Richard Brody’s recent capsule review of Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (The New Yorker, July 24, 2017) spurs me to see this film again. I
first saw it in 1978, when it was released. That’s thirty-nine years ago.
Today, my only recollection of it is a vague image of burly Alan Bates
slathering a canvas with paint. Brody calls the movie an “instant-classic drama.”
He writes,
Mazursky’s achievement is distinctively choreographic: for
all the trenchant conversation, he sets the characters into mad motion, alone
and together—jogging, dancing, fighting, strolling, embracing—and even the
static set pieces, in bars and at dinner tables, have the sculptural authority
of frozen ballets.
This seems to contradict Pauline Kael’s view of it. In her
“Empathy, and Its Limits” (The New Yorker,
March 6, 1978; included in her 1980 collection, When the Lights Go Down), she says,
The cinematography, by Arthur Ornitz, which features windows
and skyline views, doesn’t have anything like the sun-spangled vivacity that
Gordon Willis brought to the New York of Annie Hall (a film with related states
of anxiety). Ornitz is an inexpressive realist; he makes images “real” by sapping
the life out of them. (There is no dynamism even when the camera moves.) But
his work here is more delicately muted and less grungy than usual – the SoHo
streets seem to spark him.
Kael’s response to An
Unmarried Woman was mixed. She says, “It’s an enormously friendly,
soft-edged picture. Yet there’s a lot of hot air circulating in it.” She’s
critical of Mazursky, one of her favorite directors, for suppressing his sense
of satire, particularly in relation to the character Erica, who Kael finds
“puny and a bit of an idiot” (see Kael’s capsule review in her 5001 Nights at the Movies).
It’s likely Kael’s review influenced my response when I
first saw the movie back in ’78. Brody’s review provides a fresh take, focusing
more on the film’s design than on its characters.
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