The Poor Man's Jules and Jim

IT STARTED WITH a flip of the coin. Jeannette, the strong-willed, pleasure-seeking, voluptuous Southern wayfarer who has come into Willie and Phil's life borrowed the nickel from a tottering old alcoholic swooning on his park bench in Washington Square Park. Heads she moves in with Willie, tails with Phil. She was broke, and both men, madly in love with her, had offered shelter in their respective lofts. Heads. We lose.

Paul Mazursky's new film examines this threesome, their fears and their foibles. But Willie and Phil is about much more--it attempts to catalogue the 1970s. Like a poet writing about the break-up of a love affair the day after it has ended, however, Mazursky lacks the perspective for such an effort. In fact, the director/author of the film must intervene and fill in gaps in the plot with narration. This awkward device never makes the viewer feel comfortable. He's making a movie about a decade only nine months behind us. He tries to show us ourselves, and we're not supposed to like it.

Willie and Phil contains few brilliant insights into the 1970s, but rather a string of overwrought cliches. He gives us the hedonistic and self-conscious '70s, a time when people seek instant gratification and big bucks. In his movie, Jeannette (Margot Kidder) epitomizes Self-Gratification, admitting "all she wants is to feel good." Phil (Ray Sharkey) plays Big Bucks, the New York photographer gone to California to bring in big money and live in big houses, with glossy pictures of himself hung all over his mansion. The Mystic is Willie (Michael Ontkean). Mazursky, whose last movie, An Unmarried Woman, successfully analyzed an urban marriage gone awry, tries to write a morality play of our own time. It is an ambitious project, but somehow an impossible task at this juncture. How in 1980 can a man make a movie about 1979 and do it successfully?

THE MOVIE BEGINS with an audience watching the end of Truffaut's classic picture about two friends falling in love with the same capricious girl, Jules and Jim. Mazursky thus claims to be updating and Americanizing this classic. Willie and Phil meet outside the theater in 1970 in Greenwich Village and, as the narrator tells us, "became great friends." They hated the Vietnam war, and they loved Truffaut. One had a predilection to Dante, the other to baseball. They shared lofts and aspirations, beer and self-condemnation.

Willie and "Phillie," in fact, are almost interchangeable. Willie Kauffman, a Jewish English teacher, wants to find himself. Phil D'Amico, an Italian photographer, wants to be a Jewish intellectual. They both fall in love with the same woman, both accompany her to the hospital when she bears one of them a child, take saunas together and play chess. In short, they are two-thirds of an isosceles triangle. But still, Willie and Phil is not a movie about this menage a trois as much as about the times.

Mazursky attempts to create a mood of self-consciousness, a theme he perceives as archetypal of the 1970s. Mazursky uses mirrors and cameras in this way throughout the film. Willie and Phil opens with an audience watching a movie. That Phil is a photographer is no coincidence; he takes pictures of the three of them. Jeannette becomes involved in the film business when she moves to California. The movie ends as it began, with a film, though this time Willie and Phil are strolling outside the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Mazursky has failed at an impossible task, to make a movie about the times we live in, and hope that it can so successfully document the time that people will look to it ten or twenty years from now as the definitive film about the 1970s. His eye for detail is often marvelous--from waterbeds to thin ties, from dropping acid and the emotions that follow (Jeannette claims her hands have flown away while Phil screams his head weighs a thousand pounds) to well decorated lofts.

MAZURSKY'S BEWILDERING script resonates satire as well as straightforward dialogue; it makes for dense, often unfathomable exchanges. When Jeannette looks at Willie early on and says, "Don't tell me that you love me, just love me," we can't be sure whether the writer is making fun of the famous lines from Love Story. The recurring line: "our destinies are interlocked forever," which Jeannette announces the first time they all meet, teases us, but are we expected to take it seriously.

Some of the movie's difficulty lies in the acting, though only Ontkean as Willie fails entirely. He portrays this rich and challenging character vapidly, as if he's not even in the movie. Sharkey comes on like gangbusters, and his boisterous Phil might be trying to wake Ontkean from his deep sleep. Sharkey has the funniest lines in the film and delivers them well.

We like Jeannette, Mazursky's most intriguing yet incomplete character, at the outset. She flirts her way into our hearts in Washington Square Park. Soon, however, we realize that she's involved in her relationships with Willie and Phil only because they make her feel good. Unthinking and selfish, she doesn't make us care for her.

Like the narrator says of the two leading men, Mazursky is "looking for answers but not knowing the questions." Is Mazursky trying to make a major film about the Seventies? Or is he addressing the way women play on men's minds? The director cannot decide. As a result, his movie deteriorates from a menage a trois to a cliche a trois, from consciousness-raising to stream-of-consciousness.

In the end, Willie and Phil--abandoned by Jeannette who has fallen in love with a Russian immigrant taxi driver--eventually get married, have children and live "very ordinary lives." This flimsy, tacked-on ending resolves nothing. What happens to Jeannette? Does she have an ordinary life? Why doesn't Mazursky answer these questions? Does he know?

IN HIS ATTEMPT to put the Seventies on screen as the major character, Mazursky has left too many questions unanswered. His movie about seeking leaves his audience searching, but there is nothing to find. The people in Willie and Phil do not provoke or stimulate. The resolution of this film that attempts to capture a decade is ultimately as empty as its characters. Clearly, this is not Mazursky at his best. Clearly, this is not a right triangle.