The Talkies / Mazursky Trio
Podhoretz, John
"The Talkies / Mazursky Trio" - Willie and Phil, the title characters love each other, though they are not homosexuals, and they both love Je annette, who loves them both. Since she...
...Certainly this is true of the steel industry, where sufficient capital for modernization has been lacking, so that the modern and El/iott Abrams practices law in Washington, D.C...
...This girl from Kentucky has never had her consciousness raised, yet she could pose for the cover of Ms...
...A statist plan would in fact call for "national planning," with government allocation of capital to favored sectors, and a government corporation to sponsor and finance favored investment...
...Ira Blume in Love, Stephen Blume and his wife, who meet at a rally fi~r the United Farm Workers, go through yoga and health John Podhoretz's short story, "The Piano Recital," appeared recently in Harper's...
...She seems to have come into this world a full-blown feminist freespirit, naming her child Zelda and having absolute domain over her own and her lovers' actions...
...And what is meant, generally, is that more capital should be available in the right places in the economy...
...One can guess: Those who favor grea~er "national planning" are ordinarily not too keen on military preparedness, and the very last thing they would want is to make an argument for military spending...
...They seemed so real that their lives needed no drama, no s t r u c t u r e , through which we could b e t t e r understand them...
...But what is surprising about Willie andPhil is how thin and lifeless it is...
...Theories of comparative advantage would tell us, then, to go on with the building of computers or DNA and leave such products as steel or autos to others...
...What has happened to Mazursky...
...food together before she kicks him out for sleeping with his black secretary, and Blume becomes friends with his ex-wife's new lover, with whom he smokes dope and laughs a great deal...
...We last see her in the arms of Igor, a Russian dancer...
...This choice is the central issue in the reindustrialization debate, but is never squarels...
...5 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER1980 33...
...While almost everything in the movie is wrong--from the ridiculous elegance of WiUie's parents' home in Brooklyn, to the almost suburban farmhouse in rural Kentucky t h a t Jeannette's father, a penniless traveling salesman, somehow left to Jeannette's mother, and from the oy veys of the newly Buddhist Willie to the goombahs of the hopefully Jewish Phil--nothing is more inaccurate and confused than Jeannette's character...
...They want all t h a t capital put into plowshares, not Swords...
...Mazursky's characters have increasingly become emblematic figures in his own ideological journey...
...Since she is not a homosexual either, she has affairs with each of them, first with Willie, whom she marries when she is eight months lxtegnant with his child, and then with Phil a f t e r Willie goes to India to find himself...
...Willie and Phil are supposed to have become extraordinary because of their relations with Jeannette, yet they remain nondescript throughout...
...This is p a r t l y the fault of the actors: Michael Ontkean, who plays Willie, is a bland ingenue who cannot speak even a well.written line without making it sound false, and Ray Sharkey, who in Who'll Stop the Rain displayed immense promise, overacts so furiously that one wonders if Phil is maybe on uppers...
...It may be (although the case has yet to be proved) that the economics of steel or auto making, including wage rates, now favor production in Japan, or Korea, or elsewhere outside the U.S...
...Bob and Carol ana 1 Ted andAlice is a series of revue sketches about life in California, and Blume in Love is a rambling tale of the passion the title character felt for his ex-wife...
...A free market plan would make no decisions as to where capital would flow, and would simply encourage capital formation through measures such as tax incentives and regulatory l'eform...
...When Willie returns, he and Phil both sleep on the floor, not able to decide which one should go to Jeannette...
...Second is the low rate of savings and investment as a percentage of GNP...
...at any point in the movie...
...But in the context of the America of t980, reindustrialization is a term which obfuscates rather than illuminates...
...Finally she leaves them, and, we are told at the end, the two men go on to lead very ordinary lives...
...economy...
...Since they are so nondescript, and Jeannette so dully unfathomable, none of their actions assume the necessary significance...
...whether credit and capital can be efficiently allocated by the state...
...On the evidence of the movie and An Unmarried Woman, he has been stymied by the subject that could have supplied the richest grist for his satiric mill, the Women's Movement...
...No longer do the people seem real, no longer do their lives make sense, and no longer can the absence of a story seem tolerable...
...Mazursky intends the movie to be a chronicle of the 1970s, as seen through three paradigmatic lives, but 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 all Willie,'Phil, and Jeannette ever do is drop acid once (in the only scene in the movie that is remotely realistic, and the only one in which Margot Kidder, who plays Jeannette, gets a chance to display her formidable acting abilities), avoid the draft, buy a car, go to a New York Knicks game, go to California, have a child, live on a farm, and go to India...
...In the late sixties and early seventies, as Hollywood was leaping onto the "New Consciousness" band, wagon-, Mazursky was making goodnatured but deadly accurate fun of the attitudes and moods of the day...
...She tells Phil, who loves her, not to love her, but as soon as Willie is gone she jumps into the sack with him as well, sleeps with neither of them upon Willie's return, and then, suddenly, takes off...
...Mazursky's Willie and Phil, the title characters love each other, though they are not homosexuals, and they both love J e a n n e t t e , who loves them both...
...But in Willie and Phil, even more than in his last movie, An Unmarried Woman, everything is awry...
...So the United States needs to "reindustrialize" to save the balance of payments, defend the dollar, and protect American jobs, we are told...
...Willie is Jewish, and so he is thin and sensitive, good-looking with a big nose and a slight Brooklyn accent, teaches Hamlet in a high school in the South Bronx, finds that, as a Jew, it is difficult for him to buy a German car, and is in general quite dreadfully earnest...
