Water Under The Dam

My mother never saw THE IRISHMAN. Somehow this seems important. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have, it was right there on Netflix. And she had already seen numerous Martin Scorsese films over the decades which, of course, is what you did in New York. She’s the one who took me to see AFTER HOURS, my very first Scorsese in a theater. This is a memory that matters. Years later we saw GANGS OF NEW YORK at the Chinese during one of her holiday visits out to L.A. and of course she also loved GOODFELLAS as everyone did even if as time went on she only remembered the funny stuff, but that’s normal. She even expressed interest when the film was released in late 2019 but her health at the time made me think that she might not want to be reminded of certain things, since so much of the film is about The End and being close to it, and I didn’t try pushing it on her. So when she passed late on Thanksgiving night, 2022 as far as I know she had still never seen THE IRISHMAN. It doesn’t really matter. If a film means something to you, it might be for your own reasons more than anything that’s actually in the film so whatever the reasons might be THE IRISHMAN has grown to mean a lot to me over the past few years. It makes me think about events in my own life from long ago and what they really meant, it makes me wonder about a future I still have to find my way into and hopefully somehow will. It’s a film about the past leading to a future that is a long, slow, inevitable end which the main character refuses to acknowledge, even after he’s done so much that he can never atone for. Can any of us move past what we’ve done? Can any of us move past whatever our parents were, what they were to us? I suppose we have to, since the alternative isn’t worth facing. THE IRISHMAN is not about my mother, this is obvious. But maybe certain feelings get mixed in there, maybe also some feelings about my father who incidentally may have preferred CASINO to GOODFELLAS, along with other things I don’t want to think about. At the very least, it’s a film about things that happened which we maybe don’t want to remember as well as something we’re all going to face eventually, however long it takes.

THE IRISHMAN is also about America, just as many Martin Scorsese pictures are. The mid-70s horror of TAXI DRIVER, the stylized post-war of NEW YORK, NEW YORK, the media future of THE KING OF COMEDY, the financial orgy of THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and this is just for starters. THE IRISHMAN is easily the most sprawling of them, taking us from a version of America that used to exist back in the twentieth century, when the adults were seemingly in charge and we thought they knew what was best. It was an America of unions and storefronts and music by Jackie Gleason and glossy hotel ballrooms and a glorious future that seemed to go as far as the eye could see. This is a country that once had Howard Johnson’s, after all. We used to have Roger Mudd on TV every night. Through all this it’s asking how the events of the twentieth century created people and how did they in turn go on to shape the rest of it, whether anyone knew or not. This glorious world of mid-century America is basically the same as the world of crime it depicts so if one dies then the other dies, I suppose, or it all just turns into the present we’re living in right now. To bring up another film starring the same two leads, if THE GODFATHER PART II is about the dual journey of a parent and child through twentieth-century America showing what all that leads to, then THE IRISHMAN feels like it’s more interested in peering silently backward at the lives our parents once lead, the world they were a part of, the damage it all caused when they thought things were so much better and where they live now in our minds, like it or not.

For whatever reason THE IRISHMAN is also only partly THE IRISHMAN since it also goes by I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES, the name of the book by Charles Brandt it’s based on which is how the movie defiantly begins; both titles appear in the end credits. Maybe they could have come up with something better but, of course, Robert De Niro had already starred in a film called ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Whatever the name, it’s the story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), talking to no one, talking to us, about working as a truck driver long ago and his chance encounter with mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) which led to a life as a hitman for the mob aka ‘painting houses’. This new path took him up the ladder to the top of where unions and organized crime merged, becoming a close friend and advisor to none other than famed labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and what Frank’s involvement with trying to mediate some sort of peace between the two sides eventually led to.

There’s something about the special feeling of sitting in a theater waiting to see the new Martin Scorsese film. That feeling of anticipation which grows undeniably stronger each time leading to this point where we have to be honest and admit we can no longer be sure just how many more times this is going to happen. Then from this comes the initial discovery on first viewing of what each film really is beyond any expectations, beginning from that first rush of pure exhilarating cinema before deepening into whatever it really is and how we can accept that. It’s a feeling which keeps so many of them rewatchable as we return to get that contact high followed by the cold water of reality right before the credits roll. Not even five years since its release, THE IRISHMAN has already become one of those for me even if it does that without ever achieving the rush of exhilaration we might have expected, cinematic or otherwise. It’s not that kind of film and doesn’t want to be, instead showing in minute detail the steady pace of becoming part of this life in a way that feels addictively meditative, allowing me to continually focus on what happens from one moment to the next. I’ve already lost count of how many viewings there have been for me so far, from the one time I got to see it in a theater all the way through the comfort viewings circa Covid lockdown and then continuing past my mother’s death which brought an undeniable extra layer to it all. The reflection brought out in it feels like this is meant to be the ultimate statement on the guys the director has been making movies about for decades by now, starring people whose very presence adds immeasurably to how much this means. It’s a film that shows reaching the top of the mountain, a mountain the guys in MEAN STREETS never had a shot of climbing, but that film is part of a scrappier, younger man’s aesthetic, not fully aware of the gravity of it all just yet. This film feels like it’s meant to be the summation, the final word, a film about the end even if we already know it isn’t really that for the director. Ahead of release much of what anyone knew about it was the gangster movie aspect and the de-aging digital effects that some people spend too much time harping on. Now it’s five years later and some of those things matter, some of them really don’t at all anymore.

Frank Sheeran’s life is long and the film is long. Maybe it doesn’t have to be as long as it is but nothing has to be anything and there is so much pleasure in each of the side trips taken by the film, each new viewing revealing another detail which makes it that much richer. What stood out to me recently were all the silences as someone, often De Niro, keeps glaring silently, beats where the film held on shots as if wanting us to remember these places where things happen, forcing us to remember such moments as everything changes. If the film wasn’t so long those moments wouldn’t matter as much, the way time proceeds forward until we can barely tell anymore how far it’s gone. The narrative as laid out in the screenplay by Steven Zaillian is careful and methodical, with a beautiful clarity to the dual framing device that breaks things down, the map of the trip being taken and the way Frank Sheeran’s own life becomes mapped out, each leading to the exact same destination. Like the drive, the film doesn’t need to rush. The seemingly unimportant stops are there for a reason so the metronome pacing carefully laid out by Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker brings a focus to every single moment that keeps it going, a ticking in Frank’s head he ignores but it’s always there. It begins to feel like a movie about the feeling that comes within those cuts, pacing that allows each moment to get deep inside us as it just keeps going and going. CASINO and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET are both a shade under three hours which seems contractually deliberate i.e. “don’t go one second over a 180 minute runtime” while THE IRISHMAN gets even more breathing room at three-and-a-half, more time to focus on all the wrong choices being made and all the silent realizations that come when it’s too late, although you can cut that down by about ten minutes if you don’t want to count the credits. And through all that is the Robbie Robertson theme with the low notes of that cello which cut down into the soul, pressing on and on.

