Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

* * * *
Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis, George Segal

Has any role ever done more to upend a star's screen persona than the role of Martha did for Elizabeth Taylor? Even now, almost 50 years after the release of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and four years after Taylor's death, it's still sort of shocking to see glamorous Elizabeth Taylor in the role of brash, vulgar Martha, delivering a performance entirely lacking in vanity and lacking in any moment where it feels like she's playing a "character." Making the performance even more impressive is that a first time film director helped bring it to life on the big screen (granted that director is Mike Nichols, but it would be an impressive feat for a seasoned director, let alone as a debut), and that neither the performance, nor the film, has diminished in power since its original release.

Review: Closer (2004)

* *
Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen

Love is a battlefield. The characters in Closer take that notion to heart, waging a winner take all brawl which leaves them all a little worse for wear by the end. The winner? Anyone and everyone who doesn't end up with any of these idiots. This is a story about four increasingly repulsive people who throw the word "love" around while openly embracing misery and making sure to spread it around to others. Closer is the sort of movie people describe as being about adults, yet it centers on characters whose emotional maturity seems to have peaked at approximately the age of 12. To be sure, the performances (particularly that of Clive Owen) are occasionally electrifying, but good lord is this story, with its seemingly endless back and forth and back again, tedious.

Review: Catch-22 (1970)

* * *
Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Alan Arkin

There's always a catch and catch-22, with its cold, ruthless, paradoxical simplicity is the worst catch of all. Only pilots who are crazy will be grounded and absolved of flying more missions, but they have to ask to be grounded. Any pilot who would ask to be excused from flying more missions is clearly not crazy and, therefore, will not be grounded. It's enough to drive a person crazy. Just ask Yossarian (Alan Arkin).

Adapted from Joseph Heller's novel of the same name, Catch-22 is an absurdist war story that is half comedy and half drama. Like the book, the film is told as a series of smaller, connected stories that paint a picture of the impossibility of Yossarian's situation and the ridiculousness of war in general. He's under the command of blustering, status craving Col. Cathcart (Martin Balsam), who keeps raising the number of missions each man is required to fly at exactly the moment when Yossarian comes close to completing the former requirement. He hates flying missions because, when he does, people try to kill him. It's a perfectly reasonable complaint, but no one will listen.

When not figuring out ways to avoid having to fly missions, Yossarian enjoys brief romances with Nurse Duckett (Paula Prentiss) and Luciana (Olimpia Carlisi), and has various adventures with his friends Dobbs (Martin Sheen), Nately (Art Garfunklel), Orr (Bob Balaban), McWatt (Peter Bonerz), Aarfy (Charles Grodin), and mess officer Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight), who is perhaps the greatest capitalist who ever lived (and if you're unfamiliar with why, I recommend reading the book because I couldn't even come close to explaining the workings of Minderbinder's massive and lucrative operation). Yossarian has been in crisis ever since witnessing the dying moments of a gunner named Snowden, but things grow even more bleak as his friends die off one by one, leaving him feeling increasingly isolated and desperate. To make matters worse, when he finally gets a chance to go home, there's a catch.

A novel like Catch-22 is difficult to adapt. Its tone and prose are so precise, so perfectly crafted that transporting that to a film adaptation is next to impossible. Director Mike Nichols, working with a screenplay from Buck Henry (who also co-stars as Col. Korn), attempts this massive undertaking but doesn't totally succeed. It's a funny movie to be sure (and serious, when it needs to be), but I found that it ultimately lacked that sense of community that exists in the novel. We don't really get to know any of the characters other than Yossarian - and several from the novel have been excised altogether, including, sadly, Major --- de Coverly, my favourite minor character - and because of that the film's many deaths don't really have the impact that they ought to. Further, the film relies a great deal on the viewer's familiarity with the book, an element which I ultimately don't know that the film could have avoided given how much has to be condensed in order to make the story viable as a feature film.

