OVP: Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Film: Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Stars: Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret, Candice Bergen, Rita Moreno, Carol Kane

Director: Mike Nichols

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Ann-Margret)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Ann-Margret-click here to learn more about Ms. Ann-Margret (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to jump seven years into the future in our series for two reasons.  One, we have a lot to cover (Ann-Margret has been an enduring star for many decades), and two, Ann-Margret's career post Viva Las Vegas was kind of a bust.  Similar to some of the other stars we've talked about this year (like Jayne Mansfield), after just a few years as the center-of-the-world, the public began to crave a new star on their screens, and Ann-Margret could only be the "new star" for so long.  She had bad instincts during this time period (she turned down Cat Ballou, which went to Jane Fonda & opened up new doors in her career, and according to legend also turned down the part of Liesl in The Sound of Music, though I can't tell if this is just urban myth or is based in reality like the Cat Ballou decline, which actually happened), and her movies frequently had her being overshadowed by her male leads.  Instead, she struck up a Vegas nightclub act during this time frame (a successful one), and went on USO tours.  That is, until Mike Nichols gave her a role that would change her life.

(Spoilers Ahead) Carnal Knowledge is not about Ann-Margret's Bobbie, not really.  It's instead centered around the lives of two pals, Sandy (Garfunkel) and Jonathan (Nicholson), and their 25-year friendship.  Both men, virgins at the onset of the film, have completely different views on women; Jonathan considers them to be "ballbusters," something there for him to enjoy & control, while Sandy deifies them, treating them as life-changing.  

The movie is divided into three chapters.  In the first, they both fall in love with the same girl, Susan (Bergen), who attends their college.  Susan thinks Sandy is a nice guy, but is attracted to the excitement of Jonathan, and sleeps with him first.  As the relationship moves, though, Jonathan becomes angry that Susan doesn't give him the contentment that she gives Sandy.  As a result, they break up (Susan & Sandy marry), and we flash forward to the future, where Jonathan begins pursuing Bobbie, a gorgeous women whom he finds desirable, but eventually too complicated (because she is undergoing depression, and is desperate for him to love her in a traditional way, which Jonathan is not capable of because he views women as objects-of-desire).  Bobbie attempts suicide as a result of the depression, which we find in the final chapter led to Jonathan marrying and then divorcing her.  In this chapter, Sandy has found love with a new young woman named Jennifer (Kane), but has outgrown Jonathan-they have a falling out (not before Jonathan accidentally, wordlessly acknowledges that he & Susan had a relationship during a sadistic slideshow of his past sex partners), and we then see that Sandy truly leaves Jonathan behind, still financially successful but truly incapable of love.  The final scene is a pre-scripted monologue he has with a prostitute (Moreno) who talks about a man's power over her, as this is now the only way that Jonathan (who has increasingly suffered from impotence problems) can achieve an erection.

There are parts of Carnal Knowledge that simply wouldn't work today, and not just because of the deep core of misogyny that runs through it.  The film is an obvious commentary about the Sexual Revolution, and in this case two men trying to make sense of it in completely different ways, and that wouldn't make sense today.  Honestly-it's difficult for me to understand what of this film is dated & what of it is meant as a critique of these two men as a modern audience member.  In some respects I think it does this rather well-it's unflinching, nasty, & not forgiving of its main characters, particularly Nicholson's Jonathan.

But it also dismisses the women at its core.  The problematic people in this film are the men, and any audience member now would be able to tell that.  Jonathan's emotional abuse of Susan & Bobbie is rigid & hate-filled, but not much worse is Sandy begging these women to define him, to be the missing piece he isn't offering them (and to constantly blame them rather than himself when they don't).  Their friendship is unhealthy & they bring out the worst in each other, but that doesn't mean that the director's treatment of the women is much better.  Most of the women as written are nothing parts (Kane's Jennifer doesn't even speak), and with the exception of Moreno in a 5-minute long cameo at the end (where her reciting a script for money shows that she, ultimately, is in control), there's no focus on these women as anything other than through the eyes of the two male leads.

That isn't for lack of trying, though, on the part of Ann-Margret.  As written, Bobbie is a throwaway role; she's simply a gorgeous woman who wants to get married to this guy that she loves, and who is incapable of loving her.  But Bobbie is the crux of the film-she needs to both show us someone that we think is a throwaway one-night-stand, and then have it dawn on the audience (but not Jonathan) that Bobbie is perfect for Jonathan, and that if he can't make it work with her, it spells his doom.  

