the click of a door
by
Douglas Messerli
Neil
Simon (screenplay, based on his 1968 stage play), Arthur Hiller (director) Plaza
Suite / 1971
I’ve
yet to find one film source of guide that has not described the three short
plays by Neil Simon, written under the name Plaza Suite other than as comedies.
Perhaps it’s just the times or my current age, but this time returning to these
pieces, although once again Simon peppers his script with one-line zingers,
only the last piece might truly fit the comedic category to my way of thinking,
since it ends somewhat happily with the marriage of a young woman terrified of
the ceremony in which she must play the bride.
I’ve never been a
big fan of Simon’s works, but one, in particular, in its somewhat bitter
dimensions seems too have more heft than his comic recordings of squabbling
couples.
If you’ve never seen this triplet
offering, all three pieces take place in the same room, 719 of the Plaza Hotel,
a legendary institution which almost didn’t survive a transformation of its
building into a condominium reconstruction—which already in 1971 the seemingly
prescient Simon script wondered whether, in its aged elegance, might be torn
down.
In the first piece, Karen Nash (the always
marvelous Maureen Stapleton, who played all 3 central women figures of this
work on the Broadway stage) has traveled from her suburban home to the Plaza,
planning to meet her husband Sam there to commemorate their 24th anniversary in
the very suite in which they celebrated their wedding night.
Stapleton, who in the script is supposed
to be around 48 or 49 was actually 46 at the time of filming (which is funny,
given Sam’s comment that when she forgets her age she always rounds it up, not
down like other women); yet, she looks older and speaks more like she was a
woman in her late 60s, probably because then old age was defined as arriving
earlier than it currently does in those decades. In any event, she has clearly
lost her youth, and carries herself like an older woman, wearing plastic
galoshes over her shoes, and walking with a definite death-leaning slump.
Her
husband has clearly been missing in action for a long while, spending more and
more nights in the city because of his work, and she hopes that this
celebratory evening might even ignite new interest in their relationship. There
is something wonderfully innocent in her desires, as she chattily explains to
bellhops why she is at the hotel and why she is now inhabiting this particular
room, as she orders up the same meal—hors d'oeuvres (with anchovies; in Simonian
logic they eventually appear with anchovies) and a French white wine
(which with Simonian logic arrives late).
When Sam finally arrives, he is,
apparently as he has been many a night, in a huff, determined to read through a
contract between busy calls to his secretary Miss McCormack (Louise Sorel).
Obviously, he hasn’t a clue why his wife has trekked into the city to meet him,
nor is he in any mood, even when she explains the occasion, to take any joy in
her company. They argue about everything from her birthdate, the floor on which
they spent their wedding night together—he claims it as the 8th floor—and even
the number of nights he has gone missing from his suburban home.
Despite her plucky determination to offer
up a beautiful evening to Sam, moreover, it becomes clear that she also has a
barbed tongue and, in her pain over the failure of their relationship, is equal
to his dismissals of her, mocking Sam’s attempts to think himself thin and his natural
cranky behavior. At moments, they both attempt to stop the endless bickering,
but always it begins again almost immediately, as the two clearly have lost
touch with any of the love they might once have shared.
When the secretary final does show up with
a set of botched papers—which means, of course, that he will have to return to
the office—Karen finally pleads with him to stay and almost jokingly, but
obviously with deeper inner fears, claims he might be having an affair with
Miss McCormack.
We only have to wait a few dramatic beats
to hear him admit the truth, that he is having an affair with her and, despite
his attempts, has no will to cut it off. Clearly always ready to play the
victim, Karen suggests she is willing to forgive him, but her pleas that he
might give their own relationship another try goes unheeded, and he walks out
the door, leaving her to imagine the loss of her husband for the rest of her
life.
Our final view of her might almost be out
of Stapleton’s early film, Miss Lonelyhearts, with overnight case in
hand, trudging back the next morning to the train that will take her back to
her empty house. If this is not tragic—even she excoriates her husband for the
banality of his love interest, secretary and boss—certainly Hiller did not
intend us to laugh.