The widescreen approach that Scorsese has largely used over the past few decades is here eschewed in favor of something more visually hemmed in, focused more on the simple act of people dealing with each other up close with so much going on around them, whether because this was made for Netflix or a byproduct of the complicated effects work (incidentally, the only other film of his in recent years not in some form of widescreen was HUGO) is unclear but there is what feels like the gleaming, perfect look often found at the streaming site which is still evident on the Criterion Blu-ray. Either way, the look brought to it by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (now best known for shooting both BARBIE and KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON which came out a few months apart from each other) is impeccable and he brings such emotional life to each of those closeups. Those shots are an integral part of the visual effects concept to the whole film and even after multiple viewings it still works better at certain points more than others with the overall smoothing out nature of the appearances almost always unavoidable. Even if it’s a miracle of technology it’s maybe a flawed miracle and whether it’s one that serves any real purpose here or in any other film is still open to debate. But the very existence of the effects becomes so much a part of the very subtext of the film anyway that how perfect they might be only seems to matter up to a certain point. Besides, these are men who were always old to begin with so it wouldn’t work as well with younger guys in the roles anyway, no matter what age they were playing, so the way that genuine advanced age is always felt makes total sense and with each revisit any nitpicking over it all seems to matter less and less.

“I met what was gonna turn out to be the rest of my life,” Frank tells us after being formally introduced to Russell Bufalino which serves as this film’s version of Henry Hill recalling “It was when I met the world,” about the first moment Jimmy Conway entered his life in GOODFELLAS. For Henry it really does feel like the start of something but for Frank, even at the beginning, it’s like it was already over for him with everything decided thanks to the war that essentially created him, the ‘good war’, which gave him the ‘whatever happens, happens’ philosophy he chose to live his life by. To break the narrative up into pieces it’s Frank’s arrival into this world, his ascension and the falling to Earth after the death at his own hands of the most important person he’ll ever meet. It’s framed by the journey to this event which is doubly framed by him looking back at all this as he tells his story, maybe to us, maybe to no one at all, simply trying to convince himself that it all had some sort of purpose. He somehow becomes a close confidant of Hoffa almost unnervingly fast and they become like an old married couple in their pajamas almost instantly, which pleasingly gives us a De Niro/Pacino friendship we’ve really never had onscreen before (let’s forget about RIGHTEOUS KILL), just as everything that happens in Frank’s ascension from mere truck driver almost seems a little too good to be true to have really taken place, no matter how willing he was to ‘paint houses’ but even that portrayal of the American dream feels like part of the dark humor which is there and has to be there, as undeniable a part of that world, just as it’s an undeniable part of a Martin Scorsese film, as it is.

People used to seem older. Or maybe I was just younger. Either way, they were adults then and it makes sense that everyone in this film always seems older than the age they likely really are. In Frank’s mind, he always was old so when Bufalino calls him ‘kid’ the first time they meet it seems a little crazy, digital de-aging technology or not. The chronology of the film could be looked up to break it all down to exact dates and as much as it may be common knowledge when certain events took place, it still all feels like it takes place in a general sort of past. Scorsese likely remembers dates by when certain films came out anyway so when a key arrest is made Don Siegel’s THE SHOOTIST is playing across the street, because of course it is and it feels like the end of the road that began all the way back when Harvey Keitel went to see RIO BRAVO in Scorsese’s first feature WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR. This matters too, the feeling that we’re traveling through the past of various Scorsese films we’ve already lived over and over making references to both American history and his own cinematic history, whether the Copacabana or Don Rickles, trying to remember what happened in Columbus Circle whether in films or reality, plus one historical point that even briefly involves David Ferrie, previously played by Joe Pesci in Olver Stone’s JFK. Brushing up against another film, brushing up against some form of actual history. Even the details involving the Joe Gallo hit manage to cross over with the recent making-of-THE GODFATHER miniseries THE OFFER (sort of enjoyable in a Chinese takeout way but not much more than that, RIP Al Ruddy) and without getting into what’s true or not I’m more open to believing the version this film presents than the idea that Joe Gallo being killed allowed Francis Ford Coppola to film on location in Sicily. Even the use of scores from older films, such as a lyrical track from THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA under one sequence, are a key part of this approach and it’s something Scorsese has done before, most notably the way CASINO utilized Georges Delerue’s theme from CONTEMPT to underscore its own portrayal of marital agony. There’s of course a certain similarity to the way Tarantino has utilized scores from other films over the years as a sort of meta-commentary through his own versions of history and since this never happened before 1997’s JACKIE BROWN it’s hard not to wonder if he was at all inspired when CASINO was released a few years earlier. The specific choices come from different eras just as the two men do but when used they feel equally personal, additional pieces of the past somehow trying to be heard and remembered, no matter how distant they may be.

That undeniable feeling of The End is made clear right from the beginning in the prolonged opening shot where we eventually find Frank in that nursing home, all by himself and seemingly ready to talk. It’s also the way people are introduced alongside a title card describing their eventual, often violent, deaths which becomes this film’s version of the BARRY LYNDON epilogue showing how the only thing that defines them is a very specific kind of end that makes them all equal. Nothing that happened when they were alive will be remembered except for the fate of the one guy ‘liked by all’ which provides one of the biggest laughs of all. Aside from him, only Frank somehow makes it all the way through, past the point where anyone will remember. For a film where it feels like that main character takes absolutely no pleasure in anything, so much attention is paid to the way time is spent enjoying those tiny pleasures in our lives, often food, the ones we barely even think about as they happen, all of it seems like it’s part of a world that doesn’t really exist anymore. The steak, the ice cream sundaes Jimmy likes not to mention the ginger ale, the hot dogs at Lum’s that are steamed in beer, the choice Frank is given of having corn flakes or Total for breakfast, the cigarette breaks the wives insist on during their drive. There’s a sense in the film of wanting to hold onto the past, whatever it was, hold onto those pleasures and the way things were, no matter how horrible what was going on was. The way Scorsese alums like Don Rickles and Jerry Vale turn up here as played by Jim Norton and Steven Van Zandt as if makes total sense for them to be here and even if they’re gone it’s still going to happen, he way he’s just as insistent on De Niro, Pacino and Pesci still playing characters much younger than they really were at the time so the film wouldn’t have any meaning otherwise. The way we can’t move on from what we’ve done and the things that were done to us. “They wouldn’t dare!” Hoffa chokes out when the anvil is coming down and there’s nothing he can do about it. There was nothing we could ever do to change things.

