The late 1970s marks a new era for divorce in American film. Divorce is now a given, not a problem the movie seeks to solve. Comedies of remarriage persist, as do attempts to use divorce as an index for the culture at large, but such movies tend to be the least successful of this period’s films.
Movies of the 1950s wrestled with postwar liberalism’s lack of a functioning sexual morality, as well as the seeming belief that such a morality existed before WWII and might be reinstantiated. (It didn’t, so it couldn’t.) That brittle pretense shattered fully in the movies of the 1960s, a collapse accompanied by self-conscious reflection on the counter-culture and its costs. By the late 1970s, the counter-culture and the whole postwar societal tsuanami had already done their demolition work and receded into the given. These movies come after.
Divorce now being assumed, these movies tackle the challenges of post-divorce dating. Rather than focusing on the first marriage, these movies consider the nature of independence, the risks of vulnerability, the experience of trying again to find and build a relationship. In so doing, they modify Hollywood’s models of femininity and masculinity. Feminism is an influence, but usually an oblique one; the best of these movies tend to be suspicious of the doctrinaire.
Kids are a big part of these movies, little kids and teenagers alike. This is not to say that the divorce movie of the late 1970s is simply a resurrection of the longstanding child-of-divorce movie. While there are clear continuities, the shift here is away from tragedy and toward, not comedy, but drama. In some movies, the children of previous marriages are simply assumed and present, in others they drive or at least impact the plot. There is renewed interest in their experience; with some exceptions, kids with divorced parents in these movies are neither permanently traumatized by divorce, nor comic props employed to poke fun at changing mores.
Second marriages are still welcome as conclusions. (I hoped I might have coined a word with deuterogamy, but the Oxford English Dictionary tells me this term for a second marriage has been around since the seventeenth century.) Deuterogamous or not, post-divorce relationships in these movies are generally distant, plotwise, from the first marriage. The first spouse is usually not even seen in the film, though the divorced character may be anxious not to repeat his or her earlier mistakes in the new relationship. The hilarious walk-on by Wallace Shawn (“this little homunculus”) as Diane Keaton’s first husband in Woody Allen’s Manhattan is itself an instance of the relegation of the first marriage to history, not part of the plot.
In this post we’ll make do with four bad movies that nevertheless signal the new era, and then we’ll move on to better fare in the post after.
The Goodbye Girl (1977)
For better and for worse, three of the movies that mark this new Age of Deuterogamy were written by Neil Simon. The first and best of these is The Goodbye Girl, though its strengths do not include Marsha Mason as lead. Relentlessly unobjectionable, Mason was good as the temporary romance in Mazursky’s Blume in Love, but her flute-y delivery and inability to convey edge or complexity is wearing when she is given the lead. Mason is a recursion to Doris Day; her character here redecorates and goes “eep!” a lot. When she delivers lines of neurotic, New York banter, it seems not only false but uncanny.
But Mason was married to Neil Simon, and so leading roles and lines of neurotic, New York banter are what she gets. Many, many lines. As critics have lamented, Simon has his characters speak in Neil Simonese, a language of wise-cracks and witticisms that real people do not speak. The one great thing in The Goodbye Girl is Richard Dreyfus, here an instrument so perfect and intense that he burns holes through the script. It’s never clear why he falls for Mason.
Or rather, the reason seems to be not Mason but her ten year old daughter, played by Quinn Cummings. The little girl is the pivot of the movie, and there are bad and good things to say about the character. The bad is that the character is a prop, there to deliver Simon’s quips and—in an unfortunate throwback to 1960s divorce comedy—to demonstrate a supposedly comic imperviousness to the emotional chaos around her. Asked by her mother if it was hard on her living with her pre-Dreyfus boyfriend, she calms her mother: “I wasn’t living with him. You were. I was in the next room.” Ha ha. When Dreyfus wants to take Mason to California with him for a short-term acting gig, the little girl is there to reassure the adults that they don’t need to worry about her.
This is an unfortunate regression in divorce movie history, even with Cummings’s excellent delivery and ‘70s kids duds. The Cute Wise Kid is fine in the right context. Virginia Weidler as Dinah Lord in The Philadelphia Story is also wise beyond her years and witnesses things she shouldn’t. But Dinah has an extended family, financial stability, social traditions. Lucy in The Goodbye Girl just has her mom. The light comedy doesn’t suit.
Yet there is another facet to the part and the movie, and that is the extent to which Dreyfus is seeking the love of the daughter even more than that of the mother, is auditioning for the part of stepfather more than lover. Not in a gross way—though when he harangues the little girl in a horse-drawn carriage I did want to call CPS. But the movie does give us a situation in which a man genuinely wants to be a good second father as much as or more than he wants to be a good second husband, sees a child who needs love and stability and wants to provide them. This is admirable and, in the Age of Deuterogamy, plausible.
