Neil Simon: The Last Word

So that’s it! The entire Neil Simon canon, in one convenient bog, just for you.

I’ve sure learned a lot – hopefully you have too. I must say I was more than a bit surprised by some of his more serious works – stories that managed to tug at the ol’ heartstrings while simultaneously tickling the ribs.

I’m not gonna bore you with an long-winded wrap-up (although I said that about the intro, didn’t I?). I’ll just leave you with a top-10 list of what I consider to be the best Neil Simon movies. Here they are, in ascending order. 

10: Jake’s Women  Surprisingly poignant one-man odyssey of the women in one man's life, abetted strongly by Alan Alda doing what he does best: sharing his neuroses.

9. Last of the Red Hot Lovers  This one really stayed with me, particularly the format of one man’s three ill-fated attempts, with different women, to have an affair. A zany salute to the whack-job females we’ve all dated at one time or another, and the reasons we can’t get them out of our heads.  

8. The Out-of-Towners  Everything can go wrong, goes wrong – very, very wrong – for Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis in NY. Simon just loves turning the thumbscrews, and her here cranks them beyond human endurance; just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Only a man who loves the city so much could make it look so hellish.

7. The Odd Couple  The quintessential mismatched buddy comedy. Simon was in the middle of his 60s roll when he penned this play and movie adaption, and it works so well because of methodical character depth and evolution (most writers get one or the other but not both). Oh, and those incredible one-liners, one after another.

6. California Suite  Middle and best Suite movie, a perfect juggling of four funny character-driven stories at the same Golden State hotel. Alda and Fonda are touching in their reunion, which starts out cordial but quickly unearths enough skeletons to turn things bitterly fractious; and Matthau turns on the slapstick charm in his futile efforts to convince wife Elaine May that the unconscious blonde in his room is not the result of a one-night stand. But Maggie Smith and Michael Caine positively steal the show in their segment about a film star and her hubby, a closeted gay man, who keep up appearances but can’t deal with the unrequited love of their union.

5. Only When I Laugh  A real sleeper, in a filmography full of sleepers. Marsha Mason stars as an alcoholic actress, who takes in teenage daughter Kristy MacNichol, in the best of Simon’s stretch of estranged parent/child movies from the early 80s. With smart sharp dialogue, it’s a definite precursor to the female-centered seriocomedies that came out later in the decade (Terms of Endearment, Baby Boom, Working Girl), and the first film (to my knowledge) to feature a “gay best friend” character, another rom-com staple.

4. The “Eugene” Trilogy: Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound  Okay, I’m cheating a bit here, but it really is hard to pick one considering they’re all part of the same broad saga. Plus, they’re all pretty good, especially Biloxi, when Simon’s youthful alter-ego toils in the trenches (literally and metaphorically) to understand the working of the human psyche. Brighton explores family fracas amidst the brewing of a world war and a country still getting back on its feet economically, and Broadway is sort of a wintry, melancholy reverie, a crossroads for the boy and his brother, and a swan song of sorts for the previous generation. All in all, a beloved panorama – I would’ve loved to see a second Eugene trilogy, chronicling the character’s later years – but then, that’s pretty much Simon’s entire canon (why I concluded each review with “Stage in Simon’s life”).

3. Lost in Yorkers  Sort of… the “other” characters of Simon’s youth, the ones who perhaps had a far less idyllic life than he did. Two boys must stay with grandma while dad makes a living, but the matriarch (Irene Worth) is anything but touchy-feely. Her other children include a con artist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a mentally-impaired but joyously life-loving daughter, Bella, brilliantly portrayed by Mercedes Ruehl. Her confrontation with Worth at the end is absolutely the equal of anything Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams ever wrote – full of regret, love, heartbreak and, ultimately, liberation. Ruehl’s Bella, like A Doll’s House’s Nora and The Glass Menagerie’s Laura, is an unlikely feminist, one who reminds us that the first shackles to come off are from the ones you love.

