Pge Six
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
Wednesday, December 'I, j 9? 1
P ~ e S x T H M I C I G A N D A IL
Wedned-yDeceber... 197
A new look at middle class desperation
(continued front Page 2)
time before the vandals do
strike.
While these adjustments to
physical threats induce a kind
of insanity, the adjustments
people like the Bentwoods have
to make to super - charged
American society are even
more physically destructive.
Life, as students know better
than anyone else, is a series of
"businesses" - the radical
business, the dope business, the
mytic business, the sex busi-
ness, etc. You've got to accom-
modate yourself to your society,
which today means you've got
to accommodate yourself to
youth and blacks and the whole
schmeer of oppressed people
and their fetishes. Or as Otto's
partner, Charlie, puts It, "If you
don't tune in on the world,
you'll dry up and disappear."
The trouble is that if you do
tune in on the world you'll dry
up and disappear; we'll tolerate
addlebrained kids trying to be
very highly evolved . . . but
addlebrained parents? Nope.
Leon, the aging professorial
ex-husband ofone of Sophie's
friends, is bemused by the titan-
ic struggle to be with it, and
fears only that his students will
try to drug him. Charlie, halo
on hat, becomes a defender of
the poor, knowing all along
that this too is only another
business. Otto, a square by most
people's reckoning, doesn't want
to join the tide. And Sophie
harbors all the liberal senti-
ments without having to act on
any of them. All of which may
tempt you to start tongue
clucking and call them "hypo-
crites." These people, however,
aren't hypocrites. They are the
cursed bourgeoisie, neither rac-
ists nor pot smokers. Just try-
ing to come to terms with it all.
Tired, disillusioned, haunted by
guilt feelings, tortured, hated by
everyone - the lower classes,
minority groups, their own chil-
dren - and worse, hated by
themselves. They are the slent
sufferers, the living proof of
Thoreau's statement, "Most men
live lives of quiet desperation."
And yet, unlike the rest of us,
they have no one tO blame for
their predicament. Kids, often
quite reasonably, can lay their
problems at the determinist
dobrstep of polities and phoni-
ness and capitalism. Mote the
recent Write-Op controversy
where the "academic system"
gets all the blame, not too sur-
prising when you consider that
even murderers are defended
these days as victims of the
Establishment. And kids aren't
the only ones with an out.The
workers, youtrs symbiotic part
ners, can always blame their
tribulations o the kis and the
blacks and the Cermies. Mid-
dle-class liberals don't have
these scapegoats. Everyone else
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is supposedly oppressed; they're
merely depressed. So they can't
even join the revolution.
T h e Bentwoods' bourgeois
plight, however, is only a small
part of their larger desperation.
Sophie (Shirley MacLaine) is
neurotic, self - pitying, unlov-
ing, unhappy; Otto (Kenneth
Mars), often callous, self-cen-
tered, overly certain. Both are
victimized by life, by their mar-
riage. They've just about given
up trying to understand or be
understood, and instead they
exchange small talk, communi-
cating on the surface while ig-
noring the depths. She fixes
dinner and complains about his
fraying underwear. He is solici-
tous over her cat bite. Though
we see only three days in.their
lives, no doubt they'll go on-like
this, no longer interested in
one another but habituated to
their incompatibility.
It's a bleak, relentless pic-
ture that scenarist - director
Frank Gilroy paints. We like to
romanticize, to see marriage as
Love Story, all giggles and kiss-
es; and, in fact, the only happy
couple in Characters are So-
phie's friends Leon and Claire
who do not romaticize. Twenty
years divorced, they sit around
and recall the sweet past when
Leon was a flaming socialist and
Claire was a flaming beauty.
But for the Bentwoods, as for
the rest of us, the alliance drags
on, the couple gets older, weak-
nesses overwhelm strengths, and
emotional needs continue un-
met. Sophie and Otto sigh a lit-
tle and keep on truckin'.
Needless to say, it's not a
happy prospect, and so, natural-
ly, doom hangs thick as smoke
over Characters. But unlike its
predecessors, the film never
lapses into an Albee-esque
shouting match or, at the other
extreme, into urbane drama in
the Sunday Bloody Sunday
mold. There is neither bellow-
ing nor lip-biting, only shat-
tered people living lives we've all
seen and saying words we've all
heard. In outline, Gilroy's stif-
ling daily grind has no more
action than Penelope Gilliatt's
dull choregraphy for Sunday:
eat dinner, go to a party, have
senseless conversations, meet a
friend for lunch, go on a Sun-
day picnic . . . But Gilroy's is a
drama of depth, not breadth,
and its tension is very real. I
cared about these people.
Moreover, avoiding the tradi-
tional framework for domestic
drama, Gilroy also side-steps
the trap that usually snares
playwrights writing for the
screen, even Pulitzer Prize win-
ners like himself (The Subj"ct
Was Roses)--namely, those pre-
cious words that sound so good
on the stage come off tin-eared
in the whiz-bang realism of
cinema. In the theater you can
give pseeches, but in the mov-
ies you have to talk. Gilroy
knows that, and where Miss e
Gilliatt's screenplay for Sun- T
day Bloody Sunday was liter- r:
ary, stolid sentences waiting to r
be chiseled in stone for pos- h
terity, his is literate, subtle and ir
brutally honest. It's so under- a
stated that unless you're a sen- it
sitive viewer, one who sprns a
cheap telegraphy, you'll prob- y
ably walk out or fall asleep. M
Ironically, Characters' great T
strength - its screenplay -- is m
also its chief weakness. That's a
left - handed compliment real- ti
ly, since Gilroy's dialogue is c
generally so superlative that li
You're more apt to notice the w
bumps, those spots where thea- a
ter seems to triumph over film. h
("If he didn't come to see me to
I'd blow away like milk-weed.") W
Luckily, Gilroy's cinematic sense W
is sure, and even ii this, his
first attempt at film direction T
he is less stagey than many vet- w
U-M Barbers
and
Hair-Stylists
8:15 A.M.-5:15 P.M.
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U-M UNION
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4
f _____.u
rans, despite his lingering dra-
natic close-ups. But while Gil-
oy composes adequately, his
eal directorial talent lies in his
andling of actors rather than
n his visuals. Otto and Sophie,
s sensitive entities bound in
nsensitivity, demand exception-
i portrayals. Kenneth Mars (if
ou're looking for versatility,
gars played the Nazi author in
The Producers), and Shirley
gacLaine are equal to the task.
The. net effect of all this is
,hat Desperate Characters be-
omes the Easy Rider of the
beral middle class. People
Hatching their lives peter away
nd seeing no way out. Gilroy,
owever, is really the antidote
o Dennis Hopper. He reminds
s that life ends not with a
ang, but with a whimper.
hey'll be no blaze of glory
hen we go.
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