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Bluebeard and the Spaz, a magnificent foxtrot. All the aging epicurean (Walter Matthau) has is his "devotion to form," an unreliable red Ferrari embodies the leaky cocoon of luxury. Beckett the lawyer (William Redfield) spells it out, patiently: "You've lost all your money, you've exhausted your capital and therefore your income..." A handheld camera follows the ex-playboy on the streets of Manhattan after he's bopped on the head by reality, the word "poor" rolls most painfully in his jowls. With bankruptcy around the corner, he makes a deal with his uncle (James Coco, wielding a pepper-mill scepter) and sets out to marry another fortune. Miss Right turns out to be a plaintive frump (Elaine May) with a vast inheritance and zero social skills. Botany is her field, her goal is to discover and name a new species, a modest stab at eternity. "If you can't be immortal, why bother?" Between Tillie's Punctured Romance and Wild Grass is May's beautifully refined exposition of screwball comedy's brackish side. Love is declared kneeling on broken glass, that's the singular absurdity of her cosmos, the wine cooler spilled on the carpet might match the modernist splotches hanging on the aesthete's walls. The comic invention is to be savored: "Carbon on the valves," the toilet flush that gives way to the wedding march, "You're all sticky, Henrietta," Matthau's sublime sigh of irritation as his new wife removes her Harold Lloyd specs and slips into a tangled nightgown. May originally delivered a three-hour film and saw it hacked by half, the sharp twang of her sensibility nevertheless remains everywhere from George Rose as valet out of Lubitsch to the elegant lewdness of Doris Roberts' winks. The punchline is a Paterian epiphany on the edge of a watery abyss, grudgingly yet profoundly moving. Nichols' The Fortune is a friendly rival's riposte. With Jack Weston, Renée Taylor, Graham Jarvis, and David Doyle.
--- Fernando F. Croce |