2. Barefoot in the Park  Simon’s first hit, and perhaps the one he’s most known for. The story of a newlywed and their first NYC apartment (on the fifth floor; don’t count the outside stoop) is as charming as it is dateless. It introduced the world to a new brand of comedy writing, one that influenced all who came after, from James Brooks and Cameron Crowe to Nancy Meters and Judd Apatow. This adaptation, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, actually improves upon the stage version (with a better, cleaned-up finale), but even just a filmed performance of the play would be enough to rank high on any film fan’s list. A completely perfect comedy, it’s only outdone by my #1 choice:

1. The Goodbye Girl  An absolute joy. This is the film I put on to cure a bad mood, or a rough day at work. Or just when I want to see a solid love story, starring good actors, delivering perfectly crafted dialogue. Remember those days? The Goodbye Girl, of course, has free-sprit Elliot Garfied (Richard Dreyfuss) unintentionally rooming with uptight dancer Paula McFadden, with results that run the bumpy gamut from animosity to open hostility, to – of course – love. Its 110 minutes go by like ten; this is what it looks like when all cylinders are firing. Hell, even the subplot, involving Elliot Garfield’s ill-conceived performance of Richard III as a homosexual, is hilarious. Probably the most protoypical of Simon’s works; every single line bears his mark, and Dreyfuss, next to Alda, might very well be the master mouthpiece for the writer’s work. (A shame he only starred in one other Simon film.)

That’s it. We’re done. Rather than bore you with more of my tedium, I think I’ll leave you with something the man whom this blog most affectionately celebrates wrote.

  

“I am most alive and most fulfilled sitting alone in a room, hoping that those words forming on paper in the Smith Corona will be the first perfect play ever written in a single draft. I suspect that I shall keep writing in a vain search for the perfect.”

I know what you mean, Neil. I know exactly what you mean.

See you for the next blog. 

The Odd Couple II (1998)

Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau were a hit film duo long after The Odd Couple, and even before (their first pairing occurred in the smash The Fortune Cookie, from 1966). Then in 1993, with both actors pushing 70, they starred together yet again in the charming sleeper Grumpy Old Men, which did well enough to merit a sequel two years later, and another reunion, Out to Sea, in 1997. And so, with Neil Simon desiring at least one more chance to get his name back on the silver screen, a sequel The Odd Couple seemed like a no-brainer. Simon penned the screenplay (likely his last) and it naturally starred Lemmon and Matthau reprising their roles as Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, respectively.

The film starts with Oscar down in Florida, still sloppily hosting his poker parties, only this time with elderly women (some with strict dietary requirements). And when a call comes in from his son he’s elated to learn of the boy’s upcoming marriage. Not so elated, it seems, to learn the idenity of the girls dad: none other than Felix Unger, his age-old nemesis. Both plan on attending the wedding, with Oscar picking Felix up at the airport in southern California, then driving the rest of the way to he venue. Easier said than done. With Oscar’s still slovenly inclinatins and Felix’s unceasing anal-retentiveness (not to mention that annoying-as-hell sinus problem), their road trip is a disaster on wheels. It’s Murphy’s Law time once again as their car rolls down a hill and explodes, they try to hook up with two women on the run from jealous husbands, and they get arrested three times by the same sheriff (for charges ranging from the transport of illegal immigrants to the murder of a elderly gent who offers to give them a ride, then dies suddenly at the wheel). Well, they get to the wedding, with Felix finding a potential love interest and Oscar having to ease his son’s pre-wedding jitters. And when Felix gets back home, he finds Oscar, jilted by his new flame, once again needing a place to crash. Everything old is indeed new again.

Yes it is, especially in Hollywood, where the rule is - never let a franchise go unmilked. A modest hit, I’ve no doubts there could even have been a #3, but both stars’ health was not good at he time: Lemmon was battling bladder cancer at the time, the disease to which he would succumb in 2001, and Matthau passed a year earlier from heart disease. But you sure wouldn’t know it from the way these guys perform; true professionals to the end, they look and act here as good as they did in their heyday. And it sure is good seeing them in these roles again after an astounding 30 years. While the first half hour or so really doesn’t define their beloved roles so much – they could easily be playing the codgers from Grumpy Old Men – they gradually start assuming them again: Felix the neatnik and Oscar the unabashed slob. But we also get the mutual affection that so distinguished the original. As antagonistic as they are to each other, it all but masks a profound friendship, one enriched by our knowledge that these two actors have just as deep a relationship in real life.

And what about Simon’s screenplay? How does this third unofficial member of the Odd Couple fare? I guess the best I can say about his script is that it’s serviceable. The wordsmith hasn’t lost his touch with the puns and the witty banter, but they serve a pretty routine story, one we’ve seen for years and years before this. The idea of a road trip with an id/superego matchup was perfected, in my opinion, with Planes, Trains and Automobiles, so here it just seems a bit stale. Sure it’s amusing that the bumbling twosome repeatedly get arrested, but their charges are as unlikely as they are contrived. And the subplot involving the Mexican immigrants seems so cringingly racist. Sorry, Neil, you might have gotten away with the stereotypes in The Out of Towners and The Prisoner of Second Avenue. But this was 1998, and by then the “joke” of smuggling a dozen or so tamale pickers across the border just wasn’t funny.

