Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen CALIFORNIA STYLE A LUXURY OF EMOTION THERE'S A SCENE in The Last Married Couple in America where the wife (Natalie Wood) knocks down her husband (George Segal). It happens on a plaza...
...It happens on a plaza outside an office building in Los Angeles, where they live...
...But maybe that's because my Jaguar isn't a Jaguar...
...They are people in whom narcissism and exhibitionism have become indistinguishable...
...It's no wonder that the fad for tppless go-go dancers in such places is dying out...
...Segal makes this little grace note into the one truly funny bit in the whole scene...
...Everything else in their lives seemed to take care of itself, including their children...
...The life of the couple in the film differs from my own, I'm afraid, in several particulars...
...And yet somehow I knew even before I saw this movie that it would not turn out to be about my life...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And I think this movie is putting us on about the facility with which people live their lives out there, the pure luxury of emotion they're able to afford...
...It happens because she has just found out that he is having an affair with an old friend of hers (Valerie Harper...
...This kind of self-consciousness about their emotions is the last thing we can imagine the people in this movie feeling...
...It was a form of human liberation that lay somewhere beyond merely being uninhibited...
...Gosh...
...Not after hearing that the "couple'' it dealt with was the only surviving marriage on a touch football team...
...Nothing will take your mind off your troubles quicker than a few days of that kind of thing...
...Whatever the odds-makers might say, I know that I feel distinctly like the underdog in this contest...
...There's much more entertainment to be had from eavesdropping...
...I know that George Segal and Natalie Wood aren't the last married couple in America, not yet anyway, because my wife and I are still here...
...As I confessed in my review of Kramer vs...
...Maybe George and Natalie are just the last married couple in California, and will have to go into the play-offs against me and my wife to decide the national championship...
...It's so out of character...
...As he runs after her pleading, pointing out that she had an affair once, too, trying to stop her from storming off, she finally gets so furious she just starts punching and kicking him until he goes down...
...Self-proclamation in restaurants and at parties was practically a life style in this movie...
...He's not down for the count, however, and as he picks himself up there's an instant when self-consciousness flickers across the expression on his face...
...These people live in a world where that's all there is to do...
...My more ragged experience has been that it's hard to love art and put dinner on the table at the same time...
...During the torrential rains they were having just before I arrived, one couple that I know had to sleep in shifts for four days straight so that one of them would always be awake to shovel out the drains around their house...
...These Californians get in so much more practice on their marriage than I do...
...On the other hand, though, I've just made a trip to California myself, scouting the competition, so to speak, sizing up my opponents...
...He tries to compose and collect himself, for appearance's sake, before rushing after her again in a heedless dither...
...When the people in the movie broadcast their lives like this, are they ignoring the eavesdroppers...
...They were trying to keep the house from going under...
...She has her sculpture studio virtually in her kitchen, so that she can go back and forth effortlessly, thoughtlessly, from being an artist to being a wife and mother...
...Director Gilbert Cates doesn't think of this constant blathering as a sign of weakness or hubris in these people...
...But this was a lapse...
...They take a kind of incredible pride in their emotions—the kind that goeth before a fall...
...In fact, if I had any single, sustained impression in this movie, it was of a world in which people in public places always talked too loud about their private lives...
...The only kind of failure that exists here is the failure to work through your feelings...
...This was my life...
...Or are they boasting to them...
...They are so absorbed in their feelings that they don't care who knows about them...
...It made me uncomfortable...
...My Jaguar is forever breaking down, spoiling my plans to spend the day with my family, forcing me to go to work when it wants in order to keep up with the repair bills...
...At one point Segal and Richard Benjamin took over an entire bar full of customers with a discussion of their fading, middle-aged sex lives and the relative strengths of their urinary tracts...
...Kramer, just before Last Married Couple opened, my wife and I are the only marriage to survive from a touch football team we used to play on...
...When the movie itself confirmed my suspicions, I was both disappointed and relieved at the same time...
...He suddenly worries, just for a second, about how he must look to passers-by...
...It's funny because it's completely unexpected...
...To Natalie Wood's credit, even, she gagged when Valerie Harper blurted out in a restaurant that she had recently had her vagina "tightened...
...A little of each, I suspect...
...28 March 1980: 183...
...He drives a Jaguar and seems to go to work when he pleases...
...I always find that I have to struggle to make the time and space for such fine feelings in my life...
...Maybe this East-West All-Star Game will have to go into a sudden-divorce overtime to break the tie...
...What kept amazing me about this movie, and separating it from my own life, was the amount of leisure time people had to devote to their emotions...
...Yet like the characters in it, the movie itself is oblivious to the peculiarity of such behavior...
...Screen CALIFORNIA STYLE A LUXURY OF EMOTION THERE'S A SCENE in The Last Married Couple in America where the wife (Natalie Wood) knocks down her husband (George Segal...
...I knew that this movie was going to disappoint me, but I just couldn't stay away from it...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 6
