‘Play It As It Lays’ proves nihilism is pretty boring
By: Lucas Hardwick
Tags: Film, Movies, Anthony Perkins, Joan Didion, Movie Review

Quarantine Film Fest — “Play It As It Lays” (1972), dir. Frank Perry

You won’t find a bigger fan of the slow-burn than yours truly, but there’s at least one caveat that a slow-burn must be capable of to be entertaining and that is to not be boring, and it’s a fine line that is pretty easy to blur. Right away, this movie gets docked a whole star for being the Tiger Woods of boring. I have to cut director Frank Perry some slack, though because there are several moments when you get the sense of 70s existential artistry and making good use of creative editing, but the material gets the best of him and he gets drug along into the meandering but persistent dullness of mid-level Hollywood types who can’t shut up about the nihilism they’re rolling around in. This movie is so hipster, it’s mumblecore before mumblecore was cool. Is mumblecore cool? Anyway, writer Joan Didion and Frank Perry will have busts in the Halls of Mumblecore for this angsty, depressing, drifty yarn about a bunch of people who are at the heels of success, but are pretty caught up in their own bullshit.

Title card for “Play It As It Lays.”

What little story there is involves B-movie actress Maria (pretentiously pronounced Muh-ry-uh) (Tuesday Weld), wandering around Hollywood and sometimes into Las Vegas as her movie director husband Carter Lang (Adam Roarke) is working on his new film. The movie begins with and is laced with Maria’s voice-over monologue to us, the audience, from within a mental institution, as she drones on with existential musings telling her story of how she came to be in the movies and how dried up her marriage is. Her partner in experiential abandonment is Carter’s producer B.Z. (Anthony Perkins) who has seen the other side of the void and is just an unhappy dude. The only thing that actually happens in this film is in the first half-hour when Maria reveals to Carter that she’s pregnant with screenwriter Les Goodwin’s (Richard Anderson) baby. Well, being a nihilist, of course she doesn’t come right out and say whose baby it is, but if you’re a good nihilist, it’s pretty easy to put the pieces together. Anyway, she sets up an abortion — the creepy kind where you meet a heavy-set guy dressed in a white turtleneck in parking lot who rides with you to where the procedure is done, is the only mildly threatening and interesting character in this movie, and who asks about the gas mileage of Maria’s Corvette — with the condition that she, in the imminent divorce from Carter gets custody their mentally disabled, institutionalized daughter Kate.

From there most of the movie is a bunch 20 to 30 second scenes of dialogue that are supposed to mean something within the context of the film, but the characters are so in on their misery, the audience seems to be dropping in on conversations and people we never know much about. Also, Maria in her search for purpose, moves into a new apartment for a couple of months which amounts to about two minutes in the entire movie. I mean, I guess that’s interesting in the same way your neighbor stops you on the way to the mailbox and tells you about their cousin’s daughter-in-law who moved into a new place because she was cheating on her husband. The bottom line is: these characters are just miserable people who don’t know why they’re miserable and they can’t handle it. As Anthony Perkins’ B.Z. tells Maria, “You’re not exactly a shot of meth tonight anyway.”

Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld are a terrific depressing duo who seem to work like a master and apprentice, respectively. B.Z. has discovered that it all means nothing and his mastery of melancholy is the sagely evidence to Maria that she should cut short her search for purpose. And what it all boils down to in a cruel, heartbreaking finale, is Maria’s search IS the meaning and she “keeps playing.” “I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.”

Anthony Perkins is perfectly a shell of a man, with smiles and laughs in the right context and affecting emptiness driving his performance beneath. Equally, Tuesday Weld, is exactly the flaky type who doesn’t seem to know what she wants and is frustratingly wishy-washy, narcissistic, and nearly insufferable, and not unlike a few bad girlfriends. And in a resolve that’s strangely sacrificial, B.Z. does the existential dirty work that Maria selfishly ponders so much about but is too afraid to do more than bang a self-centered TV star and steal his car, get an abortion, or move into a new apartment. But oh, she “knows what nothing means, and keeps on playing.” And now I’m pissed off.

On the technical end, there’s absolutely no score, which is certainly effective for all the celebration of nothingness going on, and it’s fun to point out the film was shot by “Blade Runner” cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth. And a young Joel Schumacher tastefully outfits the cast with nipple-free wardrobe.

“Play It As It Lays” almost seems like a joke because laying there is pretty much all it does. And the poetic trick here is that’s why this movie mostly works. It’s flaw is that it’s its own worst enemy because when you do the math, and even though the hipsters think they’ve found humorous irony in the notion, real nihilism simply isn’t very entertaining.



Two and a half stars.

(Streaming on YouTube.)