Things improve toward the end, when both characters get beyond the hijinks reveal themselves through dialogue – the forte of all talents involved. There are a few heart-tugging moments at the wedding itself: Oscar counseling his nervous sire with a bit of reverse psychology (Simon loves this bit, going all the way back to the final segment of Plaza Suite), and Felix acting like a nervous schoolboy in his attempts to woo “the love of his life.” And the final ten minutes are a delightful paean to the original movie, with a near-perfect replication of the classic poker scene with Felix taking everyone’s lunch order. That combined with the immediately recognizable musical theme, was a skin-tingling moment for me. And I don’t often experience that at the movies nowadays.

This is most likely Simon’s screen swan song, and I think it’s a good one, showing that he’s come full circle in his career. One could see this metaphorically – the two beloved characters he created in his heyday are still going strong, weathering all manner of misfortune, ups, downs, romances, marriages, divorces, births, deaths. But in the end, all that truly matters are the laughs. Without those, can we really call ourselves agents of enjoyment? A human is the only species that can laugh, that can smile. This life’s too goddammed short not to avail ourselves of that one true gift – one bestowed on the old and the young, regardless of creed, race or culture.

Thanks, Neil, for giving that to us. And for telling some pretty fine stories to go with it.

Stage: None, just revisiting a couple of old friends.

Rating:  ***

London Suite (1996)

After the modest success of Jake’s Women, Neil Simon opted not to fix the unbroken by remaining with that film’s production company, Hallmark Entertainment (they also released his Sunshine Boys remake) to release 1996’s London Suite, based on his play from the previous year. But these were lean years for the once red-hot writer; Suite only played for six months at an off-Broadway theater, and its reviews were not exactly stellar either. But as nearly everything else he wrote had already been either adapted to TV or screen, it was a no-brainer to rush his third installment of the Suite cycle to NBC as soon as humanly possible. 

London Suite interweaves four stories featuring characters staying at the same London hotel. (Just as in the other two film adaptations, it takes the four separate playlets from the stage and intercuts them for greater cinematic effect.) The characters are:

·   Debra Dolby, a newlywed newly arrived at her would-be place of conjugal consummation, except she’s missing one thing: the groom. She seems to think they engaged in an in-flight drunken altercation, and so she appeals to the hotel manager for help in her dilemma, particularly when they’re expected to attend their own celebratory dinner party. Ultimately, we discover that her new hubby, Paul, had actually been arrested at the airport, the victim of a drug smuggler’s complex scheme, and so now he must go along with all the ridiculous lies his wife had told everyone in order to save face.

·   Lauren Semple, a young woman trying to set her mother, Lauren (Madeleine Kahn) up with some kind of romantic involvement. Mom gets more than she bargained for when the date turns out to be a quirky but well-mannered, adventurous Scotsman (Richard Mulligan) that she met on the airplane.

·   Sidney and Diana Nichols, the British couple from California Suite – the former, an erudite British gay man once married to the latter, a British film star who still harbors some bitterness over his leaving her for a man, even though she was perfectly aware that their union was largely for convenience. Their paths now cross years later, as he reveals to her of his lover’s terminal illness, and requests financial support in exchange for his refusal of all future alimony payments. She, however, sees this as the callous termination of their friendship, but she changes her tunes once she discerns that it’s not Sidney’s lover who is dying but Sydney himself. In the end, all three arrange to help Sydney with his disease in the States.

·   Mark Ferris, and his wife, Anne. Mark is all psyched up to go see Wimbeldon,. but when he freaks out after losing the tickets, his back gives out, and winds up floorbound for the rest of the story. Only hell or high water can get him to move – or, perhaps, the fact that the hotel accidently let his room to Kevin Costner!
 

So, you may be asking, what’s the verdict? It truly pains me to say this, but this is pretty lame stuff. I don’t think I really laughed once during this entire “comedy.” Oh sure, maybe a chortle here and there, but, Mr. Simon, you’ve elevated the bar enough that a “chortle” doesn’t make the mustard. The only one here that provides anything close is Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as Debra, scatterbraining her way through a real pickle of a situation, and leaping from one lie to another in order to salvage her already ostensibly ruined honeymoon. But truth be told she’s really just playing Elaine, her equally neurotic character on Seinfeld.