It's a tricky part, not least of which is that most of that isn't on the paper, and that might've been why Nichols struggled for months to cast it (supposedly everyone from Ellen Burstyn to Raquel Welch to Dyan Cannon to, in a twist, Jane Fonda, pursued the part but didn't land it), but in Ann-Margret he cast it flawlessly.  Ann-Margret is not the actress that Jane Fonda or Ellen Burstyn are, but she knew a good thing when it landed in her lap, and she understood Bobbie.  The way she plays her is marvelous-she shows Bobbie as a girl who had likely been worshipped by men her whole life, but is now on the cusp of thirty, and doesn't understand that while men still pursue her, they aren't willing to give her everything she desired (namely, a traditional family life).  Ann-Margret, still a knockout, but several years removed from her peak time in the spotlight, finds a way to impart that persona into Bobbie, playing her as someone who understands that her time-in-the-sun is over & she might've missed her window for happiness if it doesn't work with Jonathan.  There's a sexism in that reading, but it's the one that Nichols gives us, and I think Ann-Margret plays it well.

OVP: Silkwood (1983)

Film: Silkwood (1983)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher, Craig T. Nelson
Director: Mike Nichols
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Meryl Streep, Supporting Actress-Cher, Original Screenplay, Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I do adore Meryl Streep, this is a true statement.  But on occasion I do miss her a little bit.  The reality is, for those who have grown up with a Devil Wears Prada-style Meryl that the Grand Lady of American Cinema wasn't always so stylized in her work on the screen.  Yes, there's little doubt that the past decade has been terrific for Streep, and that she's managed to parlay her work into being a movie star for a new generation, but it's worth remembering that she used to be a more naturalistic performer.  When Streep rose to prominence, there was such a sense of excitement around her, and the way that she could inhabit characters and create these deeply real, fleshed-out human beings.  She also, and this seems a bit harsh, used to be in better movies.  Perhaps few have been as good, though, as Silkwood, her 1983 drama about the life of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear whistleblower and labor activist from the 1970's.  The film, over thirty years old now, still feels fresh and relevant, a near-impossible coup for an issue film, but Mike Nichols and Streep herself aid this with bravura acting and a script that is more about human ignorance and bullying against a crusader than a specific issue.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Karen (Streep), in many ways in the same vein as Erin Brockovich who would succeed her.  She's not a great mother (her children don't even live with her, a less forgivable reality in 1983 than today, but the indictment still rings the same), she is sexually promiscuous at work (she flashes a coworker in a crowded room), and she seems to just sort of skate by with an okay performance while claiming she's doing a great job (we all know that person at work).  She works, however, at a nuclear plant, and is frequently dealing with issues of nuclear safety.  The film features the famed Silkwood shower scenes, where after nuclear exposure a person (in this case, frequently Streep) has to endure a harsh, rough shower and forced scrubbing from coworkers in order to "prevent" radiation from the plutonium.

The film is certainly at its best when it focuses on Streep and her role as an unlikely crusader.  One of the more interesting points of the film that separates it from other "unlikely crusader" style films is the way that they don't point out how odd it is that Karen, who hasn't seemed to care about anything but herself before this fight, is the one doing it.  Karen Silkwood doesn't have her "come to Jesus" moment, and in many ways is doing this to save herself and find purpose in her life rather than initially as a safety precaution for her fellow workers.  Still, the way the script unfolds around her becomes even more haunting as the film progresses, as thirty years later we have a sense of the lies that she was being told, and the ways that the the plant would eventually go belly-up in the wake of her death due to the misplaced plutonium.  Watching her coworkers use arguments like "I want to keep my job" and "it's fine the way it is" are scary not only because you know they're essentially in the building that is guaranteeing their death, but because you see that sort of ignorance still today, where people claim climate change can't be real not because of the science but more because "it would cost jobs" and "it's too expensive."  A lot of the film, quite frankly, resonated with me as a climate change crusader, and I felt that you could pretty easily bring the entire story to the present day without much issue in that regard, which is petrifying.

