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What people do for money and with it, what having money or losing it does to them, is the raw material for “A New Leaf,” the first feature by Elaine May, from 1971. The movie is one of the best romantic comedies ever made. The turmoil it spins around wealth is funny and absurd, and it also veers toward desperate, reckless tragedy. It is in the story’s grimmest and darkest turns that May locates the roots, even the essence, of rapturous romance.
“A New Leaf” (playing three times, starting Saturday, at Film Forum and also readily streaming) is about two middle-aged people who are enabled and disabled by their wealth. Henry Graham (Walter Matthau) is a Manhattan trust-fund princeling who, with his life of leisurely frivolity and hermetic refinement, recognizes no apparent connection between money and how it’s earned or even how it’s spent. Upon learning that his checks have been bouncing, Henry is informed by his lawyer (William Redfield) that he is broke. Instead of selling off his cherished belongings (his art collection, his library, his lavish town house), he takes the advice of his faithful valet (George Rose) to marry rich. But courtship takes money, and Henry’s predatory, grandly mocking uncle (James Coco) lends him a sum to tide him over, on usurious terms, payable in six weeks. That’s how long Henry has to find and wed a suitably wealthy woman—and to kill her for the inheritance. He has no one specific in mind, but, at a sedate society tea, he encounters his prey: Henrietta Lowell (played by May), who’s rich, single, naïve, and terribly awkward (socially, verbally, and physically).
Henrietta’s teeming fortune has enabled her single-minded enthusiasm for botany—she’s a passionate amateur in the field, and this takes up most of her time. While Henry’s money allows him to cultivate his exquisite tastes for fine art, clothing, wine, and cars—he’s less an aesthete than a sybarite who takes enormous pleasure in and comfort from the best of everything—Henrietta’s wealth insulates her from judgment and experience. It allows her to tunnel into her eccentricities, her utter tastelessness (her preference in wine, for instance, runs to cheap and sticky kosher stuff). Finding her to be shy, passive, flustered, oblivious, and vulnerable, Henry reads her like a book. He marshals his chivalrous bravado, storms into her life like a shining action hero, awakens her romantic yearnings, and gets her to agree to marry him. Yet, he is repulsed by the idea of sharing a home or a life with her. While she studies botany, he studies toxicology, because he is going to follow through on his plan to kill her.
The keen depravity of May’s comedy of murder is all the sharper for the outrageous precision of its humor. Matthau adds Henry to his unique gallery of the pompous and the orotund, and adds his own whimsical spin to May’s coruscating dialogue, from the very start. (Henry turns “carbon on the valves”—the trouble with his puckish Ferrari—into a mystical yet absurdist incantation.) May brings enormous pathos to Henrietta—the true-hearted innocent who finally finds love, but with the wrong man—and centers on the character (and on her own performance) some of the most inventive humor of modern cinema.
At the time of making “A New Leaf,” May was already a famous entertainer, part of a celebrated improv-comedy duo with Mike Nichols. The pair broke through in 1960, when their act went to Broadway; they played the 1962 Madison Square Garden party for President John F. Kennedy which is mainly remembered for Marilyn Monroe’s performance. At the height of their fame, they broke up the act—over creative differences involving a play she’d written and that he was going to star in. Nichols soon became a theatre director, then moved to movies (starting fast, with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” in 1966, and, the following year, with “The Graduate”). May (who kept on writing plays) acted in a few movies around the same time, but had little experience in the art when she went into production on “A New Leaf” in late 1969. She instantly proved to be a director of a rare, original sensibility.
In her directorial début, May displays a gift of visual inventiveness, comedic composition and timing, and, for that matter, the unleashing of torrential emotion (whether antic or poignant) by simple means. “A New Leaf” instantly launched her to the forefront of American filmmakers. Moreover, the center of her teeming imagination is her own performance, which is as verbally rarefied as her prior career promised. But May is also as physically gifted as the great silent comedians, with a matching awareness of framing and timing, of the relationship of performance to images. As actor and director, May invests Henrietta’s clumsiness with charming dexterity and grace. A honeymoon scene of Henrietta struggling to get into a toga-like nightgown is a three-plus-minute mini-masterwork of comedies of errors. It’s the movie’s centerpiece, one rendered more moving for its erotic and romantic implications.
But May’s psychological acuity and emotional audacity are even more radical than her comedic vision. “A New Leaf” hurtles, Bluebeard-like, toward the death of an innocent who’s pure of heart; this is the very essence of the love story. Henrietta truly loves Henry, at least as he presents himself to her. He defends her against a haughty hostess, treats her clumsiness as a non-issue, and puts her chaotic household in order (albeit only to preserve the fortune that he’s plotting to soon inherit). His energetic devotions have given her a newfound confidence in herself, a brighter and bolder self-image, a new feeling of self-esteem.
The overwhelming paradox of “A New Leaf,” and one of the many marks of May’s genius that the movie reveals, is the overwhelming sweetness unleashed by its plot of horrors. Henry’s flood of attentiveness, indulgence, devotion, and admiration is both a monstrous deception and a brilliant performance—a majestic impersonation of a loving man, one that Henrietta takes at face value and which viewers, despite all their knowledge of Henry’s ploy, are lured into perceiving as such. Henrietta’s blossoming under his falsely benevolent yet unrelentingly constructive ministrations is authentic.
It’s no spoiler to say what May does for her most audacious twist. Henrietta finds out that Henry is trying to kill her, and, far from ending the romance, her discovery seals it. May works the wonder with an infinitesimally light touch. This is a couple starting out with the hatred and bitterness—the lack of illusions and the redemptive self-overcoming—that usually comes only with years of marriage.
“A New Leaf” offers echoes of three absolute classics: F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise,” from 1927, in which a man attempts to rebuild his marriage after trying—and failing—to kill his wife; D. W. Griffith’s “Way Down East,” the story of a victimized innocent who is pulled back from the brink of death by a sincere lover; and Charlie Chaplin’s “Monsieur Verdoux,” a Bluebeard tale in which he plays a man of refinement who kills a series of wives in order to sustain his life style. There’s nothing imitative or neoclassical about “A New Leaf,” however; May starts out as an original and develops themes and styles that are as much a matter of profound artistry as of passionate, personal insight. She has made only three feature films since: “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Mikey and Nicky,” and “Ishtar.” She endured studio interference (she brought, and lost, a lawsuit over the reëditing of “A New Leaf”) and the obtuse hostility of critics (the sublime, outrageously original “Ishtar” essentially ended her directorial career). She is, with this too small body of work, one of the greatest of filmmakers. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
