I'm starting to think Robert Culp is an unappreciated actor. He's got an interesting presence, a kind of wounded machismo, like a tough guy who's gone on an inner journey and discovered his feminine side, and it scares him. In A Name For Evil, he never seems entirely comfortable, either in his skin or in his social role, but is always trying to hide and/or contain this discomfort.
Which means he's perfect as Bob in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, as a documentary filmmaker who, along with his wife Carol (Natalie Wood), finds himself transformed (or so he thinks) by a New Agey resort into a more open, honest, and loving human being. Meaning: he and his wife are open to having affairs without the attendant jealousy or anger. Culp is terrific; we never believe that he totally buys what he's learned at the resort, but rather that he believes he believes. When they rejoin their closest friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon) after the retreat, their new attitudes (everything is "beautiful" to them) clash with their friends' neuroses, setting into motion a series of seriocomic episodes and epiphanies.
I'm not sure that "seriocomic" is the right word here; that indicates to me an alternating sequence of serious and funny scenes. What Mazursky does, to his credit, is let the viewer decide what's funny and what isn't. There are very few straight gags or one-liners; instead, the film is structured into a handful of very long scenes, each filled with awkward moments between characters that shift instantaneously from painful to funny and back again, like a ray of dramatic light that changes from a tragic particle to comedy wave. It's emotional slapstick, watching Gould trying to get Cannon to have sex with him (she's upset upon learning about Culp's affair) or Culp as he bends over backward, against his natural instincts, to treat his wife's extramarital lover with kindness and respect.
Make no mistake, however; this is definitely a Hollywood film. The ending, a rip of 8 1/2 that's a welcome departure from the naturalism of the previous hundred minutes, is also an attempt to leave on a positive note. The previous scene may have changed the relationships between the four characters for good, but we aren't privy to what those changes are, just an exhortation for the audience to find and hold onto love.
Yet while the film is a sitcom by Cassavetian standards (at times, it feels like a Hollywood reaction to Faces), it's arty and European by mainstream ones. I like how Mazursky sneaks in certain visuals from the resort (the group hugs, the beating of pillows, the intense eye contact) into this quartet's upper-class world. Interestingly, though (at least coming from the director of Down and Out in Beverly Hills), class isn't addressed here; these are rich people, with maids and giant swimming pools, and it doesn't seem like much is made of the fact that they have the money to be this self-indulgent.
(Confidential to "M": Thanks for recommending this. It did help with the script, even though I gave up on that draft after three days. [That's another story.] It has exactly the right kind of tone I'm searching for and have yet to achieve. What was most interesting, of course, was that the character in Gould's story has the same name as my main character. That was a weird coincidence.)
Where we saw it: dvd | We deign to rate it: 75 outta 100Glad you liked it. I disagree about the class thing, though -- I think that class is the heart of this movie, although it's true that there are no scenes playing it up. Appropriate that this is the case because the characters are trying so hard to believe that class doesn't exist, despite their wealth and privilege. After all, only a culture with a leisure class could invent psychology to begin with, and then it takes a whole other quantum leap to pop-psychology and EST-like gatherings. I think the humor turns on the tension created when these people try confronting the the conventions of their class, and find out why those conventions might exist in the first place.
Remember that Wood's character sleeps with her tennis instructor, and that Culp's character sleeps with an employee--(and Wood's other confrontation was with the waiter at the fancy restaurant)--people not in the same social standing, which is a perfect lead in to the ending.
Mostly, I think, it's a show up of the self-centeredness of class issues--as if becoming of a certain wealth isolates you from having to truly care about people (in this way, the film is prescient to what happens to not-so-well-heeled celebs now that acquire sudden wealth and act like self-appointed royalty). I suspect that Wood and Culp's characters were always wealthy and so the class they inhabit was less omnipresent to them, therefore easier to challenge, but Gould was a working professional whose sense of class is much more refined because he climbed from another class.
Of course, to some degree I'm reading into it with that last statement about the history of the characters, but I still would argue that class is the engine for the script.
The scene with Gould and Cannon, especially, is a marvelous thing.
D'oh! I *totally* forgot about the waiter scene -- probably because it's earlier in the movie -- so my entire statement is invalidated. I really should go through a movie in FF before I write something, but part of what I want to do is write these things fast, in an hour or so, so I don't.
Posted by: kza at January 4, 2005 05:14 PM