Frank stays quiet so much of the time, saying nothing to silent orders he’s given but never really saying much of anything at all and it’s almost a surprise when he willingly speaks so it’s even more of a shock when he actually makes a joke, like suggesting ‘twelve and a half minutes’ as the middle ground for how late it’s acceptable to arrive at a meeting. Maybe his most likable moment in the whole film is early on when he says he doesn’t mind the cold, feeling relatable for a brief moment even amid the drudgery of a workday. His silence is the perfect opposite to Hoffa’s bluster, even when no matter how close they are Hoffa doesn’t notice him standing a few feet away during one of his screaming fits. It takes time for the film to get to Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa but when he turns up and, forgetting whatever the real Hoffa was like, the effect he gives off is a bolt of lightning in how alive and energetic he seems, human in a way that no one else in the movie is with all the foibles and passion that come with it. He’s not a man who gingerly dips his break into some wine, he wants to enjoy his hot fudge sundae and have a good time while doing it while making sure that know one messes with that enjoyment to bring out his temper, that glare of resentment as he chews his steak. After all, some of us spend our lives getting annoyed by the people who wear shorts and show up late and Hoffa just seems to know that sometimes all you can do is make sure the fight doesn’t end until you say so. But as Frank learns, when the most important person in your life is gone, nothing else is going to matter and things fall apart anyway. Frank does all these things never questioning what he’s supposed to do, the way Lee Marvin as Walker in John Boorman’s POINT BLANK barely seems to know or remember why he cares so much about the money he’s owed by the mob, just as Frank has no answer for why he blindly follows these orders. An abrupt edit placed when Frank calls Jo Hoffa on the phone even feels as if he’s trying to slice the particular memory of this one solitary moment out of his brain to somehow avoid remembering but in the end has no choice but to forever live by himself with the only thing he feels any guilt over.

This is set in an east coast that always feels like what the past is to me, even if this is centered more in Philly than any New York that I knew, but I still connect it to those distant memories of restaurants in Queens or Long Island that I was taken to as a kid. And that’s the mood it has more than shots. Trying to one-up the GOODFELLAS Copacabana shot wouldn’t be right. The closest to the expected virtuoso Steadicam shots coming during one hit with bouncy Percy Faith music on the soundtrack that ends as the camera moves in on a peaceful arrangement of flowers, whether appropriate for a funeral or a scene in VERTIGO and the much later scene depicting the hit at Umbertos Clam House which almost feels dreamlike, Frank floating through the orders he’s silently been given. More than the cinematic rush we get from such great shots it’s about the mood, the looks between the actors, the rhythms of those cuts placed into a montage running over the entire film.

So much is revealed in the greatness of the testimonial dinner sequence and the way it presents how these guys deal with each other individually and what their own loyalty really is as the weight of it all begins to come crushing down. The sequence is highlighted by The Golddiggers singing “The Time is Now” in the background with that refrain of “Yesterday is Over” heard under conversation as if there’s really going to be a future for any of them. It already feels like an underrated musical selection by Scorsese and the choice is so completely shallow in its period hollowness, so perfectly plastic in its pastiche style it feels even more perfect that it barely even seems like a real song with lyrics that seems to ask how much the past even matters, how much anything we do matters and doesn’t it seem like it’s mattering less and less all the time. Maybe it never mattered anyway, considering where things ended up. The life of Frank Sheeran as presented comes off as a Forrest Gump of mob killings but that alone still makes him important in American history, one that’s more aware of the suffering around him but I’m still not even thinking about if a word the main character says in his narration is even true, just that the film is choosing to print the legend, to take a line from a John Ford film that seems pertinent here, whatever legend Frank has chosen to justify to himself. Someone I know and shall go unnamed here has a family connection to Russell Bufalino and was angered by the film, telling me he was nothing like the way he’s portrayed here. Does even this matter? Does anything we’ve ever known about our parents or our past really matter?

Whatever Peggy knows about her father, it’s clear she knows what’s going on. Maybe she doesn’t know what she knows, but she does know and from a very young age, the payoff to all those shots in earlier Scorsese films of kids silently watching the goings-on between their parents and forever marking them. In his own silence to her, Frank doesn’t even deny it while “Pretend You Don’t See Her” plays as she dances with Hoffa which both recalls when it was heard long ago in GOODFELLAS as well as serving as a message to Frank telling what he needs to do, to pretend he doesn’t see her. Or hear her. Or speak to her. And he never even thinks about it. What he would do is never even a question. Played by Lucy Galina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult, the role is the lynchpin in everything that Frank ignored, Paquin almost completely silent in the role and if she’d gotten a nomination simply for the way she asks “Why?” as part of her one real line of dialogue it still would have been deserved. In the end, that silence he caused is all he gets and when he does find one of his daughters willing to talk, anything he does has to say is far too late. I’m not sure if there’s an actual reconciliation that really lasts in Scorsese’s entire filmography. When something is over, it’s over. Those who judge you do so by their silence, to use the title of another film. “It was no more complicated than that,” he says about what happened to Hoffa and it becomes harder to shake the film’s final glimpse of him the more time goes on. The film is about those moments in our childhood when our parents didn’t speak but we knew something was going on. It’s asking what you have done in your life, what do you have at the end because of that and what really mattered. Whether or not this is the truth about Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t really matter. We all fall short in the end, but it’s up to us how far.

But it also wouldn’t be a Scorsese film about these things if it all wasn’t as funny as it is so much of the time, those moments where someone gets a little too annoyed by nothing at all even if it’s more gallows humor than ever before, the laughs cutting deep until you bleed and choke on them before the sound can come out. Those tiny pleasures are all through the film, the horrible laughs are there depicting the danger of sitting in a car’s front seat with someone behind you. The tone feels a little like the way we imagine Scorsese laughing incessantly, the way he does at Fran Lebowitz, but this drops away more and more until he’s silently remembering everything he never wants to think about. It’s none of our business. It’s easy to get lost in all that Teamster infighting and bickering of the middle section but the big showdown with Stephen Graham’s Tony Pro over traffic and how late you’re allowed to be to a meeting gets funnier every single time then from the testimonial dinner for Frank on the film is never less than masterful, the big event held up by the curious delivery of a frozen fish—another one of those pleasures in life that Frank will never know— that never gets fully explained and even that joke is diffused by the tension brought to it by Frank. The last thing we hear Russell say as he’s being taken to church is, “Don’t laugh, you’ll see,” which could be a warning given at the start of any number of Scorsese films and the last 45 minutes are devastatingly brutal, nothing left to laugh over or get any pleasure in. In the blink of an eye it’s the twenty-first century and he stays alive past the point where he literally can’t stand up anymore. Something similar happened to my mother this way and after that night she never got to go back to her home again which is what I’m always thinking of when this happens. Like the narrative span of so many other Scorsese films, it’s funny until it’s not. It’s funny until two people are in a room together too long, no more patience for any of those jokes. It’s funny until somebody refuses to realize how unfunny they really are. It’s funny until there’s a dead body left behind as you leave the room. This is what you are to some people and where you wind up, like it or not. It’s what it is.

