Not much on DVD this week, but I would like to highlight one of last week's releases I somehow overlooked, Paul Mazursky's Blume In Love.
The story of a philandering divorce lawyer who realizes--perhaps too late--just how much he loves his wife, Blume is typical Mazursky: funny, unpredictable, occasionally overbearing and downright annoying--but always warm, always alive.
In the seventies, Mazursky was considered a major director, and received accalim equal to other filmmakers of the era, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, in the eighties he was well-known and held in some regard, by the nineties his stock had fallen and he's all but forgotten today. This despite a filmography that includes, in addition to Blume In Love, such fine films as Harry And Tonto (one of my all-time favorites), Next Stop, Greenwich Village, An Unmarried Woman and Enemies: A Love Story.
Maybe you've heard of these, maybe you haven't. (And if you haven't seen Harry And Tonto, one of the funniest and most heartbreaking movies I've ever seen, for God's sake, run out and buy a copy right now. That's right, buy, not rent. You'll thank me later.) Art Carney won an Oscar for Harry (He beat Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino--deservedly!) and An Unmarried Woman was the topic of many an op-ed piece on the state of marriage back in '78, but for whatever reason, Mazursky's work has not only faded from the public consciousness, but has fallen from critical favor as well.
I suspect this has something to do with the nature of his films. He always tried to engage with his times, to tell stories about the way life was lived as it was lived. So yeah, his movies sometimes feel dated in a way the work of his contemporaries does not. Scorsese spent most of the seventies looking back (Mean Streets, New York, New York and Raging Bull), as did Coppola (both Godfather films, and Apocalypse Now), and the seventies and eighties work of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman, though seemingly of its era, tends to have a timeless feel--only the fashions feel dated.
But the America Art Carney moves through in Harry And Tonto has largely vanished, and An Unmarried Woman charts the dawning of a feminist awareness that we all now know. At their worst, Mazursky's films are like watching a stand-up comedian from the mid-eighties, riffing on TV personalities and pop culture trends no one remembers.
At their best, though, these films are achingly human. Hearts still get broken, relationships still need to be negotiated, we still age and die--Mazursky's films may have been about the society and times in which he lived, but his true subjects are emotions and behaviors we all know, and his characters always surprise us with both their nobility and their pettiness. We recognize ourselves in them, whether we want to or not.