And that leads to the production’s primary fault: it’s just got a flat television quality throughout it all. Jay Sandrich, a fine veteran television director, does no favors for Simon’s material, which, at the very least, needs to be opened up as much as possible. And literally half the cast is lifted from NBC sitcoms of the time, ranging from Kelsey Grammar (Frasier) and Dreyfuss and Michael Richards (Seinfeld) to Richard Mulligan (Empty Nest) and Jonanthan Silverman (The Single Guy). Anyone not aware of the work’s pedigree might just well assume it’s just a series of four sitcoms string together – all we’re really missing here is a laugh track.

But truth be told, it’s hard to imagine this being terribly funny on the stage either. Simon’s ear for comedy has gone awfully tin, at least on the basis of these vignettes.  The one involving the Wimbledon fan stands out as being particularly unfunny. He runs amok looking for tickets, throws his back out, and lies there on the floor for the rest of the segment. That’s the joke?? In desperation, Simon throws in a barrage of physical comedy stunts at the end like he did with the “Visitors from Chicago” segment of California Suite, with an equal number of laughs – in other words, none. Again, Richards is just aping his Kramer character from Seinfeld, with evidently no real direction regarding what character he should be playing. But he shouldn’t feel too bad; he’s not the only one.

Madeleine Kahn fares no better as the mother set up with a date by her daughter. This vignette is so lightweight I literally cannot remember how the date turned out. And the piece involving Sydney and Diana, the Brits so elegantly and movingly portrayed by Maggie Smith and Michael Caine in California Suite, is completely unnecessary, not even working as an AIDS commentary as it did in the stage version since the disease has now inexplicably been changed to lung cancer. To top it off, both actors are American; Kelsey Grammar squeaks by with his naturally refined manner, but Patricia Clarkson sounds completely inauthentic as Diana. In fact, all of the other Brit roles are played by Americans too – is this because Hallmark was scared we wouldn’t recognize any actors from across the pond? I fear this to be the case, and it’s in keeping with the across-the-board homogenization Simon’s already flawed work has suffered in its stage-to-boob tube transition.

The ratings were pretty low for this movie, effectively ending Simon’s made-for-TV works to date. With no other Broadway successes to draw from, he had nothing left except to do a screenplay – this one based on characters from his halcyon days of the 60s. (It will be our final blog entry: stay tuned!)

Stage in Simon’s life: none, really, just a follow-up to a once-popular series. (His output of late seems to be wrapping up or following-up on things.)

Rating: **

Jake’s Women (1996)

Following Neil Simon’s critical and commercial success on Broadeway with Lost In Yonkers, he followed-up with a play he’d been tinkering around with since the late 80s. Jake’s Women had its public debut in California in 1990, but Simon rewrote most of it before its Broadway debut in 1990. It reunited his talent with those of Alan Alda, the first time since 1978’s California Suite. It follows the life of a novelist/teacher in his late-50s, probably the most closely autobiographical character the playwright has so far crafted. Simon was still unofficially exiled from Hollywood at this point, so the medium which carried the film adaptation was television, CBS to be exact. It aired in March of 1996, to modest ratings. Not that the stage version fared any better: it closed after seven months.


Jake is a widower of about twenty years who is currently undergoing a separation from his current wife, Maggie. That’s the basic framework here. The catch? Jake, as a writer far too imaginative for his own good, is constantly visited by the women in his life, living or dead, completely in his mind. They interact with him, and each other, often while he is trying to converse with real women (there are no other male characters here besides Jake). The women are:

·   Maggie, his wife (Anne Archer), who is mostly real but occasionally pops up as a spirit, mostly to monitor his goings-on in his temporary singlehood.

·   Karen, his sister (Julie Kavner), who imparts words of wisdom during his more dramatic moments, whether he wants to hear them or not.

·   Julie, his deceased wife (Mira Sorvino), who is eerily aware of her forthcoming death at 35, but relies on Jakes imaginings to give here an awareness beyond her mortality.

·   Edith, his therapist (Joyce Van Patten), who does all that a therapist does, but now must make cerebral house calls.

·   Molly, his daughter (Kimberly Williams), who gets the rare chance, imaginarily, to meet her dead mother. She’s also depicted at the age of 12, where she gets to approve or disapprove of Maggie.

·   Shelia, his girlfriend, briefly (Lolita Davidovich). She bears the full brunt of his psychosis when he proposes a zillion different things for them to do, then yells at her to get out, actually meaning it for his hallucination of Maggie.