In the end, Frank is alone with nothing that ever mattered to him but that gaudy ring on his finger that will probably still be there when he dies, no one left to care that he was one of a few to ever be given it and a few photos of the past, whatever that past ever really meant including one of his wife, the one he ended his first marriage to be with, who we never learned much about beyond that she smoked. Maybe he never learned much more either and he’s not even going to be buried next to her. So maybe his ‘whatever happens, happens’ philosophy was never enough. Fuck it, Bufalino basically says at both the beginning and the end. Frank doesn’t seem so sure about that anymore but it’s still how he always lived, he just hasn’t put it into words. He hasn’t really said anything and now he’s left trying to justify it all, whatever the truth really is. The one moment that haunts him years later isn’t even one where he actually killed someone but what he did after. Eventually all he has left is the crypt he buys and the green coffin which is probably the snazziest purchase he’s ever made in his life and maybe the most individual choice he’s ever made, while still ignoring everything that the very idea of burning up in cremation symbolizes. “In the Still of the Night” is played at the start and it returns later as a sign of doom that can’t be turned away from and we remember it, taking us to the end, long after the music has stopped as they always do when the fun stops in Scorsese films and the world feels completely dead. It feels like a fair question to ask if there’s anything to the memory of a life at all if it doesn’t come with any guilt. And Frank doesn’t have the answer. Of course, it’s the end of THE SEARCHERS being recalled when Frank is seen in the final shot, having long since made the choice to stay on the other side of that door. Only in this case it’s a door not completely closed, as if waiting for Hoffa to reappear, waiting for Peggy, waiting for anyone, but also a refusal to commit just like Frank spent his life doing but more than that he’s alone at the end just as any number of other Scorsese protagonists have been through the years. But Travis Bickle still had his cab, Jimmy Doyle had his nightclub, Jake LaMotta had his nightclub act, Paul Hackett had his job, Henry Hill had his exile, Ace Rothstein had his ability to pick winners, Howard Hughes had his madness. All Frank Sheeran has is the inevitable, even as he’s hoping for something more, desperately bargaining for a way out.

So much of this feeling is found in the sheer sense of focus coming from Robert De Niro in every scene and the result is at times overwhelming, very likely one of his most underrated performances with every ounce of that silent power exploding from the very stoniness of his expression and how his eyes are registering it all, whether saying anything or not with each movement carrying so much weight, especially that little nod he gives to Pacino at a crucial moment to get him into a car. He’s essentially playing a walking, talking brick wall and how much his eyes alone tell the story of what he’s doing, playing somebody who did all the wrong things for the wrong reasons and only realizing this at the end, not even understanding reasons why or why he should ever feel any different. He’s a thug, nothing more than that, but it’s balanced out by the ultra-dry humor that comes through more often than you’d think with his narration of the line “They steam them in beer” about the hot dogs from Lum’s that is maybe one of the best line readings Robert De Niro ever given and now all I want is one of those hot dogs. As De Niro remains constantly still, Al Pacino is all about movement and he delivers a gloriously huge performance in a portrayal of someone, however accurate it is to the real person, who despite what he does and knows makes him seem to represent all that is good in the world and what could possibly be. He barrels through and it’s a thrill to see him do this especially when he’s playing off Joe Pesci in their big scene together is one of the true underdiscussed pleasures of the film, one actor so angry, one staying so calm, so quiet, the way he repeats ‘some people’ multiple times. You can’t say that Joe Pesci steals the movie, it’s not that kind of performance, but the way he seems to choose each word, each syllable, each gesture, very carefully, causes you to lean forward to catch every single word he says and the impeccably quiet nature of it is unforgettable. No surprise, there are too many others to mention. Harvey Keitel for the way he explains what saying, “I do” means when offering up an answer to a question he posed, Ray Romano as Bill Bufalino, Stephen Graham as Tony Pro, Kathrine Narducci as Carrie Bufalino, Jessie Plemons as Chuckie, Welker White as Jo Hoffa (particularly for the way she turns down a Lum’s hot dog), Louis Cancelmi as Sally Bugs (particularly for the way he grills Chuckie about the fish), Marin Ireland as Frank’s other daughter Dolores, Action Bronson as the casket salesman, Dascha Polanco as the nurse who’s never heard of Jimmy Hoffa and doesn’t need to hear Frank musing about how fast time goes.

“The most personal is the most creative,” was what Bong Joon-ho said in quoting Scorsese about making a film when accepting his Oscar for Best Director at the Oscars the same year THE IRISHMAN home empty handed, clearly the most emotional moment of that night. And the best films do feel personal for the one who’s making it, just as personal for the person seeing the film, seeing it again, returning to it again and again for the hit or to be reminded of that feeling. Just as personal for the person writing about the film, trying to understand, trying to remember, trying to accept the past and how awful it may have been at times because otherwise how will we ever remember when it was good. I remember these things just as I watch certain Martin Scorsese films over and over. You can probably guess a few of them and THE IRISHMAN has become one by now as well. On each new viewing I feel some guilt myself, but that’s my own business. The film ends and I want to start it again but instead I wait a little, keeping that Criterion Blu-ray close by which means it may get rewatched almost to the point of obsession anyway. But it does mean that Netflix has accomplished at least one good thing while it’s been around, much as we may hate to admit it. Of course, several other Scorsese films already became this for me long ago. You can probably guess a few of the titles. I remember those films just as I remember the world of my mother, the world of both my parents, which is no more. There were things she said to me about memories she had, wanting me to know how she felt long ago. I remembered other things, but I didn’t say that. But it still makes me think about where they came from and where I wound up. How much time we have left to remember things. And if any of that really matters.

Back At That Pool Again

Things change. That’s what happens as time goes on, like it or not. Films, on the other hand, don’t change. How much they mean to you can change and some matter even more as the years go by, while others fade away. In those cases, it’s often for the best. The reasons for all this become more clear as the films in question start to make more sense to the person you’ve grown into. And there are always reasons. Certain films deserve those reasons.

Watching SUNSET BLVD. again and, say what you will about him, but Joe Gillis apparently had a couple of B-pictures to his credit and I respect that. It seems to matter. He was in the Writers Guild, after all, which counts for something. And every morning lately when getting on the 101 North from Franklin I look over at the Alto Nido apartments across the way and give Joe a little wave, imagining him inside working on those original stories that are never going to get him anywhere. It’s left ambiguous just how good Joe Gillis ever was as a screenwriter but suddenly watching the film this time it feels more apparent than ever that none of the ideas for scripts that he’s sitting there pounding out are any good. None of them. They’re all just the work of somebody trying to come up with something, anything, and winding up with nothing. And if he ever got the chance to pitch the story of the film he’s the main character of, he should still bring in Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett to do the real work. But if we were ever meant to believe that Joe was a great writer, or even a halfway special writer, this would be a very different film. I wouldn’t think about him as much, that’s for sure. Paramount reader Betty Schaefer, one of ‘the message kids’, knows Joe by reputation as someone with talent so maybe he did have some even if it’s slipped away by the time the movie starts, drained out of him. “It’s from hunger,” Betty says about his BASES LOADED outline, which could also be a decent review of plenty of movies from the past thirty years or so. Whatever work Joe did on Norma Desmond’s version of SALOME doesn’t seem to have impressed C.B. DeMille either but maybe we can chalk that up to whatever Norma insisted he put in there. Maybe. Joe’s narration of his story gives the impression of someone with a knack for churning out sentences that contain a punchy, colorful flavor but maybe also with a hard-boiled edge that’s putting a little too much effort into the phrasing. Regardless, he was still trying. He didn’t want to go back to that copy desk in Ohio. And even though he says he was on his way out of town I’m still not convinced that Joe Gillis was really going to leave.

