Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [164]
An Unmarried Woman was the story of an upper-middle-class woman (Jill Clayburgh) who discovers that her stockbroker husband, Martin (Michael Murphy), has fallen in love with another woman and is leaving her. In one scene that particularly resonated with audiences at the time, Erica walks away from Martin dry-eyed and shell-shocked, as the camera swirls around her in one continuous take—until she vomits in a trash can. It was a movie that put the zeitgeist center stage: Erica’s friend Sue (Pat Quinn) observes, “It was so much easier in the ’60s. Vietnam. Assassination. The Black Panthers. There was a helluva lot to do. You can’t even find a decent cause these days.” And there is a revealing exchange between Erica and her precocious teenage daughter, Patti (Lisa Lucas):
PATTI: I mean, everybody I know is either miserable or divorced. I don’t want that.
ERICA: There’s a lot of happily married couples.
PATTI: Name three.
ERICA: I’ll have to think about it.
Michael Murphy didn’t grasp the impact of certain aspects of the script when he first read and rehearsed it. “We thought that Martin pissing Erica off was just sort of a mechanism to get her off on her own and dishing with the girls. But the weight of that marriage became more prominent than any of us thought it would. It took on some weight of its own. Sometimes with movies that happens.” After An Unmarried Woman was released, Murphy got up one Sunday and walked down Third Avenue to the theater where the film was playing. “There’s this line, and they’re mostly women. I thought, Holy Toledo, what’s going on here? And that’s when I realized something culturally was happening. For many years, both genders hated me. I was the first of the whiny yuppies, you know? I had women wrinkling their noses at me. There were guys who looked down at me. My own agent called me and said, ‘Don’t expect you’re going to get a lot of work from this.’”
Pauline found the film “funny and buoyant besides. It’s an enormously friendly, soft-edged picture,” and she loved the performance of Jill Clayburgh, whose “floating, not-quite-sure not-quite-here quality is just right”; perhaps it was even appropriate that “that camera isn’t in love with her—she doesn’t seem lighted from within.” She did agree with her fellow critics, however, that some of the movie’s points were hit a little too glancingly. She thought that Mazursky was “a superb shaggy screenwriter and rarely less than deft, but he touches so many women’s-liberation bases that you begin to feel virtuous, as if you’d been passing out leaflets for McGovern.”
The picture became problematic once it introduced a too-perfect man for Erica, in the person of Saul Kaplan (Alan Bates), a smart, sexy, understanding, and successful painter who wants to spirit her away to Vermont for the summer. But the movie ends with Erica not sure that Saul is the answer; she prefers to continue exploring her own single status. Surprisingly, Pauline objected less to Saul’s perfection than to the fact that Erica hesitates to be with him; she felt that at that point in the story, the audience lost interest in what happened to Erica, because it was difficult to tell “whether she’s struggling toward independence or embracing the generalized anxiety and dissatisfaction in the culture and sinking into it.” She suspected that the director’s “ambiguous ending, which is a way of postponing his decision, suggests that he can’t get through to his own creation. He doesn’t know what’s going on in Erica’s head.” Perhaps James Broughton had been right all those years ago—Pauline was in many ways an Ibsenist at heart.
There was a reason that Pauline’s enthusiasm had grown shriller, more insistent, in the recent years: Outstanding movies with a lively, original sensibility had been coming along much more infrequently than they had just a few years earlier. The life was seeping out of the film movement of the 1970s, and she knew it. All the more reason, then, to intensify her advocacy for the movies she loved, even for those that she thought simply showed promise: In