Slick Shtick

Rating: 6/10 (27 November 2005)

Mike Nichols has taken a work of dubious value and turned it into something that shimmers at times with brilliance. But the brilliance comes from the directing and the acting. Not the writing. There is the shtick of fast forwarding everything so that we progress through 4 years of time, effortlessly and without the entanglements of life, only their conflicts. There is the shtick of using Cosi Fan Tutti in the background, reminding us that such parlor room farces have been popular for centuries. And there is the shtick of 4 card pick up at every re-entering of the "now." Each time we have to sort out who is with whom this time, as those cards had merely been tossed into the air and fell down this way or that. The dialog is witty, a few times. Verbose always. Animated always. And comes in short staccato bursts, like machine gun fire--- or more like the lob of a tennis ball over a net of neutrality. Larry: So Anna tell me your bloke wrote a book. Any good? (lob) Alice: Of course. (return) Larry: It's about you isn't it? (lob) Alice: Some of me. (return) Larry: Oh? What did he leave out? (lob) Alice: The truth. (return) I don't believe that mature, intelligent people talk this way. They may if they see enough movies like this one where life once again imitates art. It's cute. It's meant to be funny. It's e/mail talk. The most worrisome aspect of this movie is that many people seem to relate to it. That's not a compliment to the movie- it's a sad comment upon our society. These people bounce from one another like balls in a pin ball machine, being hit by a paddle of emotion which inexorably forces them into the arms of another. I have no doubt that many people live such lives, but it's sad. Each professes love for the other, at some point, but has no concept of what loving someone means. Part of having a loving relationship is devoting so much time and energy to that relationship it becomes the most important thing in your life. These people are all so wrapped up in themselves they really don't have the ability to love. There is nothing wrong with writing a screenplay about such people as long as the audience understands that you are not displaying it as a model for life, but rather offering a moral that this lifestyle is only self destructive. This movie doesn't do that. We are left with one relationship which is broken but the other seems to survive through pure inertia. The final shtick of Dan's discovery that Alice Ayers is not really Alice Ayers, thus denoting that their whole relationship had been a lie from the beginning, is an amusing, if not silly twist. How could someone from the USA get jobs and live in the UK and never divulge her real name? They've lived together for almost 4 years, off and on. It's more pleasing when plots make sense.