“YOU CAN SUM ME UP IN ABOUT TEN WORDS—a former student of English literature who went downhill from there.” It’s not clear whether Mike Nichols studied English in his brief stint at NYU before dropping out, but anyone who sees him in the masterly 1997 film of Wallace Shawn’s play The Designated Mourner feels the resonances between the main character—a brilliant, or at least devilishly clever, aging man who has gigglingly sold out to a terrifyingly corrupt system—and Nichols himself. Mourner is Nichols’s only film performance and, my hand to God, it is one of the greatest in all of cinema. (Pauline Kael cited it as one of the rare examples of someone doing something new and inventive in film acting.) A full retrospective of Nichols’s film-directing work is taking place at the Cinémathèque française this May and June—and unfortunately, the key Nichols work they are missing is the David Hare–directed Mourner. Shawn’s study of an upscale Western society gently shading into totalitarianism stands as a defining movie (along with Mike Judge’s Idiocracy) of our era, and the picture works because of Nichols’s performance as Jack—a glib, convivial jack-of-all-trades who happily throws his wife and her dad under the bus for a cushy spot in the new world. Nichols’s performance, laden with hiccups and wrong-footed rhythms, brings his own mannered realness to the character; one feels that his slick, self-rationalizing sellout is a confessional creation. As the retrospective will show, Nichols was justly acclaimed as the greatest whore of his generation.
But before there was Mike Nichols the director of stage and screen, there was the acerbic uptown comedy duo of Nichols & May. Both friends went on to become filmmakers: Nichols the dauphin of upscale entertainment, Elaine May the dark sorceress of avant-garde screwball comedy. What divergent paths! May’s four acrid features to date are each hallowed, presently worshipped by a cult of millennials (who might find her gags hopelessly sexist had she signed her films “Alan May”). Nichols’s work, on the other hand, is largely sighed over as what-might-have-been: There is a feeling that a first-rate mind squandered himself on tinny boulevard farce and, later, high-concept bollocks on the level of the J. J. Abrams–penned Regarding Henry, in which a yuppie learns how to be a good person by experiencing a brain injury. And without any irony! In a Mike Nichols movie! Talk about wasted potential.
For the stage, Nichols won massive acclaim for mechanical Neil Simon contraptions to which, they tell us, Nichols brought the breezy wind-up and seams-showing zetz of real life. His takeaway from this early success was to keep insurance in mind, not to tackle eccentric material—to think, as he would probably put it, of the main chance. Seen today, a timely confection like Working Girl, in which blowsy chav Melanie Griffith conquers the big city, loses most of its charm and flashes most of its shuffle-ball-step contrivance. Silkwood, Nichols and screenwriter Nora Ephron’s attempt to sculpt a tragedy out of a trailer park, plays wholly inauthentic now, and as for Mike’s cinematicizing of Doc Simon’s Biloxi Blues—as a great man once said: Don’t even ignore it. But there are a handful of masterpieces that those who have canonized the New Hollywood greats—like Sam Wasson with his new Coppola hagiography The Path to Paradise—have utterly ignored. Though we think of him as an Uptown Johnny a whole generation older, Nichols was roughly contemporaneous with Altman and Scorsese. A few of his works deserve to be seen in the same auteurist glow.
It is my experience that Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, a glacial film rendering of what began as a Jules Feiffer play, is the one film of the ’70s (along with Fosse’s All That Jazz) that young people can pretty unanimously get behind. It may be because the man/woman combat it limns is so eternal: It is the quintessential ’70s movie even though a good part of it seems to be taking place in the waning days of the Truman administration. It may also be that the text—a mixture of ticktock comedic mechanics and Cassavetes rawness—is perfectly set against iceberg imagery from Nichols and Fellini cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno. (Alas, this mix of domestic emotional violence and arctic altarpiece imagery inspired the cinematic career of Neil LaBute.) But when Nichols the auteur really took off was at the end of his life, with two little-remarked-upon masterpieces for HBO that reveal him at his most formally achieved and most tender—adaptations of two midwit theater enterprises that take them to Valhalla.
Wit begins with a pizzicato stab of Henryk Gorecki’s violins and Christopher Lloyd leaning into the camera to bark “You have cancer!” The bracingness of the opening sets the tone for the next ninety-odd minutes, in which Emma Thompson’s aloof English lit Ph.D. faces ovarian cancer head-on and loses. Onstage the heroine’s literate joust with the Grim Reaper is an all-expenses-paid whistlestop tour for a grande dame actress, a series of boffo bits feeding an inevitable wet-eyed ending. Nichols’s telling is heavy on the implacability of death and the fragility of the flesh casing outside the Dickinson-like mind; it was probably a bonus that Thompson’s brittle facade excludes empathy on an almost endocrinal level.
But the real summing-up, the Book of Life in the Nichols canon, is his six-hour Angels in America. The text is as common to us now, and as seemingly redundant, as Wilder’s Our Town, but Nichols performs an act of diabolical abracadabra on Tony Kushner’s earnest socialist meanderings—the macabre alchemy is not far from what Altman did to Come Back to the 5 and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. (Altman was the first intended director for Angels—one can only imagine the cosmic cymbal crash had his Theater Period met his Polyvocal Period!) From the harrowing oboe of Thomas Newman’s theme to Stephen Goldblatt’s long lenses on Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep) gloating over the AIDS death of Roy Cohn (Al Pacino), Nichols never puts a foot wrong—the movie is a virtuoso exercise of perfect taste.
That was always the rap on Nichols—that he was a rich kid with too good manners. But in the end, he spun that mannerliness into heavenly light.
The Mike Nichols Retrospective runs May 29–June 22 at the Cinémathèque française in Paris.