...So the major issues are never discussed...
...b y E l l i o t t Abrams There is, however, a separable national defense issue in this debate...
...But never do we see a copy'of The Feminine Mystique or The SecondSex on her night table, nor do we ever see her with any other women besides her sister, her mother, and Willie's and Phil's mothers...
...An intelligent debate would ask whether we want more government, or less...
...He cannot poke the slightest fun at it...
...It is the work of a man who has lost the comic spark that was his only real gift...
...This is the plot of Willie andPhil...
...Mazursky wishes to put the seventies on film, but instead he has made a movie about three vapid people, two of whom he characterizes only in a joke: Willie, a Jewish by John Podhoretz schoolteacher, wants to be a concert jazz pianist, and Phil, an Italian photographer, wants to be a Jewish intellectual...
...She is, to date, the falsest screen portrait of the liberated womaD...
...Having said this by means of a narrator, Mazursky does not even feel compelled to make their actions fit the joke...
...efficient Japanese steel industry can ship iron ore and coal to J a p a n , produce steel, ship it to the United States, and still sell it for less than U.S...
...And as for Jeannette--well, she is so mysterious, so elusive, so breathtakingly Mother Earthish, so much, in fact, the perfect woman of feminist fantasy, that Mazursky d o e s n ' t even bother to make her comprehensible in a joke...
...She wants n o t h i n g - - s h e simply is...
...Mazursky, with satire as his stock in trade, got underneath the skins of his characters, showed what made them tick, and portrayed their lives, their homes, and even t h e i r analysts with such precision that it w a s n ' t necessary to parade them around in a coherent story...
...The first is the decreasing American competitiveness in world trade, symbolized by imports of Japanese steel and autos...
...Steel can...
...Why do we hear so little of this in the reindustrialization debate...
...In that context, use o f the term "reindustrialization" is appropriate and the term has a clear meaning...
...It all seems only to r e p r e s e n t the behavior of childish, empty, and uninteresting people...
...A new Reconstruction Finance Corporation has been championed by Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker...
...Instead, voices from government, business, and labor babble on about " r e i n d u s t r i a l i z a - tion," a term so vague all parties can agree on it and yet not have a single common proposal...
...the New York Times did a whole series on the matter...
...U] THE BROMIDE OF CAMPAIGN '80...
...For good reason, it is argued .that the low capital formation rate is a main cause of the loss of competitiveness of American industry...
...Such a debate would help us make important choices about how to cope with our n a t i o n ' s diminishing savings and investment and international economic strength...
...Everything about her, what she says about her freedom, her lack of commitment, her wish to make no promises, and her attitude of superiority to these men, suggests that she has taken a crash course in the works of the Women's Liberation movement...
...In I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, which he wrote but did not direct, a square l e w i s h lawyer takes one bite of a marijuana-spiked brownie and soon thereafter becomes a hippie...
...In Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, a woman who has just had her consciousness "raised" fi~llows a waiter into a restaurant kitchen, attempting to prove to him bow much she " l o v e s " him...
...This reverence for the Movement's ideology has castrated him as a filmmaker...
...This year, at the lexicographical inspiration and leadership of Columbia University's Amitai Etzioni, much has been heard about "reindustrializing" America...
...his good films (with the exception of his wonderful, autobiographical Next Stop Greenwich Village) have no story to speak of...
...confronted...
...whether economic and national security arguments are, to any extent, contradictory...
...tion...
...MAZURSKY TRIO I n Pa...
...The issue is the role of the s t a t e , or simply put, more capitalism or more socialism...
...The use of the term hinders clear thought about thetwo important issues which lie behind it: national defense policy and free market economics...
...The choice before us is between more capitalism or less, and--in view of the success of national planning elsewhere--it is no wonder those favoring less hide behind a term like "reindustrialization...
...Phil is Italian, and so he says " a a y " very often, acts as though he is always suffering from a dyspeptic ulcer, and cries and laughs and talks very loud...
...a r e - - steel, or computers, or autos, or biotechnology--but who will decide...
...Business Week presented us with an entire issue under that title...
...She flips a coin to choose between the two men, Willie wins, and she moves in with him in what is supposed to be a platonic relationship but which, after five minutes in Willie's impossibly huge and glamorous Greenwich Village apartment, develops into a beautifully sexual one...
...A f t e r the Second World War, Germany r e - i n d u s t r i a l i z e d . Its oncemighty industrial plant had been destroyed during the War, and was rebuilt, and of course modernized and expanded...
...And if he continues to place the liberated woman at the center of his films, he will be lost forever...
...But whatever the economic rationale for shrinking them, the steel and auto industries deserve special consideration because without them our ability to build tanks and ships and other essential military goods is greatly damaged...
...For one can favor two e n t i r e l y different plans for "reindustrializaWhen people speak of reindustrialization, they generally have in mind two problems now facing the U.S...
...It is not surprising that Mazursky, who wrote and directed, should make a movie with such a weak story...
...Thus we quickly reach the issue of free market economics~ The important question here is not what those "right places in the economy...
...he seems obsessed with proving that, unlike other men, he is on the side of the fairer sex...
...These two, hackneyed and cliche-ridden as they are, are more believable than Jeannette, who appears in Greenwich Village from Keritucky, is beautiful, doesn't curse, and is forever saying things like, "Don't tell me that you love me, just love me," and declares, "I never made any promises," to her husband...
Vol. 13 • December 1980 • No. 12