Of course, people do leave. I know that all too well by now and maybe I shouldn’t make any promises about my own future. Norma Desmond definitely would never leave, especially since she could never possibly imagine a world other than what she knows. We also don’t know just how good an actress Norma was during her own heyday but the way DeMille speaks of her makes me think there was something, even if he was the one who did much of the shaping of that persona. And she feels like a star, no matter how much her own madness informs that. You meet these people in Hollywood. They’re a star, they’ve been a star, they have that power and they drag you into their web if that’s what they want. Of course, Joe Gillis is the one I still relate to, even if I’m closer to Norma’s age by this point and it is certainly Joe Gillis in the first ten minutes of the movie that I’ve felt like more than a few times over the years. In my apartment, trying to write, trying to figure out if it’s any good, trying to avoid the truth of it all and I can’t see what’s coming around the corner. Along with that money problem you constantly need to worry about. Plenty of Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. is about a Hollywood that’s no longer there but some of it still is and so much of it still hurts. It understands those moments when you just know you could never be anywhere else. And who can really say what sort of Hollywood isn’t there anymore? The way it is, we either deal with it or we don’t. It’s just that sometimes we’re not sure why we still do.

Flashing back from the body of a Hollywood screenwriter discovered in a fancy Beverly Hills swimming pool, we meet Joe Gillis (William Holden) at the end of his financial rope, unable to sell any story ideas and finance guys after his car. On the run from them he quickly turns into what he thinks is an old, abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard only to discover that it’s populated by silent film queen Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) who lives there with butler Max (Erich von Stroheim), waiting for her comeback, waiting for nothing. She enlists Joe to help out with a script she’s working on, a remake of Salome, but soon enough Joe realizes that he can’t leave. And why would he. But an encounter back in the real world with friend Artie Green (Jack Webb) and his script reader girlfriend Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) becomes a reminder of what he’s missing and when he tries to do something about it, that new script turns into something else entirely.

I have no idea how many times I’ve seen SUNSET BLVD. by now. Of course, I could say that about plenty of films. But this one feels different. Like only the very best do, this is one that’s become something different as I’ve gotten older, what started as something great has only gotten better, deeper, funnier, scarier. It felt even darker to me this time and it hadn’t been that long since I’d last watched it. What the film means has shifted, looking at it from the outside at somewhere I wish I could be to it turning into a view of a place I have a different perspective on now. And it also says something that SUNSET BLVD. is one of the best films ever made, as close to perfect as can be, with some of the most biting, quotable dialogue ever and it’s still maybe only the third best film ever made by Billy Wilder but I’m willing to have discussions over official rankings. Right from the first moment everything about SUNSET BLVD. is perfection, that narration, the acerbic rhythm of the dialogue in the studio exec’s office, that cynical tone Joe Gillis holds onto as he enters the mansion for the first time, just assuming that it will be enough armor against these two people. He has no idea how much more they know than him and he has no idea just what sort of power Norma is going to have each time she enters a room, the power she still has when she leaves. One of the things that makes it great is those shifting perspectives, the way it allows us to consider the narrative from each of the main character’s viewpoint and the comedy within it, as well as the horror, feels absolutely, scarily true.

But what is truth in Hollywood? What makes you connect with anyone? Just as many days I pass by Joe’s apartment building I’ve also driven down Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, presumably passing the 10000 block where Norma’s mansion was. I also worked for several years at Paramount when most days I would take a walk around the lot during lunch, looking up at the giant soundstages, passing Robert Evans’ office, glancing up at the readers’ department where Betty Schaefer worked. I loved working at Paramount, a major studio that really is in the heart of Hollywood where such a place should be in our dreams. Paramount means even more because of SUNSET BLVD. Most of the film defiantly stays put in Noma Desmond’s mansion, that crumbling world where time stopped in the late 20s and to realize the clock has kept turning after all would be too horrible to confront. Realism is a factor in a film like this involving such larger than life figures, but those times when you suddenly find yourself in certain big houses up in the hills of Beverly Hills or Hollywood, realism has very little to do with things anyway. “Is it a black comedy?” Cameron Crowe asked the director in his book “Conversations with Wilder”. “No. Just a picture,” was the reply. He was right. Of course, it is a comedy, it is a drama, it is a noir, it is a horror movie, it is a damning look at what Hollywood does to people when they’re not looking. In Wilder you get the truth and from that truth comes the cynicism people still talk about when it comes to the director. The acerbic comic tone, the cruelty, maybe even the misogyny in its portrayal of ignoring the inevitability of age. Maybe this is correct, maybe it’s avoiding how much that tone feels like it comes from a jilted romantic or someone who is becoming more accepting of the way the world really is. ‘Curdled Lubitsch’ is how Andrew Sarris once described the Wilder approach, adding ‘romanticism gone sour’ but that isn’t how SUNSET BLVD. plays, a film that has long since moved on from naïve hope that you’re going to change the world. Even the 22 year-old Betty Schaefer seems to be approaching her writing career on a completely pragmatic level.

As for realism, the elegance found in the best of Lubitsch isn’t always so lifelike itself so maybe what Wilder brings is an appropriately rational cynicism, as if Lubitsch was about all the grace in the world while the best of Wilder can be about wondering how the grace was lost. Joe Gillis, after all, has been around Hollywood long enough to feel this way with some reason, to still be trying but to know what the odds really are. Cecil B. De Mille, at least as portrayed here, has an idea of how things really are and even he only has so much power. The film doesn’t hate Norma Desmond but it also knows she’s too far gone to be saved as Joe (or Wilder, or us) sadly shakes his head, that the past itself is way too far gone, and all it can really do is give her that moment of glory near the end when she’s too far gone to even fully understand it. The humanity is there and even Joe tries to offer that to her as he pleads with her near the end, before he's killed and even in his narration afterwards. He knows how much it means to her for the cameras to roll. He even seems to know that, in the end, her story is going to be more important than his own.