Clearly this guy has some issues. But does he really? Don’t we all have these phantoms inside our heads, and if you’re as much in love with women as Jake is, these phantoms tend to be of the female variety. When all is said and done, Jake evicts these distaff spirits within him, without him – and his present situation is mended as a result. (Maggie uses her time away to find a marriage-desirous man, but turns him down at the restaurant where Jake comes back to her.) Jake catches a glimpse of phantoms one more time, but then bids adieu. Memories of the past are a good thing, until they interfere with the present – and the future.

As I mentioned earlier, this is as close to Neil Simon’s own life as a writer that I’ve seen. Floating between past and present, with all the women that have have mattered in his life, Jake approximates so many other haunted protagonists of the theater (Willy Loman comes immediately to mind). This is the literary embodiment, I think, of Simon’s amorous yet tortured soul – his ghosts come not with dour tidings but punchlines, albeit punchlines informed with the wit and wisdom of relationships in 20^th century New York. It all works with all the power of fine drama alnd also the warm, witty humor that we all associate with Neil Simon stagecraft.

In short, it’s an absolute masterpiece.

I know, that being a TV production (and Hallmark-produced at that), it has all the trappings of the all-too-safe sitcom style. That said, although the direction doesn’t offer much of a filmic point of view, and lacks upscale production value, it doesn’t interfere with the purity of the play’s text, either. I pretty much got the sense that I was watching the play, and given the author’s prodigious talent, that’s A-OK with me. The star of the show is really Simon’s brilliant dialogue, and nothing really eclipses that here.

Oh, and the other star? Alan Alda. He fits Simon’s writing like a glove. There were times when I was watching this that I felt like I was watching a Larry Gelbart-penned episode of M*A*S*H (Gelbart, along with Woody Allen and Simon, forms my holy trifecta of brilliant comedy writers). He delivers these lines with overt Vaudevillian flair, emotional turmoil, nuance, subtlety, depth, daring and transcendence – all at once, sometimes. He is the superb mouthpiece for Simon’s multifaceted quips, and as far as I can tell, he retains the complete essence of his Broadway performance right here.

When he’s not playing verbal volleyball with the women inside his head, he’s being serious, and the relationship that depicts that most profoundly is the one between him and Julie, his deceased wife. In the hands of a lesser writer, the whole conceit of her as a dead woman acutely aware of his summoning her up, and the fact that she knows of her death at 35 (he imagines her at 25), could easily be messy and confusing. But it all works clearly and heart-wrenchingly – and it all comes to a head with the climax of the movie, when Jake has Julie meet her adult daughter, Molly. It’s a recipe for disaster, and he knows it, but things strangely work out in the end, and it helps Jake move on past his female fixations. This scene is not simply the best scene in the film; it’s also among Simon’s best work, mixing laughs and tears as only he knows how.

I don’t know for sure, but I can only imagine Simon must’ve been frustrated over the middling reaction to a work he clearly poured his heart and soul into. The year after Jake came and went on Broadway, he penned the book for his Goodbye Girl musical, as well as a new play, Laughter on the 23^rd Floor. In 1995, he finished his “Suite” trilogy with London Suite, but, no longer having he big Broadway clout he once enjoyed, he opened it Off-Broadway, where it played for just over five months. After that, the hits were scarce, and one can only help but to wonder why plays like this one weren’t the sellout successes of its predecessors from the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps the times changed – maybe newer, zippier writing styles were taking over. The know the kind – hipper-than-thou characters reciting contrived dialogue with no “breathing room,” as I like to call it.

They can have that crap. I’ll take this one, thanks.

Stage in Simons life: It’s pretty autobiographical, and confesses the writer’s curse of constant imagining, as well as the gynophile’s curse of loving women entirely too much. 

Rating: ****

The Sunshine Boys (1995)

For the purposes of this canon blog, I’ve generally stayed away from remakes or restagings of previously produced Neil Simon works. So you won’t find the dreadful remakes of The Out of Towners (1999) or The Heartbreak Kid (2007), or the amiable but unnecessary TV version of The Goodbye Girl (2004). However I did make an exception for the televised play version of Barefoot in the Park that aired on HBO in 1983 – I wanted to include a dramatized version for the purpose of reviewing one of his straight plays, and it was a fine interpretation of one of his seminal works, allowing he viewer to focus more on words than star power, as was the case with the Redford/Fonda version. And I also allowed this film, a Hallmark-produced TV version of The Sunshine Boys from 1995, for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s not just a retread: Simon rewrote his original script to update it and accommodate the new casting of Woody Allen and Peter Falk as Al Lewis and Willie Clark, respectively. In many ways, it’s an improvement – some of the scenes that didn’t work in the original are completely excised here, with equal if not greater attention paid to the more successful bits (e.g. the “words that are funny” routine, “Enter” vs. “Come In”, the sliding lock door, etc.). The duo is now a product of the Gold Age of Television, not vaudeville (works just as well), and Allen has more quips dealing with his efforts to modernize – one funny joke involves a five-year old he has come in twice a week to teach him Nintendo. In a way, Simon is better at being fresher when he can still write for “older” folk, commenting on modern things like Seinfeld and music videos.