All that being said, I liked Catch-22 quite a bit. I think Arkin makes a great Yossarian and of the supporting cast I particularly enjoyed the performances by Anthony Perkins as the Chaplain and Bob Newhart as Major Major Major Major. I also liked some of the minor touches that Nichols brought to the film and thought that he guided the abrupt change in tone which happens at about the half-way mark (when Yossarian's companions being dying off) very well. The film version of Catch-22 doesn't reach the heights of its source but it's an enjoyable film and a nice companion to the novel.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Graduate (1967)

Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katherine Ross

The Graduate is a film that you have to see at a certain time in your life in order to fully relate to it. If you’ve just graduated from University and haven’t yet started your career (or even decided on your career path), you’ll relate to Benjamin Braddock’s ennui, his “Now what? Is this it?” attitude, his embarrassment at his parents’ aggressive pride in him, and his need to be left alone. But, if you see it again later, after you’ve passed through this stage, you’ll find yourself wondering why it has to be the story of Benjamin’s affair with Mrs. Robinson, rather than of Mrs. Robinson’s affair with Benjamin.

Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) is the story’s most interesting character, mostly because she’s the only one with character. Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine (Katherine Ross) are as lacking in depth as they are in experience. These are suburban kids who’ve grown up in a relatively insulated world where nothing really bad has ever happened to them, and who are more or less the passive playthings of life. Benjamin’s parents are shiny, happy people who would like nothing more than for their son to graduate from college and come home to marry the girl next door. They don’t have personalities outside of Benjamin. Mr. Robinson exists mostly on the fringes as the “villain,” if the film in fact has one. Mrs. Robinson is the only character who is really alive, though we see how she suffers in her life. There is an undercurrent of boredom in the film, the boredom of having everything you want coupled with the pretence that it makes you happy. But Mrs. Robinson adopts no pretences. She’s bored and unhappy and pursues Benjamin less because she can’t resist him (she can do better and she knows it) and more because he’s the one who happens to be there.

And Benjamin really is just “there.” He comes home, passively allows himself to be paraded around by his parents for their friends, who ask the inevitable (and inevitably unanswerable) questions about his future, and give him advice like, “Plastics” (“Plastics,” Benjamin repeats, his voice flat and emotionless). He spends days just floating in his parents’ pool, simply existing, not really doing anything. Even when he begins the affair with Mrs. Robinson, there’s still the sense that he’s not really doing anything. There is one scene where Mrs. Robinson attempts to remove a spot from her blouse. Benjamin walks up behind her and grabs her breast and she… just keeps working the spot. He’s her accessory and she’ll pick him up for use when she’s ready to use him – and in between those times, there’s Benjamin, floating in the pool.

Benjamin gets involved with Elaine at his parents’ insistence and falls in love with her in spite of himself and to Mrs. Robinson’s fury. Elaine learns the truth (in a great scene between Hoffman, Bancroft and Ross where the final pronouncement isn’t delivered verbally, just through looks) and runs away back to school. Benjamin follows her and manages to work his way back into her life. Why does she want anything to do with him? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it has a lot to do with the fact that she’s now about to enter into her own shiny, happy suburban marriage and sees in Benjamin a chance of escape into something more exciting, something forbidden and troublesome. It’s a burst of colourful drama in what is shaping up to be a black-and-white life. And what could be more colourful and dramatic than Benjamin stopping her wedding? How could she not make the most of this opportunity and run off with him?

Part of what makes The Graduate so good is the way that it speaks to you differently at different times in your life. This isn’t a static film; it shifts with you as your own life shifts. At one point you may see Benjamin as a flawed hero, his relationship with Elaine as compelling. At another, you’ll see Benjamin as an empty vessel waiting to be filled, his relationship with Elaine as a romanticized vision of what love should be. In either interpretation, Hoffman is ideal as Benjamin, alternating between cool indifference, and the nervous anticipation we see – especially in his early scenes with Mrs. Robinson – as he attempts to prepare for the fact that something is about to happen in his life. Bancroft, too, is marvellous, giving Mrs. Robinson layers and dimension and not allowing her to simply be the lonely housewife. This is a very real character and not the caricature that popular culture has made of the “Mrs. Robinson” type.

The film ends exactly as it should, not with the adrenaline fuelled flight from the church, but with it’s aftermath. Benjamin and Elaine sit beside each other on a bus, neither speaking, not even really looking at each other. When asked what happened to them, director Mike Nichols once stated that “they ended up just like their parents,” which must be true because Benjamin and Elaine ultimately lack the imagination to make themselves anything else. You can see it in their faces at the end: Now what? Is this it?