starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder
by Walter
Chaw The older I get, the
better I understand
Billy Wilder. And the better I understand Billy Wilder, his weariness
and acerbic
sense of humour, the more I feel comfortable saying, with that complicated mix of affection and fair
warning
that I think indicates his work as well, that his movies are
assholes and mean it. Billy Wilder, the
ten-cents-a-dance Austrian gigolo, the roommate of Peter Lorre who
learned
English by
listening to Dodgers games on the radio, the admirer of Ernst Lubistch.
The guy
who demanded he be allowed to direct his own screenplays and so made a
legendary hyphenate debut with Double Indemnity.
The writing partner of
both Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, the man who made whores of
Audrey
Hepburn
and Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, because nothing could ever be
as
simple, as innocent, as it appeared at first glance. The guy
who
lost
family in Nazi concentration camps, who came up with the best closing
line in movie history, which was
"nobody's perfect." Maybe the last line of The Apartment--"Shut
up and deal"--is a close second. Narrative context tells us the line
refers to a card game; the Wilder context suggests a
certain way of looking at the world: coping, acceptance, fatalism.
Would you
believe The Apartment is actually one of
Wilder's optimistic
films? Optimistic because the way it views the world is through a
scrim
of absolute cynicism--and despite it, despite all the towers falling
down,
there's the possibility of love, sweet and simple, between Ms. Kubelik
and Mr.
Baxter.
|
C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) sits at one desk out of hundreds, adjusting numbers and pining for the day he has his own office and a key to the executive washroom. That's why he lets his boss, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and all of Sheldrake's management cronies use his apartment as an anonymous bed for their dalliances: facilitated sin in exchange for a little extra consideration once a seat at the table open up. Wilder handles the early scenes of Baxter standing in the rain, waiting for his apartment to vacate, with the wit and balance that made him a legend while giving lie to the idea that of the great Hollywood auteurs, Wilder's the toughest to pin down to a style--to a give. I'd offer it's the Wilder protagonist that is his greatest "tell": outsiders, losers, each looking to be accepted into the larger group but deciding, at the moment of assimilation, that perhaps being on the outside was better all along. If they don't figure it out, they end up floating face-down in a swimming pool.
Baxter will figure it out, though not before his neighbour
Dr.
Dreyfuss (a wonderful Jack Kruschen) develops a very bad opinion of
this guy
with crates of empty liquor bottles left outside his door and a new
girl
calling out through their shared walls every night. Risqué stuff for
the '60s,
you'd say--and you'd be wrong. In the same year, after all, you had Psycho,
Eyes Without a Face, and Peeping Tom,
the
nouvelle vague
firing up with Breathless, Fellini putting Anita
Ekberg in a fountain in
La Dolce Vita, Bergman telling a particularly
nasty
fairytale with The
Virgin Spring, and Antonioni telling another via L'Avventura.
The
heroes of the era are assholes like Hud and everyone played by
Steve
McQueen. In the '60s, Old Hollywood went to places like The
Misfits to
die. The decade begins here; it ends with Rosemary's Baby
and Easy
Rider and The Wild Bunch and the rise
of
the New American Cinema.
Sheldrake's goomah is sweet elevator operator Fran
Kubelik (MacLaine), on whom Baxter develops a crush ultimately
undimmed
by the knowledge of what she's been up to with the boss. Ms. Kubelik
tries to
kill herself one night during an episode of self-loathing. Baxter
saves her, and discovers that he doesn't like who he is,
either. The
Apartment is
essentially about Baxter deciding that doing the right thing--even
though the
right thing means being destitute in New York--matters more than
anything else. It's an extraordinarily modern film in that sense, wise
about the
world, about how nothing is ever as simple as love at first sight, but
should
be--and would be, if not for the way we complicate
everything with
our venality and confuse what's important in our lives. The
Apartment lays
it all out there. All the longing, desperate and thunderstruck, of
falling in
love with any girl who talks to you.
It's an antecedent to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in that the film is essentially about broken people who hate themselves. Baxter and Ms. Kubelik are incapable of finding any self-worth worth treasuring. They're self-destructive and motivated by the dim idea that they deserve something better, but they don't really believe it until it's almost too late. The wonder of the film is that without any kind of sentiment, with a surplus of humour, with a remarkable amount of real artistry in its timing and performances, it examines what it is to love someone unrequitedly, then to embark on a relationship that's probably doomed in a world this bleak, since the human compulsion to love someone with all your heart is at the end maybe all you've got. It understands that love is always accompanied by desperation, by the memory of loneliness and the threat of its return. The Apartment is more meaningful to me each time I see it. Shut up and deal.
THE BLU-RAY DISC
MGM shepherds The Apartment to Blu-ray in a
2.35:1, 1080p transfer that is absolutely
crystalline.
There are few source defects to speak of, no blooming or haloing,
no
motion fuzz--and yet it betrays little in the way of digital tampering,
presenting
an
image that still looks, still moves, like film. Clearly, this got the
studio's crown-jewel treatment. The original mono audio has
been opened up for a remix delivered losslessly in 5.1. Thankfully,
the DTS-HD MA track resists any
fireworks in favour
of an enveloping warmth; the finale in a crowded
bar on
New Year's Eve is magnetic, somehow, pulling you into that
moment--that bitter,
funny, romantic moment--we won't see the likes of in another romantic
comedy
until Charlie Kaufman's ode to imperfection and hope.
Bruce Block contributes a feature-length yakker
that tells all the old stories about the production and assorted lore.
Cameron
Crowe covers a lot of the same ground in his book-length interview Conversations with Wilder (and Wilder, for his part, was always good with the anecdote, no matter
his
carefully-worn crotchetiness). Still, it's a good listen for the newcomer.
"Inside The Apartment" (30 mins., SD) interviews
MacLaine
and Chris
"son of Jack" Lemmon, among other assorted
suits and historians. It's a hagiography, of course, but if any
movie
deserves
it, it's The Apartment.
Besides, I'll never tire of hearing about
MacMurray's horror that
his reputation as a nice guy took such a massive hit with this film.
Similarly, "Magic
Time"
(13 mins., SD) is essentially just a sloppy wet kiss directed at
Lemmon,
useless
but mostly inoffensive. What's important to note about The
Apartment is that it was feted at the time
with a
Best Picture Oscar--a rare example of the Academy being in absolute
tune with
the zeitgeist. (And lest we forget that it, along
with another Hollywood
big-earner, Psycho, reverted to beautiful
b&w cinematography,
television be damned.) The thin crust covering all the worms alive in
the
Eisenhower years were coming up at exactly the same time. It's
ferocious stuff,
and it hasn't aged a day. The movie's trailer, in HD, rounds out the
disc.
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