And the other reason is simple: to witness the meeting of two great comedy minds. Woody Allen finally gets the chance to read Neil Simon script, and if there were ever two greater literary lions of postmodern humor in film, I don’t know them. Even better, they’re on the same wavelength – the only real difference in their product, particularly during the 70s, is that Allen’s is somewhat more literarily intellectual, and surely more neurotic. But both have perfected the craft of wit-sparring to serve romantic comedies – both are peerless in their intuitive kens of dialogue cadence, and the way top-dollar jokes are woven seamlessly within. Allen has the Gorge Burns role here, the saner one, and the fact that he’s younger allows him a more exasperated performance. It fits his natural neuroticism like a glove, and makes him a good entry point for the viewer.

Peter Falk has the greater stretch, and although he first draws comparison to Walter Matthau, who perfected the role, one soon starts to settle down to enjoy the work in its own right. With a gravely, rasping voice that sounds like Columbo with laryngitis, he accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of making senility funny – listening to the same, irrational things over and over again gets to be so frustrating you have to laugh – just like real life. This again is why Allen is such a great foil; his head-shaking incredulity is just what we’re experiencing.

But of course, as was the case with the original, the real theme here is that great comedy works in strange ways, and when these guys are on, they’re on. That’s precisely why they’ve stayed together so long, despite their complete incompatibility. Simon has kept their extended scene performing together (in this case, a film scene) nearly intact – it’s their love of the game that keeps them going, and willing to work together despite their knowing of its absolutely negative repercussions. When the tone turns serious in the film’s final act – Willie’s heart attack – its their recollections of career highlights which profer the most joy, even though still it is laced with petty banter about who so-and-so is and when did they die and so on and so on.

The other note of seriousness, that regarding Willie’s unspoken attachment to his niece (Sarah Jessica Parker), is just a bit less successful than the original’s. Matthau, primed from his brilliant performance in 1971’s Kotch, expertly managed an irrascable exterior while still containing a vulnerability within, evidenced by his sickbed worry upon hearing that his nephew may leave him (still a heartbreaking scene). Falk tries, but that same scene in the remake just doesn’t have the same emotional power. It doesn’t detract from the film, but it doesn’t elevate it into something more either.

On balance, though, there’s much to appreciate here, as Simon’s deft comic hand once again reminds us why he’s the American master that he is.

Rating: ***

Lost In Yonkers (1993)

Neil Simon was in a rut on Broadway in 1991; he needed a hit outside his Eugene trilogy – bad. He must’ve known it was do or die time because he crafted the play that would win him the Best Play Tony and the Pulitzer Prize: Lost In Yonkers. Keeping the same timeframe as his autobiographical plays – the early 40s – he instead switched the tone just a bit, showing us a wartime-era family with far more dysfunction than his own, and thusly a heck of a lot more drama. The narrator this time is also a child, Jay, who’s about as close to normal as the story got. Mercedes Ruehl received a Tony for Best Actress and Irene Worth for Featured, and Simon was hot yet again on the Great White Way.

Two years later, Simon’s old producer, Ray Stark, helped bring the play to the screen, enlisting Martha Coolidge to direct. Wisely, Ruehl and Worth were retained for their respective roles, and Richard Dreyfuss stepped in to play Louie, which Kevin Spacey portrayed on Broadway. Did the film set it on fire as did the play version two years earlier? Not quite, as the film’s 10 million dollar gross was roughly equal to its budget. And it didn’t help that it played in mid May, just before the start of the summer movie season, which that year included that modest indie sleeper Jurassic Park. Yonkers did not exactly come across as popcorn-munching fare.

Our story begins as two boys, Jay and Artie, are brought by their father to see his mother – Grandma, as she is enignaticaly known to all family members. Hard as nail and cold as steel, her reputation precedes her enough to scare the devil out of the two lads. But they have a ob to do – feign affection for her enough so she’ll accept their staying with her, while salesman Dad travels the countryside to scare up some extra dough. The fail – until Grandma’s other child, Bella, so excited about te nephews’ visit, threatens to leave if they don’t get their way. They, and we, soon discover that Bella is somewhat cognitively challenged, but her ebullient spirit and fun-loving attitude helps make up for such deficiences.