The film received five Academy Award nominations, with Streep positioned best-of-all in the bunch.  There's something so mesmerizing about Streep in the early-1980's, watching the way that she doesn't dumb down her performance, the way she's so on in every scene.  In many ways her work here recalls Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln and There Will Be Blood in the way that she abandons any sense of the movie star behind the work, instead just becoming an iconic character.  I feel like in some ways, despite some really amazing work since, she hasn't done that in modern memory in quite the same way since Miranda Priestly.  Cher, gaining her first experience of "serious" acting, is fine but not in the same league as Streep's lesbian best friend-she and Kurt Russell both have their moments (I love the question mark that Cher leaves on her character, whether or not she sold her out in order to keep her job), but really they just sort of our sidelined by Streep's outstanding work (Kurt Russell was definitely a dish in this movie, though, it's worth saying).  Mike Nichols' directing is taut and clear as always-he keeps slightly extended-shots when he needs it, and the ending is filmed with just enough malice to get across his opinion of what happened to Karen Silkwood without legal being involved.  Combined with Nora Ephron's succinct script, the film is certainly well-done.  The movie might have a tad bit of sprucing up of the supporting characters (I particularly never quite got what was going on with Craig T. Nelson), but that's a pretty quiet quibble for such a film.

Those are my thoughts on this movie-what about yours?  Are you with me that Silkwood still feels remarkably prescient today?  Do you occasionally miss the Meryl of yore?  And considering she had an amazing cast of Debra Winger, Julie Walters, Jane Alexander, and the victorious Shirley MacLaine competing against her in 1983, do you think she deserved that Oscar?

Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

I'm not ready for this one.  As many of you are aware, legendary director and producer Mike Nichols passed away Thursday.  Nichols, though 83, was not what you'd generally consider a celebrity that you were expecting to die soon, and I think that's because he always seemed so "on."  Nichols, beloved by those that collaborated with him, frequently found himself handing out life achievement awards (or receiving them) and always had a verve about him.  It wasn't just that he was witty-there was such a feeling in his cleverness, and the way that he seemed brimming with joy and love for those around him.  Optimism and bliss are rare gifts in life, and Nichols publicly (and from what his friends and family have stated about him, clearly privately) knew how to emanate those like few others.

My first experience with Nichols was probably Regarding Henry, his 1991 film starring Harrison Ford and one of those first films to introduce the world to Annette Bening.  It was one of my mom's favorite movies, and it sat there on top of our entertainment center in our living room growing up, staring down at me with Indiana Jones' soulful eyes.

The first experience I ever had with Nichols that was truly seismic in terms of my movie-watching, however, would have to have been Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  People frequently ask me what was the film that made me fall in love with the movies, and for the large part that would be A Streetcar Named Desire, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a profound effect as well, as I saw them basically back-to-back.  Both films showed me actors exploring new chasms of feeling and performance.  It is not a mistake that the first movies that I fell in love with were heavily reliant on a future love, that of theater, and of course Mike Nichols was one of the few directors who could truly meld the two.  The films he adapted to be plays, ranging from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Angels in America to the wildly-underrated Closer always felt like they existed in the cinematic world.  So often stage directors don't know how to adapt to their new medium while still keeping within the confines of the actual staged work, but Nichols, Man of a Thousand Tonys, was not someone who suffered in that regard.

For those who see Nichols name and think instantly of a couple of movies like Who's Afraid or The Graduate or (my brother's personal favorite) Silkwood, there was something else truly special about Mike and his approach to the cinema: the way that he could find actors and bring out the best in them.  Frequently referred to by the enviable moniker "an actor's director," Nichols could both reinvent an actor and in many cases discover one.  For those of you who casually love movies but may not know who Nichols is, rest comfortably in knowing that he has vastly influenced your filmic viewing through the years even if you've never seen one of his pictures.  People like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Whoopi Goldberg were discovered or entered superstardom as a result of Nichols' influence, and other actors had their public personas vastly changed as a result of his tutelage.  Nichols managed to take Meryl Streep out of period dramas and into grittier, more realistic work, which vastly shaped the way she was seen in the 1980's.  He brought Elizabeth Taylor out of her gorgeous glamour mode and gave us the grittiest, finest performance of her long career.  He transformed Cher from being a singer and host of a silly variety show to being an acclaimed movie star.  Actors ranging from Jack Nicholson to Melanie Griffith to John Travolta to Julia Roberts have seen their careers dramatically shifted by his steady influence, bringing on a new chapter in their artistry.  Nichols was one of the last directors who, like Elia Kazan and William Wyler, clearly was focused on specific performances in the film as they related to the overall picture; he brought that theatrical sensibility to the screen in a way that few modern directors have been able to muster.  He was that rare artist who cared both about every project that came his way (his films and plays rarely offered us something uninteresting, and oftentimes offered us something profound and life-changing) and had a sense of legacy.  His works live on in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved a performance or had their perception of an artist change.  He was an actor's director, of course, but he was, thankfully for all of us, also an audience's director as well.

