Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm is in theaters beginning April 25.
A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971).
Never have I seen one woman in whom every social grace was so lacking. Did I say she was primitive? Well, I retract that. She’s feral.
—Henry Graham, of Henrietta, in A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971)
I have been dreading writing this essay because it means admitting to myself and to the world something very unfortunate: I am a loser brunette.
It was 2017, and my then husband suggested we watch A New Leaf (1971) because there was a new Blu-ray restoration, which was exciting. But as I watched Walter Matthau as Henry Graham arrogantly reckoning with the fact that he had run out of money, making teary-eyed farewell visits to his Upper East Side tailor and racket club, I thought of the man sitting next to me and was shocked by the similarities. “He’s just like you,” I said to my husband, who likewise maintained emotional relationships with the institutions that validated his sense of sophistication. Surprisingly, he didn’t bother denying it, just agreed and chuckled. The nerve! I guess it was too late in the game to pretend otherwise. I was already drowning in debt after supporting his life of leisure for years. As I watched the rest of the film, I wondered how I had managed to get swindled so badly. The nerve! My then husband regarded his appreciation for the finest of things as a sort of talent, which he applied to correcting my feral ways, just as Henry cleans Henrietta of crumbs each morning before going to work at the university. And just like Henrietta (Elaine May herself), or like Lila Kolodny (her daughter, Jeannie Berlin) in The Heartbreak Kid (1972), I thought those corrections were a sign of care. I know better now, but my affinity for Elaine May’s sweet but tragic, nerdy characters has remained.
The naturalistic tenderness of these women’s loserdom tells me that they were written by a woman, very possibly from her own lived experience. May’s characters are brainy, vivacious, funny, and good-looking, but for some reason they can’t really fit in. Men are cruel to them because they’re too smart for their own good. Too intense, too enthusiastic, too assertive, too clumsy, too much. It’s the same reason I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine on Seinfeld (1989–98). On paper, she’s an attractive woman with a good sense of humor. In reality, she’s a weirdo who’s bad at dancing, an opinionated feminist who can’t keep her mouth shut, and most importantly, a woman who is too comfortable with her sexuality to be sexually enticing to the men around her.
Talking Heads (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989).
May's acting reveals that playing a character is also a way of writing them. In Clive Donner’s Luv (1967), Peter Falk and May are an unhappily married couple. As ever, she is gorgeous and sophisticated, but can’t compete with the object of her husband’s new affections, a simple-minded gym teacher in blonde pigtails (Nina Wayne). Falk tries to pass May off onto a hesitant Jack Lemmon: “Just meet her. ... She’s an exceptional woman, Harry. She has a photographic memory. And she paints, and she makes charts, and she plays the guitar. … And Harry, she reads books I never heard of, with hard covers.” And there’s really nothing wrong with her except that she’s too intelligent to spend her days in the suburbs, waiting on a husband too detached to ask what’s for dinner, and he resents her for that.
There have been many examples of deeply intelligent and witty femmes fatales on screen, but that’s exactly what May doesn’t do. Her women are annoying to men precisely because they’ve chosen to invest their intelligence in something other than seduction, in interests that aren’t necessarily appealing to the opposite sex. A curative for the contemporary trope of the pick-me girl, May always plays and writes the leave-me-alone-I’m-doing-something-else girl. The beauty of May’s women is that they are aware of how unattractive their interests are. Not even the most enthusiastic botany professor would find Henrietta’s fanatical interest in ferns sexually enticing: It would have nothing to do with him. Everyone talks about Falk’s and Cassavetes’s performances in Mickey and Nicky (1976), but the scene I will never forget is the heart-wrenching exchange with Nicky’s mistress, Nellie (Carol Grace), a sweet, lonely woman both men abuse and mock for following the news and reading books.
Top: Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as Elaine Benes in Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, 1989–98). Bottom: Parker Posey as Libby Mae Brown in Waiting for Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996).