“They’re dead! They’re finished!” shouts Norma about the movies early on. Her viewpoint is because of all that dialogue but it’s nothing new. Someone, maybe me, could be shouting that about them even now. The movie knows how eternal the town is, or at least was then, how much this is all going to go on. The sympathy is shown to Norma, at least partly because Joe doesn’t ask for it. Whether or not he deserves it, he really doesn’t care. And just how strange it is, in that mansion. The film doesn’t waste a moment, mapped out in that brilliant script by Wilder and Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr. whose involvement apparently boiled down to supplying part of the premise which gave him a credit meaning that he’ll forever be one of the writers of SUNSET BLVD, one of the greatest movies ever made. Which of course makes me wonder, just what have I done lately? It even seems important that this film marked the end of Wilder’s collaboration with Brackett for reasons that have always seemed a little unclear, even when one of them got asked about it. The storytelling carefully reveals one layer at a time almost before you realize it just as Max made up Joe’s guest room hours before he knew he was going to stay. It can be easy to forget in all this madness about Norma’s pet monkey who died right before Joe showed up. He becomes the new monkey and never even realizes it, at least until it doesn’t matter anymore.

And it’s a film about people who are waiting, so much of it is about that waiting. “Waiting for the gravy train,” as Joe Gillis puts it and it’s what almost all the people in SUNSET BLVD. seem to have in common. Everyone is waiting, even De Mille is waiting to shoot the next scene when we first see him. Norma Desmond is waiting too, waiting for that phone call she’ll never get about her big comeback. The first ten minutes out there in the world Joe is either trying to avoid people or get their attention and it all gets him nowhere. Once he finds himself in the world of Norma he’s just waiting to leave. Even though he has nowhere to go. Deep down don’t we all believe that something like this is going on in Beverly Hills right this minute? Money is just as much a factor with Joe needing it for his car what indirectly leads him into Norma’s driveway in the first place. But it’s not the only factor. Norma has so much money that she doesn’t care about it and at a certain point Joe doesn’t care about all that money either. The very nature of him prostituting himself, if that’s what we’ll call it, goes beyond the money. It’s not a movie about money, after all. It’s about wanting to be known in the end, whether as a star or just one more name in the credits.

And it’s about waiting through all those beginnings and endings. Maybe I’m thinking about a little of both right now, maybe because of my own extremes I’ve had the past few years. We meet Joe Gillis at his own end just as we meet Walter Neff near his end at the start of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Both films lead right into a flashback structure although it’s not as clear at first in SUNSET BLVD who the real main character of the film is. As for beginnings, Betty Schaefer is apparently no more than 22 and in such a hurry that it would be easy to believe her if she admitted that becoming a writer was more important than her marriage to assistant director Artie Green (or, really, anyone). She probably has lots of opinions on films she’s seen recently like THE HEIRESS and A LETTER TO THREE WIVES that she can’t share with Artie but Joe would be ideal on an intellectual level if she could ever get him to stop talking around the subject. And she helps him want to write again, really write, at least for a little while, the way she gets into his brain and makes him want to do it, to overcome all those ways people never have any idea who writes a movie, that obsession he can’t seem to shake and is keeping him from ever actually really leaving. She knows all the plots, after all. She knows what he wants. Joe’s more romantic relationship with her isn’t quite the same as Walter Neff getting close with Lola Dietrichson played by Jean Heather in DOUBLE INDEMNITY but they serve a similar function as a reminder of the innocence that was once there, both young women seemingly offering the lead a way out of situation they’ve gotten themselves into, or at least a reminder that there really is some kind of innocence left in the world, no matter how much each of the men are already just too far gone.

The New Years’ Eve sequence even plays now as a funhouse mirror version of the end of THE APARTMENT which wouldn’t even be made for another decade, someone this time returning to a person for the absolute wrong reasons unlike what Shirley Maclaine’s Fran Kubelik would do much later. But back to the cynicism or at least back to trying to understand if there is any humanity in SUNSET BLVD, anyone onscreen Billy Wilder really cares about. He seems to know that caring about Joe is like caring about himself and that will only get him so far. Betty is young and she’ll be fine, Joe knows that he doesn’t need to worry about her. Norma, along with a little bit left over for Max, is where his affection goes even if she’ll never be aware of it and likely never care. She’s the one who’s going to get it somehow and in that is a reflection of his own feelings for the movies and for the town named Hollywood that he lived in, as much of a sewer as he understood it to be. SUNSET BLVD. is a film like no other about what it is to be in Hollywood and the choice to remain. Norma was discarded by the town. And in the final shot she envelops it.

Billy Wilder very likely means more to me than any other director. He made films the way I want them to be and make sense in a life that I sometimes find myself caught up in, like it or not. Hoping I get to the right ending, unlike Joe, whether still in Los Angeles or not. No other film seemed to understand Hollywood quite this way until the 2001 appearance of David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DR., named for another road up the hill and several years after Lynch had already taken the name of the much talked about Gordon Cole from SUNSET for a character he played in TWIN PEAKS. The best Hollywood movies, even when they classify as comedies, are really horror films in their way. I’m also still a little fascinated by Robert Aldrich’s THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE which plays as some sort of odd mashup up SUNSET BLVD and VERTIGO even while never nailing down the tone beyond just coming off as sort of weird. A brief redo of the small piece of young Gloria Swanson footage from the unfinished QUEEN KELLY that appears briefly in SUNSET also turns up in Lynch’s even darker more extreme INLAND EMPIRE and the way his outlook has been inspired by Wilder becomes more crystalized the more each of their obsessions seem to mirror each other, effortlessly finding the horror of the real human feelings below the comedy. And SUNSET BLVD. is this original, pure distillation of that view. Even now, in a time when we don’t know how much longer there’ll even be a Paramount, it still matters, at least it does in my dreams.

The compassion the film shows may be for Norma and she may be the one who takes over the final image but it’s William Holden as Joe who holds it all together with a grounding that helps us understand and every single moment feels completely genuine. He has to be as cynical as he is, as dismissive of Norma and Max, so dismissive that he doesn’t realize how deep he’s in until it’s too late, with a believability to his desperation seen just under the surface and to play any of that from a remove would cause it to collapse. His determination is just as strong as that self-loathing and few other actors in 1950 would have been able to give his answer of “Constantly” to the question “Don’t you sometimes hate yourself?” just the right indication that he’s joking but not really joking, not when it comes to this. Maybe it would make sense for the character to be a little younger than Holden projects but that grouchy humanity he brings is essential for holding his presence down just as Gloria Swanson shoots everything else around her off into space, overwhelming each moment even as I sometimes notice how tiny the 4’11 actress really was. The intensity of every look she gives makes it seem like it wouldn’t be allowed to look at anyone else when she’s in frame, plus how much of her performance can be found in each gesture she makes, especially the way she pulls Joe towards her at the end of the New Years’ sequence, making it clear who really has had the power between the two of them all along. The movie really is the two of them but surrounding them with the intensity of Erich von Stroheim who the more you watch the more you pay attention to how much he’s holding this madness that he’s in charge of together plus the way he says the name “Gordon Cole” is one of those things impossible to forget. Nancy Olson may be the ingenue but she never comes off as too innocent, simply looking for the right way to get in a little bit more, knowing what she wants but never guessing just how far she will wind up peering into the town she’s always known.

