duo. Several light years away in tone from the screwballishness of “A New Leaf” or the bittersweet modulations of “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Mikey and Nicky” is a talky, loose-limbed gangster film, of all things, featuring guns and hitmen and chase scenes. But this is May, and it was the ’70s, so the guns are seldom fired, the chase scenes are largely a curb-crawling car searching for a pedestrian and the hitman is played by Ned Beatty with all the dangerous charisma of a junior accountant. It’s a magnificent but occasionally frustrating stew of a movie, so free-form as to seem completely improvisational, and yet almost every word in the film reportedly adheres to the script May wrote. But her filmmaking style, which was to have three cameras left rolling for long periods of time as the actors worked and reworked the scenes, gives it an almost unbearably naturalistic feel that owes a great debt to, and arguably surpasses, some of Cassavetes’ own directorial work.
Nicky (Cassavetes) is a paranoid wreck and a petty criminal who, in a fit of desperation calls his old friend Mikey (Falk) to come and meet him in the hotel room where he’s holed up. Mikey arrives to discover an ungrateful (and fundamentally obnoxious) Nicky in a fit of almost psychotic fear in the belief that there’s a contract on his life. The rest of the film unfolds episodically, with the two trading reminiscences and recriminations across the city at night in a kind of Beckettian “After Hours” scenario, with the bonds of their friendship and their deeper agendas only gradually, elliptically revealed. The stories surrounding the film’s troubled gestation are myriad: the production budget more than doubled under May’s obsessive but undisciplined approach; she missed the scheduled release date by nearly a year before Paramount stepped in; and when they did, they sued successfully for final cut, and halfheartedly released their version in December of ‘76, where it basically died on the vine. But even at the time, the critics who saw it were fulsome in their praise, with Stanley Kauffmann calling it “the best film that I know by an American woman” and naming it one of the best 10 films of the decade. Today, it’s the film of May’s that is most ripe for and deserving of reappraisal (and the Criterion Collection looks poised to put it out, it’s already available in their Hulu Plus collection) as it embodies all that is great, as well as all that is retrospectively maddening, about this hallowed period of American studio filmmaking. [A-]