When I was asked to write about Elaine May, I felt inadequate because I only knew her for A New Leaf and Mikey and Nicky. To be honest, I was dreading having to read more about her life and work. Being a female writer-actor-director and reading about other female writer-actor-directors is never fun. Most stories about women filmmakers in Hollywood seem to be cautionary tales about those who got punished for flying too close to the sun (which is to say, staying true to their vision). Barbara Loden comes to mind, of course, but also Polly Platt, Ida Lupino, and a long list of opinionated, stubborn filmmakers.
I was lucky to rewatch the director’s cut of Mikey and Nicky at Metrograph last year with May herself in attendance for a Q&A alongside editor Phillip Schopper and assistant editor Jeffrey Wolf. It was an inspiration to see her, in her nineties, being so witty and looking so good, but I was saddened to learn that such a brilliant film had been a flop, buried by Paramount upon its release after years of litigation and even, apparently, the threat of jail time for going over budget.
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976).
As with any other tragedy, I couldn’t look away. I went home and continued reading about how she didn’t direct anything else for a decade until the multimillion-dollar Ishtar (1987), a bigger flop than Mickey and Nicky with an even more difficult production and worse reviews. I could have enjoyed May’s renaissance the way it was given to me, within a frame of reappraisal. I should have let the wave of her current revival wash over me, with all its celebratory excitement, but instead I forced myself to understand her career the way it happened when it happened, disrupted by disappointment, mockery, and disdain. But there was a silver lining: By reading newspaper clips from the 1970s, I also discovered what May was originally famous for in the early ’60s, her improvisational comedy duo with Mike Nichols.
I generally don’t find stand-up comedy from the ’60s and ’70s funny. I understand the appeal of Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman, but I don’t find myself actually laughing. Nichols and May make me laugh. When an older friend of mine told me he had all their records when he was a teenager and would listen to them in his bedroom, I felt jealous in a way I hadn’t in a long time. Ah, to be a teenager in the ’60s and listen to Nichols and May for the first time, with headphones, prying into that lighthearted intimacy only ex-lovers can achieve so effortlessly. When something so simple works, it’s magical, and that may be May’s tragedy. Her visionary improv genius thrives in the present moment. Her medium is theater, language. Even her cardinal sin as a filmmaker, that of keeping the camera running for too long, seems to respond to an interest in truth that lives naturally onstage but is easily corrupted by the Hollywood machine and the art of montage. We might wonder what would have become of such a talent had she been born in Western Europe, like Agnès Varda or Chantal Akerman, and enjoyed state funding, unburdened by the expectation that each film will be a profitable business venture.
Luv (Clive Donner, 1967). Promotional photograph by Bob Willoughby.
May zeroes in on the weaknesses of the common woman with empathy, making good comedy out of them. All of May’s women live in her early improv. In a bit called “Merry Christmas, Doctor,” from Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors, May is a psychoanalyst hurt by the news that her patient will miss his next session to spend Christmas Eve with his wife and kids. This is classic May, an otherwise professional woman has an Achilles heel: her inappropriate attachments. In the duo’s Mother and Son sketch, May can’t stop nagging her son to call more often. She knows that by doing so she pushes him further away, but she keeps on spiraling.
The same sort of insecure, self-destructive, man-repelling behavior is brilliantly performed in The Heartbreak Kid by Jeannie Berlin, who both subtly and intensely transforms from cool girl into tedious matriarch almost immediately after the wedding ceremony. She’s clumsy, can’t swim, and takes too much time to do her hair. Unlike Cybill Shepherd’s character, carefree, conniving, and rich, she’s good-natured, gullible, and working-class. May’s comedy happens at the very moment a man finds an otherwise attractive woman repulsive.
This collection of helplessly sincere, funny losers is what makes Elaine May so special to me. I’m excited about what she has planned for Dakota Johnson in Crackpot—that is, if they find an insurance director to shadow her. Paul Thomas Anderson did it for Robert Altman, Guillermo del Toro for William Friedkin. I’d be more than happy to volunteer for this, of course. The question is, will Hollywood finally let May do her thing? Or will they punish her once again for believing in the integrity of her vision?