In the clip above, I discuss Elaine May’s third feature, “Mikey and Nicky,” from 1976. That it should be a feast of performance is no surprise, given what she had already accomplished as a director (in “A New Leaf” and “The Heartbreak Kid”), and given the extraordinary cast—Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, in the title roles, dominate the film. Though they’re quite as freewheeling and spontaneous and dangerously alive onscreen as they are together in Cassavetes’s own films (they were two-thirds of the desperately rampaging trio in “Husbands”), May takes a different perspective on their rowdy male antics. The lack of sympathy, even the cruelty, of men toward women in Cassavetes’s films is one side of a battle in which men are fighting with and against women—even the women they love—for their lives and their identities, against their better natures and better judgment. For May, the stakes are different. She presents two men—a smooth-talking swinger and a bland, practical square—who are small-time mob players in Philadelphia. The swinger has overplayed his hand—he’s been thrown out of his house and, after the murder of an associate, knows he’s the target of a planned hit by his boss (played spicily by the famed acting teacher Sanford Meisner); the square is happily married and, though not exactly prized by the boss, manages nonetheless to make himself useful and keep his steady foothold in a turbulent realm.
May’s judgment on manhood is harsh: it entails renunciation, submission, humiliation, and the willingness to betray and to break the relationships forged in the heat of male bonding. Or, to be a man, one must stop being one of the guys.