More secrets are revealed, nearly all having to do with Grandma’s harsh upbringing of her children. Louie, another son, drops in to say awhile; he’s a shady con-artist needing refuge from some gangsters who seem to mean business. And then ther’s Gert, another daughte, who has a speech impediment caused by breathing difficulties: a trait she developed after being traumatized by Grandma. But the elderly matriarch hasn’t had an easy life either; she saw her father killed by police in Germany  as a horse crushed her foot, and she buried two children from Scarlet Fever early in the century.  A hard life requies one to be hard, is her motto. But her children, now adults, are now more than a little resentful of their dysfunction.

Except for Bella, until now. She’s sweet on a male usher at the local theater, a man who seems to be a bit slow too, but has dreams of opening up his own restaurant. Bella tries for days to summon up the gumption to tell her mother she intends to get married, but it ends in chaos, as Louie is also adament against the pairing based on his suspicion that the man only wants the family money. Bella changes her attitude now – Louie ponies up the money for her, but Grandma thinks she stole it from her. Another crisis, this time ending with Bella exhorting her regret that Mom always treated her like an eternal child, fearful that she might go to a home and leave her. The boys depart, Louie departs… and so does Bella, as Grandma still will not change her ways. A liberation for one person, a lifetime of buried emotions for another.
 

One can quibble with a few flaws here and there, but it’s pretty darn hard not to consider Lost In Yonkers a masterpiece. This may well be Simon’s best screen work since The Goodbye Girl – it’s brim-filled with pathos and heartbreak, featuring characters with tragic backstories, leading lives of quiet desperation. Part Tennessee Williams, part Eugene O’Neill and part Simon himself, this is a story for the ages, revealing to us in alternating shades of humor and sorrow just how wounded those American lives of the traumatic early -20^th century could be, and how so many could exist only by repressing, repressing, repressing.

And Simon has certainly created his greatest “heavy” here (honorable mention goes to Sgt, Toomey from Biloxi Blues). His Grandma is a fearsome persona – one so achingly resonant because we all have someone like her in our family. How can she do this? How can she treat her children this way? Irene Worth inhabits this character like no actress I’ve seen I recent memory – and she doesn’t let the viewer off easy. No smiles, no heartwarming shows of humanity, no easy payoffs which would compromise the integrity of her character. Just a few layers peeled off here and there, to show us the cause of her consternation. Oh—there is one thing---a moment, after Bella says a terrible thing to her, in which she sobs, muffled, into a handkerchief. And I was sobbing too.

Equally winning is Mercedes Ruehl as Bella, a sad, puppy-dog of a wallflower, struggling to burst free out of her shell but constrained by the guilt she feels toward her mother. Grandma made peace with her disability: “The doctors said you were a child, always a child,” and she lives with this with the reasoning that the world is full of hate and cruelty, maybe being a child is not the worst thing to be. Clearly their scenes together are the crux o the film, even though Dreyfuss, Sraithern (as the usher) and the boys do exactly what supporting roles are meant to achieve: support. I won’t soon forget the explosive, skeletons-out-of-the-closet scenes between mother and daughter. Again, no easy answers, just pure drama.

So why weren’t these two actresses (or, heaven forbid, the film itself) rewarded at Oscar time or by that many critics, which could help abet the other oversight? I haven’t a clue. Worth and Ruehl both deliver career-worthy performances, and they should not be penalized because they were rewarded for the same roles with Tonys. Could it have been the unfortunate release date? Or was it the lunkheaded marketing campaign, with the roadside sign showing “Lost In Yonkers” – get it? Maybe, but I suspect it was due to the film’s a bit too perky and conventional direction by Martha Coolidge. She is an actor’s director, not necessarily a stylistic or hip one, so that may explain why more critics didn’t warm up to it. But even just a well-photographed version of a Pullitzer-prize winning play still makes a great movie. The art is in the writing and acting, and good Lord shouldn’t that be enough?

This is probably Simon’s last great work on the screen. His next few projects are TV adaption of previous or new stage works. I should mention, by the way, that the same year of this film, 1993, also brought to the public his stage work Laughter in the 3^rd Floor, which was televised on PBS. I have been trying, futilely, to find a copy, so you won’t get to read a review of it – for now. If I ever procure a copy I will add it to the end of this blog strand.

Stage in Simon’s life: marginally-autobiographical, probably an exaggeration of family members or friends from his boyhood.

