Signs of the times

Like other Gotham-based directors (Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet), Paul Mazursky is a New Yorker who often makes movies (often about other New Yorkers), but that's pretty much where their similarities end. You can look at practically any scene--sometimes any frame--from an Allen, Scorsese, or Lumet picture and instantly peg its director. To recognize Mazursky, you need to listen. Mazursky has never been much of a visual stylist; his films tend to have a flatness to them, a casual storyteller's composition. The images on the screen seem calculated not to distract you from the content of his characters' lives. As a result of his fluid lack of pretense, Mazursky has never achieved the superstar status of his contemporaries. His solid, respectable output, from goofy comedies to topical dramas, betrays a personality less concerned with being an auteur than a journalist--an astute observer of social conditions, and one of its drollest commentators.

Mazursky's principal strength has usually lain in giving a filmic voice to contemporary social issues without getting hung up on "art." He makes a commercial product, one the masses can embrace and the critics can enjoy, too. His first film as a writer-director, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, was considered one of the raciest (and funniest) satires of the late 1960s. (It also introduced Mazursky to the festival circuit, opening the New York Film Festival in 1969.) In the same way that The Graduate employed the comfiness of the upper-middle-class as the backdrop that radicalized their children, B&C&T&A used the same cocoon as the jumping-off point for what should radicalize the parents. Mazursky explored their sense of yearning for what they feared they were missing--what a "generation" only 10 years junior to them seemed to be reveling in: sexual liberation, a cozy familiarity with amorality, and a refreshing lack of shame.

Mazursky was poking fun at the sexual revolution as much as celebrating it--B&C&T&A is set in Southern California, so Mazursky has an outsider's contempt for his subjects--and that may clue you in to the key to his ethos as a director. By perpetually turning out films at the cutting edge of topicality, not to say newsworthiness, Mazursky has often sacrificed enduring popularity for the immediate gratification of being "first" at something. Most satires suffer from seeming outdated in the long run, after the issues they skewer gain currency and what was once viewed as scathing seems tame by comparison. (Network is a notable exception, a satire so avant-garde that only now can we accept its cynicism about television programming and the softening of the American mind as almost a documentary.) Such is the life of all journalists--old news is no news, and editorialists like Mazursky depend as much on their subject matter as they do their own talent. When he tackles conspicuous consumerism--as he did in the garish, pastel-intensive Down and Out in Beverly Hills or the immigration comedy Moscow on the Hudson--you see his view of America is not as melting pot, where everyone becomes like everyone else, but stew pot, where people of different backgrounds try to connect but rarely do. Oddly, when he has chosen to mine the fields of his own life for his comic inspiration--either as a young Brooklynite (Next Stop, Greenwich Village) or as a filmmaker (Alex in Wonderland, The Pickle)--he seems self-indulgent, and his reputation suffers. Maybe his style requires a larger dose of objectivity. Surely there are few who would deny the merits of his three best films: Harry & Tonto, An Unmarried Woman, and Enemies, A Love Story.

Harry & Tonto might be characterized as Mazursky's first change-of-pace film, a road picture about an elderly pensioner (Art Carney, in an Oscar-winning turn) and his placid pussycat. Through its episodic format, Mazursky peels away a subtle outrage of modern culture: the alienating effect of growing old in America. The irony is that all the people Harry meets--all much younger--are more screwed up that he is; in Carney's gentle hands, Harry stands in sharp relief to his self-absorbed daughter, his weakling son, and a host of others. Over the course of his cross-country travels, we see Harry as an everyman: father, counselor, lover. Dignity has often acted as an unseen character in Mazursky's movies, from the puppylike desperation of Blume in Love to the treatment of the homeless in Down and Out to the quest for authentic self-respect in An Unmarried Woman, but never before or since has he extolled the virtues of dignity as simply as he did in Harry & Tonto.