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After Sternberg and Stevens, Dreiser according to Elaine May. A full winnowing of the tenacious male ego for the anxious schmuck within, he (Charles Grodin) is a sporting-equipment salesman introduced practicing his smile in front of a mirror. A whole New York courtship gets compressed behind the opening credits, from bar pick-up to wedding party, then shalom Miami Beach. The bride (Jeannie Berlin) is gorgeous and lively but needy, her flaws are suddenly magnified in the groom's eyes as the terror of imagining your spouse flushing a toilet or watching her tearing into an egg salad. "There's a lot of things you didn't notice about me, and a lot of things I never noticed about you." Coated in sunburn cream after being barbecued in the surf, she's trapped in her hotel room while he pursues the tawny valkyrie (Cybill Shepherd) on vacation with her upper-crust parents. Eddie Albert's master class in slow burns gets plenty of room from May's long, still takes as Grodin lays the cards on the table ("Decency doesn't always pay off, you know"), the poor wife absorbs the news over lobster legs and pecan pie in a sequence of savage awkwardness. The second half exposes the hollowness of the dream as a coed's caprice amid Minnesota snow, the tenacious weasel can't back down now, he's become his drive. "Back to the soil, so to speak," the bullshit artist's pilgrimage into the frigid new tribe. The abrasion of May's riposte to The Graduate's glibness has been noted, her caustic and tender interchange of brunettes and blondes not so much, Vertigo or L'Avventura by way of Neil Simon. "You're looking at a brick wall, young fella," the protagonist pierces through only to find the bleakest of comic endings on the other side—the moony Burt Bacharach ditty has become a Baudelairean elegy, it reverberates through Edwards' 10 all the way to Gray's Two Lovers. With Audra Lindley, William Prince, and Doris Roberts.
--- Fernando F. Croce |