California Suite (1978)
Neil Simon’s anthology film—directed, like The Goodbye Girl, by Herbert Ross—observes five different couples in the same Los Angeles hotel. It’s mostly dull, a waste of some great talent: Maggie Smith, Water Matthau, Michael Caine, Richard Pryor, Elaine May. The best part is the first half hour or so, which is devoted to nasty, high-IQ bickering between ex-spouses played by Jane Fonda and Alan Alda. They haven’t seen each other in nine years but, because their 17 year old daughter has run away from Fonda in New York City to her dad in L.A., they have to renegotiate custody arrangements—and to assess what they are to each other and to themselves after a decade of divorce.
Alda’s character has mellowed, become more Californian. Fonda rehearses the bitterness and self-loathing of the high-achieving bitch, shadowboxing for thirty-some minutes before consenting to a compromise. Alda previously had their daughter two months of the year during the summer; now, they’ll try six months and six months. The kid will be 18 in a year in any case.
So this is really about New York and Los Angeles. Fonda is the New York snob: “What the hell is she going to learn in a community whose greatest literary achievement is a map of the movie stars’ homes?” “She’s not happy in New York,” says Alda. Fonda: “Nobody’s happy in New York, but they’re alive.” Woody Allen sounded these notes the previous year in Annie Hall: “I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”[1]
House Calls (1978)
This is another example of the Age of Deuterogamy, with Walter Matthau as a surgeon who is dating again after the death of his wife, and Glenda Jackson as a divorced mother with a teenaged son. The movie is dumb, seems to know it and therefore tries to be amiable, occasionally succeeding. We like watching both actors, though it stretches credulity to accept Matthau as a sexually irresistable lothario sowing his wild oats among the the nubile nurses at his hospital. His medical colleague Richard Benjamin chastizes him in dialogue that shows what the movie is settling for:
Benjamin. Charlie, you’re embarrassing. I mean, you’re such a cliché. Here you are, a middle-aged man, suddenly finds himself alone, grows a beard, goes berserk with his sexual fantasy. . .
Matthau. Please, stop with the Psychology 101.
The screenplay is by Charles Shyer (who wrote the remake of The Parent Trap with his wife Nancy Myers before their own divorce) and Alan Mandel, and Howard Zieff directed. There are some tired counter-culture jokes as Matthau dates the nurses and has to sit in a beanbag, listen to Boz Scaggs, and eat granola.
But these trite yuks tee up the real theme, which is the decision to commit to a new relationship after a first marriage. Matthau grows bored of the beanbags. 57 when he made the movie, he tells Jackson, who was 41: “It’s comfortable with an old broad like you. I don’t have to explain things like who Ronald Coleman was.”
Chapter Two (1979)
The third of our Neil Simon movies is the autobiographical Chapter Two, based on Simon’s relationship with Marsha Mason. James Caan plays the Simon character, Marsha Mason plays the Marsha Mason character, a divorcee who takes a chance getting involved with a successful writer still grieving over the death of his first wife.
Perhaps there is more to the real-life Simon and Mason, but their alter-egos in this film are insanely dull. They go thrifting and shop for flowers, try Indian food (too spicy) and leave classical music concerts early because they’re bored. At one point, Mason, in a restaurant, says: “I was thinking about a chef salad with Roquefort dressing and a half a grapefruit and some iced tea with Sweet’n Low.” This, I thought; this line is the movie’s beating heart.
Perhaps because there is so little substance to the characters, the Simonese here reaches a peak of self-referentiality. The quips are literally about the quips, e.g.:
Mason. “This is what they call ‘repartee,’ isn’t it?”
Caan. “No, this is what they call ‘amusing telephone call under duress.’”
and
Mason. “Do you write the way you talk?”
Caan. “This is not talking. This is impressing. Talking comes later.”
Caan compliments Mason early on, saying: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but we talk in the same rhythm.” We noticed.
Bad as they are, the three Simon movies, along with House Calls, are significant because they reflect the prevalence—and, even more importantly, the presumption—of prior marriages. Chapter Two makes the first marriage part of the plot, the emotional tie that Caan needs to loosen so his second marriage with Mason will survive. But this is hardly Rebecca. Caan’s first wife is just a complication that gives the principals something to talk about. And Matthau in House Calls isn’t even sad over his first wife’s death.
Earlier, I mentioned a scene in Woody Allen’s Manhattan as a paradigmatic marker of the relegation of the first marriage to anecdotal background. Similarly, Allen’s character in Annie Hall was married and divorced twice, and this is, again, of anecdotal function, not to tell us anything about marriage and divorce. Indeed, Allen has always been more interested in the topics of infidelity and the unpredictability of desire than the actual experience of either marriage or divorce. But in the Age of Deuterogamy, the anecdote, the flashback, is the point. Prior marriages, when not relegated entirely to the past, are for material, for characterization. They are the stuff we already are when the plot begins.
Next Post, Better Movies: An Unmarried Woman, Starting Over, It’s My Turn, Rich Kids, Too Far to Go
[1] I wonder if the NYC vs. LA shtick in part reflects an unease with 1970s New York City as the embodiment of ruinous liberal policies, with decamping to California seen as a disloyal abandonment of the political ship, a displaced and guilty neoconservatism. Alda needles Fonda over the liberal charity luncheons they used to attend back east: “A teeming mob of women who must have spent $12,000 on Gucci pants, so they could raise 2,000 for the grape pickers. Why the hell didn't they just mail them the pants?”