The Triple Crown of Cinematic Life Achievement

Yesterday the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced that movie star and frequent Sexiest Man Alive George Clooney was chosen to be their recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award.  Clooney, a fixture at the Globes, will surely give a great, funny speech, probably with more than one joke about how, at only 53 and as one of the biggest stars on the planet, he's hardly ready to be getting a lifetime achievement award.

And quite frankly, I'm kind of with hypothetical Clooney on this one.  I know that trying to figure out what is going on in the heads of the HFPA is a fool's errand, but seriously?  George Clooney?  He's not even Jodie Foster where he's been acting in major films since he was a teenager and so there's decades of work to rely on, covering up the fact that she also was far too young.  You just know that Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, and Brad Pitt are coming in the next couple of years at this rate, and even they have all had more important cinematic careers than Clooney's!  There are so many other names that should have been listed, and so in honor of these missing names, I figured it was high time that we check in on the Triple Crown of Cinematic Life Achievement.

The Triple Crown of Life Achievement, for those of you too lazy to go to the above link (just kidding-love you!), is my name for those rare entertainers that have won the Kennedy Center Honor, AFI Life Achievement Award and the Cecil B. DeMille Award (I skip the SAG Life Achievement Award because it is pretty evenly split with television actors and because it is more for services to the industry than straight-up life achievement, though it's also a big deal-congratulations age-appropriate Debbie Reynolds on winning this year!).  In the past year (since we last checked in on this topic), we've seen an odd amount of movement on the list.  In the great news column, we had our 21st performer (and fourth woman) hit the triple crown, the one-and-only Shirley MacLaine, who got the Kennedy Center Honor this past year.  We also saw Tom Hanks complete his second leg of the tour, getting the Kennedy Center Honor (just the DeMille, oddly enough, is left, despite him being relatively young and that being the first leg for most performers).  And most exciting of all, we saw Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Woody Allen, and yes, George Clooney, begin their journey toward the title.

On the other side, though, proving that there's a ticking clock for even the most accomplished of stars on completing the trio, we had four people pass away without completing the list: Lauren Bacall (missing AFI), Robin Williams (missing AFI/Kennedy), Shirley Temple Black (missing AFI/DeMille), and Ruby Dee (missing AFI/DeMille).  You have to assume that Williams in particular would have been able to complete at least one more award in the collection, maybe completing the circle.  Sadly, they all left us before we could finish honoring them.

Looking ahead, though, I want to take a peak at where we're at for the remaining contenders, starting with the eight people that are just one award away from completing the set.  Here we go!

Missing Only the DeMille: We'll start here since I'm royally peeved that George Clooney (who should have won in like fifteen years-I'm not a complete grump and wanting to deny him wholly) got what could have gone to a number of other, more age appropriate stars.  There are still four people that have somehow never won the DeMille (I'll put everyone's ages in parantheses): Tom Hanks (58), Meryl Streep (65), Mel Brooks (88), and Mike Nichols (82).  Of the four, I am certain that Meryl will win it at some point, even though Meryl has almost enough Golden Globe statues to make her own chess set with them (the DeMille could be the King!).  I am also confident that Hanks will win as soon as HFPA remembers they haven't given him a statue (I genuinely believe that they think they've already given him one-that's the only explanation for him winning after Clooney).  I am far more doubtful of both Brooks and Nichols, though Brooks especially is a huge miss for the Globes, considering he's been nominated four times and never won, and this would be a brilliant way to honor a comedic legend.

Missing Only the Kennedy Center: With Shirley MacLaine off of this list, we're now down to three men: Michael Douglas (69), Al Pacino (74), and Harrison Ford (72).  Last year I said MacLaine was the least likely to win of the four, and she was the first to do it, so this proves I know little, and so I'm going to second guess my thoughts from last year with Al Pacino are wrong, as he is slowly becoming less and less relevant and hasn't done what his peers like Robert Redford or Robert de Niro have done: staged an awards comeback.  However, Ford/Douglas/Pacino are incredibly famous movie stars and the Kennedy Center Honors has five recipients each year, including two typically for film, so this isn't particularly hard for them, but I think that Pacino is least likely to win this, with Douglas actually the most likely; he consistently makes movies and is extremely well-regarded in the industry (and for what it's worth, he's the youngest).  Ford doesn't have any Oscar-loving, which probably hurts him.  If he ever made a genuine play for another nomination, I think the accolades would come pouring in and he'd pull this off in the same way that Meryl did with The Iron Lady.