Rating: ****

Broadway Bound (1992)

Broadway Bound was the first play I ever saw on Broadway, during the brutally cold Presidents’ Day weekend of 1987. In short, I loved it, although I’m sure it was mostly for the experience as I didn’t really understand much about the show, or its context. Still, I was aware that it was well-written and professionally acted, and I even pled with my folks to wait outside the stage door for Linda Lavin, who played the mother, so I could finally see Alice up close and personal. In retrospect, it was a fitting commencement for my theatergoing career – a fine play from a brilliant playwright, a man who I still hold kn high enough esteem to be writing about him 29 years later.

This version is a TV movie adaptation which aired on ABC in 1992. After the Marrying Man debacle, no film studio would touch Neil Simon with a ten-foot pole, so sadly the final chapter of his Eugene trilogy would be consigned to the boob tube. It wasn’t so bad, actually; unconstrained by the Hollywood requirements of big stars they actually got a talented, theatrically-trained cast to star in it, and the work retains and subtle, theatrical quality it might not have managed on the glitzy big screen. On a whole, the casting is marvelous (with one big exception, which I’ll get to later) and the script spare and strong; ultimately the coda to Simon’s tertiary autobiography is unexpectedly moving and rewarding.

It is now 1948, three years after the war, and Stanley and Eugene are still living with their parents, Jack and Kate, and her aged dad, Ben. The boys are aspiring writers, and they get the chance to do a script for a comedy radio show, mostly due to Stanley’s prodding. He’s the wheeler-dealer of the duo, but his frustrations over Eugene’s doubts and insecurities become more and more evident. Things are worse with mom – she correctly suspects that Jack is having an affair – and her confrontation with him over it leads to a weepy confession that a dalliance had been going on for over a year, and only recently gotten serious.

Grandad understands marital discord all too well: his wife of decades hasn’t lived with him for quite some time, and he’s in no hurry to leave his beloved NY home to live with her in Florida. Even Aunt Blanche, now a wealthy woman after having married a millionaire, can’t persuade him, and Kate is even more resentful of her now with her newfound riches. Stanley and Eugene finally get to hear this show on the radio, but it’s obvious the fiction comes from their nonfiction family life, and it ruffles Jack’s feathers, who’s already insecure from his infidelity. Ultimately, the boys land a deal to write for television, and decide to move to the Big Apple. Jack moves too, under far more unfortunate circumstances, and Eugene marks the moment as a turning point in his life.

One thing that really stands out for me in this work is the tone: meditative, ruminatative, and as quietly sober as the snow falling outside for the duration of the story. Like a good Bergman film, there are a lot of secrets, and regrets here – the characters here

TV ad from 1992

rarely emote so much as they implode. Kate, for example, is not surprised by her husband’s affair; it had been going on for so long. All she can do is remember, and her scene with Eugene remembering dancing with George Raft is one of Simon's best-written moments ever. Hume Cronyn is fantastic as Eugene’s socialist, Trotsky-loving, somewhat senile granddad, a man who provides the work with much needed spontaneity and innocence. And Jerry Orbach is nothing bud sad as the tragically wounded father. A man spending his life trying to do right, but failing at nearly every level. Simon has put adultery on the stage and screen for thirty years at this point, but this is probably his most pathetic, head-shaking depiction. You sure couldn’t get farther from the sunny, optimistic tone of Brighton Beach Memoirs if you tried.

But the biggest flaw for me in this movie is the casting of Johnathan Silverman as older brother Stanley, not Simon alter-ego Eugene, despite the fact that he played this role in the Broadway version as well as the film version of Brighton Beach. Why the switch? I have no idea; it’s not only confusing but also plain unconvincing. Silverman had a Matthew Brodeick-esque quality about him that served him well in this wisecracking role. As the more authoritarian Stanley he’s all wrong. It’s just too bad they couldn’t have had the same guy play Eugene in al three films – they at least had the chance here to get two out of three, and they blew it.

But it’s not enough to sink the film. On the contrary there are some truly lump-in-the-throat inducing moments, as when Eugene hates the writer side of him, calling it a monster, to which his brother replies, “Better get used to him; that moster will be paying your bills!” And then there’s the final goodbye, as the brothers move out, and the family bids farwell. Kate, the unemotional, acetic matriarch is clearly saddened, but stoically says little. And Eugene remembers her this, as well as the heartache her husband’s betrayal has caused her. He leaves behind a wounded family – but it’s his family. The only way to cope is to write, and that’s exactly what he does.

A fine coda to a wonderful trilogy. Goodbye, Eugene. You came a long way.

Stage in Simon’s…. obvious.

Rating:  ***1/2