Bringing it back around to each time I look across the 101 at the Alto Nido Apartments, SUNSET BLVD. reveals a truth that always feels like a reminder both of what I want and what I desperately want to avoid. And it’s also a reminder that, well, even Joe Gillis had those B-movie credits. This makes me wonder just how Billy Wilder thought of Joe Gillis, even in a self-deprecating way. He’s searching for the answers to why he’s still trying to do all this and if Wilder went through this sort of period during his early days in Hollywood, I’m sure he understood. Maybe this feeling is part of why I return to Billy Wilder films so much, pretty much all of them (well, maybe not THE EMPEROR WALTZ), even the few I’d just as soon do without. That look at a humanity that combines glaring in the mirror with unrequited self-hatred with desperately trying to hold out a little bit of hope. Sometimes that happens in Wilder’s films. Sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it’s a draw. But that’s what so much of life becomes. Waiting for that one thing. That one moment. If we’re lucky.

Making Things Move

We all have regrets. Like this one time at a party I met Mary Kay Place and didn’t ask her about MODERN PROBLEMS. But certain memories stay with you. It’s a long time ago now but I was in the second row at the New Beverly for the packed 2008 screening of Joe Dante’s legendary THE MOVIE ORGY, directly behind several well-known people in the front which of course included Quentin Tarantino, some years before he completely took over the place. I don’t know what they were talking about but it could have been just about anything and all I know is that at one point Tarantino was heard by me to exclaim, “I love MODERN PROBLEMS!” in case you were wondering how he felt about that particular Chevy Chase vehicle I sometimes wonder about. And the existence of MODERN PROBLEMS has long seemed like some sort of private joke between me and, well, I’m not really sure. Maybe LexG and other people who remember MODERN PROBLEMS. The film actually did pretty well when it opened on Christmas Day 1981 but not many other people ever seemed to like it, let alone love it. Chevy himself has always been dismissive, although a near-fatal electrocution he suffered on the set might have understandably soured him on the whole thing. The film was directed by Ken Shapiro, who he had a history with going back to his pre-SNL days of the Channel One Theater and THE GROOVE TUBE but after this they never worked together again and Shapiro never made another movie. If I bother to think about MODERN PROBLEMS for more than a minute the whole thing feels stranger and stranger, possibly a darker satire begun by various National Lampoon-related personnel as an R-rated comedy that was later smoothed down to a PG which meant a kid like me could have gone to see it. Revisiting the movie now makes me think I maybe shouldn’t have been allowed anyway since there are enough remnants of that more adult tone still in there. And though it’s never as funny as I’d like, enough random laughs come through to make me watch it again once in a while even as I wonder why I’m watching it again. Why am I watching it again, anyway? These are the riddles of MODERN PROBLEMS.

Max Fiedler (Chevy Chase) is an air traffic controller living in Manhattan dealing with all the stresses of his life, including his girlfriend Darcy (Patti D’Arbanville) suddenly picking up and moving out with no notice. Driving home one night he finds himself behind a tanker truck which spills a mysterious green sludge onto his car and, not knowing that the truck is actually carrying nuclear waste, Max suddenly finds himself imbued with telekinetic powers to move objects and make things happen at his choosing. Attempting to get Darcy back into his life, the two of them head for a weekend outing at a house belonging to old friend Brian (Brian Doyle-Murray) who now lives with Max’s ex-wife Lorraine (Mary Kay Place) but things are soon tested by the arrival of self-help author Mark Winslow (Dabney Coleman) who makes no secret of the contempt he displays towards Max and his own interest in Darcy with Max beginning to lose it, finally making no secret about what sort of powers he has.

Apparently director Ken Shapiro described MODERN PROBLEMS (I’m guessing in the press materials) as “CARRIE meets ANNIE HALL” which isn’t a bad pitch and sounds like it could have been one of the fake movies made by the Woody Allen character in STARDUST MEMORIES. Written by Shapiro & Tom Sherohman & Arthur Sellers, tonally it’s a film that falls somewhere between the R-rated approach of ANIMAL HOUSE and the more kid friendly MEATBALLS, a stopover before GHOSTBUSTERS made things acceptable for all, post-John Belushi and all that drug humor. Somewhere in there is the grubby sexism of the National Lampoon fuck-the-world nastiness that was the forte of some of these people and maybe it needed Harold Ramis to figure out the right sort of balance when he directed Chevy in the first VACATION a few years later bringing an almost nostalgic, as well as therapeutic, approach to the sacred cows being satirized while still pausing for the fate of the dog that Clark Griswold forgets to untie from the car. The bones at the heart of MODERN PROBLEMS feel like the story of people (well, men) who grew up in the 60s trying to figure out what to do once they get to be 35 and the ‘80s begin, terrified by how fast things are changing but especially by women who have their own thoughts and the other men who might be showing an interest in that. Which is a more adult concept than gaining superpowers but it’s a fair guess that the studio wanted the potential wackiness of Chevy becoming imbued with telekinesis to be the draw so someone like me could see it and since SUPER FUZZ hadn’t turned up on HBO yet what else were they supposed to do?

So MODERN PROBLEMS doesn’t feel made entirely without thought, even while it plays like the director wanted things to be as broad as possible at every conceivable moment. At least it’s weird, although this means there’s not much in the way of a consistent tone with a few of the supporting performances containing bits of interesting characterizations up against the lead role played by Chevy that never feels completely formed. One line blatantly tries to sell us on his hapless likability as if forced to by studio notes when his friendly ex-wife Mary Kay Place calls him, “a prince who thinks he’s a frog.” But he just seems like a drag a lot of the time, the film resisting making him the smarmy Chevy of Weekend Update and CADDYSHACK in favor of a regular guy who can say all the right things to a mannequin that he can’t say when his girlfriend is actually in the room but they can’t make him likable. He’s kind of a jerk but the film doesn’t come up with enough ways to make him an interestingly flawed jerk so all that’s left is his insecurity even if you’d think that the portrayal of what would now be thought of as toxicity could maybe even add to the satire. With everything that’s going on around him so much of the time, Chevy is kind of left glaring at it all.

There is an idea somewhere in all this of a guy who has to confront his own self-hatred before finally being able to open up himself to the love of his girlfriend but the focus is really more on the next big comic setpiece. The Vincent Canby review in the New York Times mentions “four short but hilarious sequences” sprinkled throughout and I could probably guess at what they are (sadly, Canby isn’t around anymore to confirm), like the brief stop in traffic during the opening credits where everything seems to go wrong which isn’t bad in a silent movie way or maybe the early scene at a restaurant, also played without dialogue, when Max catches the eye of a woman who it turns out is on a date followed by a chain reaction of other people catching the eye of someone at another table. It’s not badly done even if the blocking of the people at the other tables doesn’t feel quite so elegant but it does present this world where everyone doesn’t just want to be with another person, they want to be another person entirely and Max can’t even admit that to himself. All this feels like it’s going for a point, along with the portrayal of the word of bitter, exhausted air traffic controllers which conceivably represents all of society falling apart while still never very well developed.