Missing Only the AFI Award: With the death of Lauren Bacall, we now only have one person who has won the DeMille and the Kennedy Center Honor but lost the AFI: Robert Redford (78).  Honestly, what's the hold-up here?  Redford's been a movie star for decades, is great behind-the-camera as well, continues to make important pictures like All is Lost and reinvented the independent cinema scene with Sundance.  Plus, he seems to be relatively well-liked.  I honestly don't get this-they need to jump on honoring him immediately (they haven't announced the 2015 winner-let's make it Redford).

Only has the Kennedy Center Honor: Here we run into a conundrum: the Kennedy Center Honors (and to a lesser extent, the DeMille Awards), honor not only for cinema but also television, theater, and the world of comedy.  As a result, we have people who are most noted for Broadway (James Earl Jones (83), Angela Lansbury (88)), stand-up (Lily Tomlin (75), Steve Martin (69)), and television (Oprah Winfrey (60)) who also have made significant contributions to cinema, though that may not be their primary claim to fame.  Because of this split in mediums, many of these people may stay in this first position indefinitely (though Martin could probably advance to at least the DeMille).  There's also Joanne Woodward (84), who won this award in conjunction with her husband Paul Newman (not to impugn Ms. Woodward, but that probably helped), as well as John Williams (82) who probably isn't famous enough with the mass public to win one of the other two awards.  Your best bet other than Martin to advance would surely be Julie Andrews (78), who would give a perfectly divine speech with the Globes if they let her, and is famous enough with the mass public to get them the ratings they're hoping to win.

Only has the DeMille: Considering that they generally go young with this award you have people like George Clooney (53) and Jodie Foster (51) who are infants in terms of these honors and have hopefully a couple of decades to inevitably win the next two trophies.  Time isn't necessarily the friend for reclusive stars like Doris Day (either 90 or 92, and don't you love that someone as famous as she can still hide her real age?), Gene Hackman (84), and Woody Allen (78), none of which would probably show up even if the Kennedy Center or AFI came a-knocking.  Anthony Hopkins (76) is getting up there in years and surprisingly hasn't parlayed his English sophistication into a Kennedy Center Honor, but considering he works constantly (we saw him earlier this year in Noah) he may just get there.  Finally, there's legendary Sophia Loren (79), whose lack of a Kennedy Center Honor is probably the strangest thing in this article after Tom Hanks missing the DeMille-surely the Kennedy Center Honors, which love to give trophies to artists from around the world, would like to honor the most famous Italian actress of all-time?

Only has the AFI Award: Tom Hanks moved on up from this classification, but in a bold move, we had a new name to this list (the AFI is the least likely of the three to go first): Jane Fonda (76) finally got some love for her many decades of filmmaking this past year with her win.  She's joined by George Lucas (70) as someone who has only won the AFI trophy, and while I suspect that Fonda will never get this entire circle (she's too controversial to get a government-issued award like the Kennedy Center Honor), she could still grab the DeMille and Lucas will surely get the Kennedy Center Honor before his career is over.

Hasn't Started Yet: I could list the likes of Roberts, Cruise, Bullock, Washington, and Pitt, but I'm going to stick with only people over the age of sixty (though Denzel actually hits that number in December so maybe it's about time to add him to the roster?).  Some names off the top of my head (there are surely more-share them in the comments): Diane Keaton (68), Samuel L. Jackson (65), Julie Christie (73/74-another mystery!), Glenn Close (67), Robert Duvall (83), Cher (68), Jeff Bridges (64), Maggie Smith (79), Faye Dunaway (73), Michael Caine (81), Judi Dench (79), Ellen Burstyn (81), Christopher Plummer (84), Bette Midler (68), Jessica Lange (65), Helen Mirren (69), Francis Ford Coppola (75), Catherine Deneuve (70), Sissy Spacek (64), Kathy Bates (66), Vanessa Redgrave (77), Arnold Schwarzenegger (67), Goldie Hawn (68), Norman Jewison (88), Rita Morena (82), Milos Forman (82), and Liza Minnelli (68).  And there are surely others...which again is why it is so sad that George Clooney, young, spritely, decades-left-of-his-career George Clooney was chosen this year.

But seriously, congratulations.