The reason I returned to this rather
insubstantial film was become of the second playlet which stars Barbara Harris
(who died on August 21st of this year; Simon dying five days later), in which
another suburban housewife, Muriel Tate, drives into the city to meet up with a
former beau, Jesse Kiplinger (again Matthau), who is now a successful Hollywood
producer.
Muriel is a sort of less-wealthy housewife
who might be right out of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company, which
appeared only 2 years after the Broadway premiere of the Simon play, being one
of the women who lunch ordering up another “vodka stinger.” Indeed, despite her
best intentions, Muriel is quite delighted by Jesse’s attempts to get her back
into bed; and while endlessly saying, like Groucho Marx, “I must be going,” she
is both attracted to the “stingers” and the possibilities of sex.
Like nearly all male seducers, once Jesse
has lured Muriel back into his room for yet another round of drinks, he clicks
the lock of the door shut. But in doing so, Simon, at least in the #MeToo
generation, sucks any possible comic oxygen out of his work, leaving us with a
kind of bitter Don Giovanni-like rape. If Muriel has another sexual
round with Jesse—we never see the final conclusion of his sexual actions, but
we have to presume it—we are certain that it will be quite uneventful for both;
even if they did once, as kids, have great sex, they are no longer children
and, as our nearly inarticulate President spoke the other night, the “lingering
stench” of their now middle-aged bodies won’t be pleasant.
What is pleasant in this short piece is
the kind of “ditzy” performance by Harris, who balances her horror of the event
with her absolute delight in the fact that, given the unspoken sexual failure
of her husband Larry, someone might still find her attractive. She’s ready from
the start, despite her assertions, to drink herself in oblivion in order to
submit, very gradually, into a slave of temporary pleasure—constantly postponing
the time she must be home from 3:00 o’clock, to
If this slow rape is funny, I must be
missing something. It is now among the sad stories we daily hear about women,
you and older, being trapped by power, far, and sublimated desire.
The last piece of this not-so-funny comic
opera might well rhyme with the central character of the piece (although never
fully seen except for a couple of quick camera flicks), with the strangely
waspish name, particularly given the overtly stereotypical Jewish portrait of
her not-so-loving parents, “Mimsey” (Jenny Sullivan), while reminding me of the
structure of this work, “flimsy.”
Here, as in both the previous plays, a door suddenly clicks into a lock,
as the young would-be-bride closes herself into the bathroom of the same hotel
suite, perhaps the only way to truly escape that claustrophobic suite with its
mean history and her parents, equally hysteric—the male in Matthau’s case is
the primary example of that word—and the money-oriented life her family leads.
Roy Hubley, after all, is paying for a
highly expensive wedding which his daughter is now suddenly refusing to attend;
and his wife Norma (Lee Grant) is bout to lose “face” and be treated with
further abuse from her husband.
At the heart of this sillier piece are
numerous pratfalls, torn tuxedos, rained-upon head-wear finery, ridiculous
treks across the outer ledges of the famed hotel, along with entries into other
people’s bedrooms and endless calls from the panicked parents of the groom who
must face the growing impatience of the wedding-goers.
So weak is this playlet, that all it takes
is the rather chubby, long-haired groom Borden Eisler (Thomas Carey) to stand
outside the locked-away Rapunzel and shout out, “Mimsey, cool it,” and out she
comes, ready to ride away on his motor-bike. Well, this, finally, is a comedy,
as empty as it can get, like an after-thought of the deeply disturbing
betrayals we have previously witnessed. I suppose I might even have laughed,
except that I am afraid Mimsey can’t “cool it,” given her horrific childhood,
for long. Someday, far too soon, she will trek back into the city to see the
empty shell of her dreams.
Los
Angeles, September 23, 2018
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (September 2018).
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