Scattered in among the various elements like the annoying would-be romantic rival Barry played by Mitch Kreindel (maybe best known for trying to pick up Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardner at the embassy party in BEING THERE) or pieces of dialogue like when Brian says that Mark Winslow is “always one step ahead of the Village Voice”, the film seems to want to spend more time on Max getting acquainted with his newfound powers and one imagines Ivan Reitman taking mental notes while watching it on how to adjust the tone when making a PG supernatural comedy. More random are possibly some of those other short but hilarious sequences which Canby was referring to, like Chevy causing chaos at the ballet (the ballet star is named Stolichnaya, ha ha) or maybe even be causing Barry to suffer a horrendous, and gory, nosebleed at a restaurant, which is actually much more unpleasant than I ever thought at the time and something that probably wouldn’t have been done just a few years later, even if the guy is going after Max’s girl and from the film’s point of view kinda sorta deserves what’s coming to him—he also reminds me of someone so maybe I’m projecting just a little, but we don’t need to go into that. Some of this is at least in the ballpark of funny if not actually funny, among several ideas that are half-formed like the sight gag of the first look at the beach house which isn’t that good a joke anyway but then the film is still stuck with it.

Max is allegedly the nice, normal guy but he’s miserable, up against the supporting characters who are everything he’s not. Girlfriend Darcy just wants to live a normal life, to love him and maintain her own career at the same time but he doesn’t know how to communicate with her and even when he uses his new powers to pleasure her in bed (another reminder of how I saw this PG movie at a certain young age) he’s still unfulfilled by the whole thing. Ex-wife Lorraine wants to avoid negativity and is excited to try something new, old friend Brian is able to laugh at his sexual misfortune in Vietnam and Dabney Coleman’s Mark Winslow, a prick right from his first line of dialogue, is all about taking everything for himself, a self-help author whose selfishly hostile approach seems designed to turn people against each other. On the other hand, he’s the one who gets the line, “Life sucks so why not be a schmuck?” which really doesn’t seem like all that bad a philosophy to maintain at certain times.

All of this leads to the final half-hour where everyone meets up at Brian’s beach house and Max starts to crack up giving us the long dinner scene where Max finally shows everyone his powers with things becoming more about the complicated special effects than the jokes but it still feels like not very much happens even if, in fairness, the film does give us a look at Dabney Coleman’s ass. The idea of an EXORCIST spoof only about battling one’s own demons isn’t bad but it still feels a little rushed through with Chevy’s possessed nature in the last third meaning that it doesn’t feel like he’s even present much of the time and a few of the characters just drop out of the movie entirely. Of course, it all leads to the climactic drug humor involving “voodoo powder” plus Chevy’s “I LIKE IT!” declaration that everyone seems to remember and when you think about it, if this isn’t cinematic immortality what is?

The homophobia of the leather bar/book party and casual racism in the portrayal of Nell Carter’s live-in Haitian housekeeper Dorita is all worth pointing out although a brief kitchen scene with Carter, Mary Kay Place and Patti D’Arbanville likely qualifies the film as passing the Bechdel Test, if we’re keeping track of such things. Maybe it’s an issue of energy in the way some of these short sequences, as Vincent Canby referred to them, just abruptly happen with no time given to building to anything so it’s like the film is missing a big setpiece in contrast to all the smaller setpieces. Whether or not MODERN PROBLEMS should be called good, it still fascinates in a certain nasty, sleazy way and considering how many people refer to this as one of the worst comedies of Chevy’s career/SNL alum history/all time, I guess my feeling would be that there’s almost something perversely comforting about it by now. Even the “Gonna Get It Next Time” theme by The Tubes that plays over the credits is still pretty catchy and the way it gets worked into Dominic Frontiere’s score helps it stick in one’s brain for the next forty-plus years. It’s a better film than FLETCH LIVES, at the very least. In the end, MODERN PROBLEMS is only 92 minutes so all this is over with pretty quick but also, maybe more importantly, separated from all these years after seeing it as a kid a few of its problems are more relatable than I ever expected.

This is still fairly early in the Chevy Chase movie star run and much as I like FOUL PLAY or SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES not to mention CADDYSHACK I’d argue that there isn’t a really sharp cinematic characterization from him until the first crack at Clark Griswold in 1983. There’s something in his look at the time as he wreaks that brings the right sort of madness to the moment where he wreaks havoc but when things need to be momentarily normal it’s like he doesn’t always know how to portray such a simple moment. Up against all that, Patti D’Arbanville (never mind the Andy Warhol background or relationships with the likes of Cat Stevens and Don Johnson, her film & TV career feels like the definition of random) displays a sweetness and even perceptibility at times even if the part is basically The Conflicted Girlfriend. Maybe she’s no Beverly D’Angelo as these things go but she still brings to it whatever emotional stakes the movie actually has. Mary Kay Place, from that party once upon a time, is always an engaging presence somehow creating a fully fleshed character out of not much at all, plus Brian Doyle Murray gets a few moments as well; the shot when he continues to cut his food as someone hovers above them at dinner even gets me to laugh out loud.

But it’s still not much of a surprise that the whole thing is stolen by the great Dabney Coleman who gives the funniest performance that is so good he even manages to perfectly time the moment near the end when he gets by a wave right after turning around as he marches out to the ocean. He has some of the best dialogue too, making the material feel stronger than it is with one particularly good scene when he recites a list of his favorite things out on the beach with a pronunciation of the name “Martin Scorsese” for the ages, maybe the single best moment of the entire film.

In the parlance of our times I suppose parts of MODERN PROBLEMS qualify as problematic, not that there’s any point in spending too long on such things. It’s unavoidable that Christmas 1981 feels like a long time ago now, for lots of reasons. The Belushi-Aykroyd NEIGHBORS was also playing then and did slightly better business but they both feel like a couple of the stranger SNL-connected product to ever get out there. It is an odd product of its era, down to the strange coincidence of being about an air traffic controller came out just a few months after Reagan fired the air traffic controllers when they went on strike so even the film couldn’t anticipate what sort of problems the modern ‘80s were going to include. Ken Shapiro died in 2017 having moved to Las Cruces some years before. Chevy is still Chevy, or at least he appeared to be the last time I checked his Instagram account. Also worth pointing out is how much used DVDs of this film out there seem to be going for so presumably someone else is still watching this thing. Maybe Tarantino can write about his love for it in his next book. For now, I guess the only thing to do is figure out a way to move on past all those regrets from long ago, some of them more substantial than having to do with people I met at parties. Of course, some of those problems are more modern, and painful, than others.