Paul Mazursky Films | Paul Mazursky Filmography | Paul Mazursky Biography | Paul Mazursky Career | Paul Mazursky Awards

It is no small irony that Paul Mazursky's best film is one he wrote (with Larry Tucker), but was not given the chance to direct. I Love You Alice B. Toklas, like most of Mazursky's work, stages a humorous, if somewhat predictable, encounter between deadening forms of everyday life (especially the monotonous regularity of heterosexual monogamy) and the bewildering, if attractive, otherness of nonconformity. Directed by Hy Averback (at the insistence of star Peter Sellers, who would not work with a novice), this film records the fall of its main character, seduced by free love and marijuana brownies, into a late 1960s California underworld of unlimited self-indulgence, social honesty, and brotherly tolerance. Recovering his desire for a comfortable working life and marriage to the right girl, the Sellers character almost decides to go straight, but refuses at the very end to choose between the extremes his culture offers, the discontents of which have been equally and mercilessly exposed.

The commercial and critical success of Alice gave Mazursky an entree into New Hollywood directing. Unlike the film school whiz-kids (Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, and company) who came into prominence at this same time, Mazursky had spent many years in show business, developing not only an acting career (which he has continued, if in a more limited way, after turning to directing) but a fair reputation as a writer (among other credits he wrote, with Tucker, the pilot episode of The Monkees). Like the more famous talents of the Hollywood Renaissance, however, Mazursky has manifested an abiding interest not only in a critical social realism, but also in the European art film, which, through imitation and hommage, he has attempted to domesticate for the general American audience. His cinema, at the same time, favors the writer and the actor; not interested in or capable of an individual, arresting visual style, his films are based on literate scripts and afford excellent opportunities for affecting performance. And yet, unlike Alice, they usually retreat from the harsh conclusions which their initially penetrating analyses of contemporary life should require.

Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, for example, offers an upwardly mobile California couple whose lives, following what appears to be a marathon Essalen encounter session, find a new direction. Taking the message of absolute honesty and non-stop self-expression to heart, they resolutely transform their social selves, experimenting with free love and attempting to loosen up their best friends, a more traditional couple who use up their energy in self-defeating games and manipulations. The foursome, now mixed, eventually winds up in a luxurious resort bed together, but are unable, presumably because of a residual conservatism, to consummate their contemplated new relationship. The film, however, offers this ideological dead-end as a triumph, as a happy ending whose import is hardly clear. Traditional marriage, with its jealousies and lies, has been mercilessly satirized, but open marriage, Mazursky seems to suggest, does not suit basic human needs. And yet Mazursky's relentless tenderness toward his characters, a sentimentality that surfaces as his desire to make the spectator identify with their predicament, blunts this critique by focussing attention on a relief-filled retreat from choice (the irony that the characters are set free to enjoy themselves in Las Vegas is not underlined).

Bob and Carol made a good deal of money during its initial release in 1969, perhaps because it dared to deal with some of the conflicts of the developing sexualtion; it has not worn well. Most of Mazursky's subsequent films re-stage the same dramatic and ideological conflicts with mixed results. Harry and Tonto begins by challenging notions of ageing, but winds up confirming a whole range of social stereotypes: despite an occasional bitter note, the film exudes a warm, accepting humanism that trivializes its criticism of socially acceptable self-indulgence and mindless role-playing (the main character finds his niche as a lovably cantankerous septuagenarian who likes cats). An Unmarried Woman cuts its richly pampered Upper East Side heroine adrift from her cheating husband only to enmesh her in a suitably vague conventional fantasy?having to choose between wonderful sex and a bohemian lifestyle with a handsome artist, on the one hand, and the self-fulfilling exploration of the world of work (whose details are deliberately left rather vague), on the other. Alex in Wonderland strikes an autobiographical note with its portrait of a director, naturally enamored of Fellini, in search of a powerful theme for his next project. Compared to Woody Allen's similar hommage (Stardust Memories), the film lacks biting humor and fails to find interesting reflexes for Fellini's modernist technique and intellectual seriousness. Willie and Phil cannot create American equivalents for Truffaut's cinema of interpersonal conflict and triumph, while Down and Out in Beverly Hills, based on a classic Renoir study of the venality and selfishness that cut across class lines, becomes an unintentional comedy of integration, constructing a cinematic world that sentimentalizes the inauthentic, the mindless, and the hypocritical. Like its director, the film's main character has his heart in the right place and is a reasonable success in his chosen field, even if he is unable to master the madness of the world around him without romanticizing its foibles and absurdities.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mazursky continued to find success with chronicles of contemporary American life that emphasize its contradictions and absurdities. Like Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Scenes from a Mall (with its deliberate Bergmanesque echoes) centers on marital problems among the haute bourgeoisie, in this case an upscale California two-career couple whose relationship disintegrates and reestablishes itself during a nightmarish odyssey through a suburban mall. The film is not only an homage to Bergman but, with its hyperconscious and motor-mouth main characters, an homage to Woody Allen, who plays the self-doubting but good-hearted husband he might have created himself. Though certainly funny and often inventive, Scenes from a Mall depends too heavily on its script (which bogs down in repetition halfway through) and the engaging style of Allen and Bette Midler. Mazursky does little more than stage their encounter, and except for brief moments never uses the mall inventively to create more of a cinematic experience. Though it suffered from a poor release, The Pickle offers Mazursky at his best, with a chronicle of the absurdities of contemporary filmmaking, especially its deal making and artistic compromises. Here the script is well constructed and allows Mazursky to do what he does best: direct the actors.

Mazursky's most memorable recent film, however, is his most untypical. Enemies: A Love Story, based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, offers a tragi-comic narrative of a man who, falling victim to circumstance and his own desires, winds up with two wives and a mistress he would like to marry. Set in a post-Shoah New York, the film offers the character's failure to settle down as, in part, the result of an entire culture's displacement and ruin (the deadly aspects of which have not ended, as one of his women kills herself, doing what the Nazis were never able to accomplish). Coaxing fine performances from a largely unknown ensemble cast (Ron Silver plays the lead), Mazursky successfully evokes a bygone era by using nicely detailed sets (camp in the Catskills, Brooklyn streets, a Coney Island diner) and a photographic style that emphasizes the human drama played out within them. Enemies: A Love Story deserves to be considered, like The Godfather and Avalon, one of the most engaging and penetrating cinematic interpretations of postwar America.?R. BARTON PALMER