278
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Nicky
given another chance after its unheralded run in New York.
A movie that makes as few concessions to its audience as this one can't
be all bad. It is a film about two unpleasant thugs (Peter Falk and John
Cassavetes) and the painful, sometimes comic implications of what is a
metaphoric sibling rivalry. The film is full of the self-revealing
behavior we are used to getting from Cassavetes and Falk in Cassavetes'
own movies, the kind of self-revelation that ultimately hides more than
it gives away. A nightmare film,
Mikey and Nicky
fails because May
only rarely lets it escape its naturalistic frame.
Carlos Saura's
Cousin Angelica
is an ambitious failure of another
sort, a film that mixes the remembered past and the enacted present as
if they were contemporaneous realities. The same repressive Spanish
Catholicism that has emotionally maimed the central character, the
film insistenly indicates, is responsible for the Fascist overthrow of the
Republic. Saura, in the manner of the early Bunuel, lets the private
story stand by symbolic implication for the public one, the two
distorting mirrors of one another. Particularly effective is Saura's
strategy of having his middle-aged protagonist appear as his adult self
in his dramatized recollections of childhood. The effect is
to
give the
recollected past a graven immediacy.
The movies large audiences are going to in Seattle are not the
Festival films
(Madame Rosa
excpected), but the same middlebrow hits
that appear
to
be enchanting the urban East. What do
Julia, The
Turning Point, An Unmarried Woman, Madame Rosa
and
Coming
Home
have in common? They are all slickly produced, aspire to some
primitive idea of sophistication and culture, have inspiriting themes,
are without a single original cinematic idea, and manipulate tears.
These "quality" films are, at heart, interchangeable. In that reliable
melting pot of memory, they merge into one. Disguises of plot aside,
they all make the same fraudulent emotional appeals, enlisting us in
the noblest causes, while falsifying significant particulars to avoid
ambiguity. The admiring reviews these films have had, along with
their popular successes, suggest that we have moved into a period in
which sentimentality is willfully confused with emotional vitality.
One despairs at the implications of such news. Exaggerated feeling is a
disguise for no feeling, for numbness and cruelty.
Hal Ashby's
Coming Home,
the most recent and perhaps most
admired of these films, is a classic representative of the Vogue of
Sentimentality. As
Julia
is putatively anti-Fascist and
An Unmarried
Woman
programmatically feminist,
Coming Home
is self-regardingly
opposed to the Vietnam War. So as not to seem a one-cause film (like a
one cause politician?)
Coming Home
affirms compassion and love and
liberated sex, the immutable trendy verities. The apotheosis of the
