FOUR WEEKS OF MAY: A NEW LEAF

Welcome to Elaine May Month!  

And not a moment too soon.  I’ve been sitting on this pun of a title for two years now.  It feels good.

Elaine May is a fascinating individual (who, as of this writing, is thankfully still with us at the age of 90).  She’s probably ultimately most well known as a member of a two-person comedy team she formed with Mike Nichols in the 1960’s, an improvisational success that inspired future comedians like Steve Martin and Woody Allen.  However, once the two went their separate ways, May became somewhat of a creative raconteur from there.  A whole other series could be done about her screenwriting career that, among other things, earned her an Oscar nomination for 1978’s HEAVEN CAN WAIT.  Most notably (for our purposes, anyway), she had a brief, but nevertheless consequential, Hollywood directing career.

She’s done it all, dammit, is what I’m saying.  And even with only four movies to her directorial name, she kept reaching for new challenges.  Within those four films alone, we have two dark comedies, a small gangster character piece, and a broad tribute to the Crosby-Hope ROAD TO… movies (that would unfortunately become a requisite punchline for decades).  That’s quite the range for a filmography that isn’t even a half dozen movies long.

Anybody else excited yet?

One quick caveat: technically, I’ve seen one of her movies already, which means I’m going against one of my self-imposed rules this year.  Again.  But, it’s a movie that’s kind of special to me, one that I could argue got me curious about the world of film again, leading us all to this moment right here.  So, give me this one, yeah?

But, that won’t be for another couple of weeks. We start, as always, at the beginning.  Let’s take a look at A NEW LEAF.

A NEW LEAF (1971)

Starring: Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Jack Weston

Directed by: Elaine May

Written by: Elaine May

Released: March 11, 1971

Length: 102 minutes

Based off of the Jack Ritchie short story “The Green Heart”, A NEW LEAF tells the story of Henry Graham (Matthau), a rich layabout who suddenly finds himself completely broke after spending his way through an entire inheritance.  Nobody in his family, least of all his uncle Harry, is willing to float him any longer, and Henry decides the only recourse is to kill himself.  That’s when he gets the idea from his valet to instead secure a loan from Harry with the stipulation that he will get married within six weeks (with the consequence of forfeiting his remaining property if he fails).

This proves more difficult than Henry intended, as his standards are both simple yet nearly insurmountable: his potential bride needs to be beautiful, rich, no family, and agreeable to being married quickly.  For awhile, it’s looking grim. Then, with a week to go, he runs into Henrietta (May), a clumsy botanist who nevertheless checks all the boxes.  They are quickly married that weekend.

From there, it’s a race to secure the bag and sever ties.  Can Henry kill his new bride without her lawyer (who winds up working with Harry against Henry) and waiting staff catching him in the act?

It’s a simple test that I’m about to lay out for A NEW LEAF, but it should be noted from the jump that I frequently laughed out loud while watching it by myself, something that almost never happens with me (watching things alone frees you from the burden of a movie having to be good, lest a partner’s time be wasted, but man, it can cause certain types of movies to kind of fall flat, no?).  May’s ability to wring laughs in a variety of ways is so impressive.  There’s dramatic irony, there are rug-pulls (I mean, just the opening joke of Henry’s ill loved one that he’s concerned about turning out to a sports car…masterful), there are pratfalls.  May has so many comedic colors in her palette, and you rarely see them used so casually as here.

Part of the comedy comes from Matthau, who is playing a little bit against type, at least against the image we typically have of him in our head.  We know him primarily as the drunken slob in movies such as THE BAD NEWS BEARS or THE ODD COUPLE, or perhaps as just a grumpy old man in movies such as, um, GRUMPY OLD MEN.  He’s also certainly played noble and beleaguered in stuff like A FACE IN THE CROWD.  But here, he’s playing posh and upper-crust (a sample line: “Madam, I have seen many examples of perversion in my time, but your erotic obsession with your carpet is probably the most grotesque and certainly the most boring I have ever encountered”).  It’s like he’s an Oscar Wilde character or something.  It’s such an interesting and counter-intuitive turn for him.

We talked a little bit when we took a look at SABRINA about how Humphrey Bogart is probably simultaneously the most famous leading actor in Hollywood history AND somehow underrated. Well, it kind of feels like Walter Matthau is sort of in that category as well. Okay, he’s obviously nowhere near the level of fame and ubiquity that Bogart enjoyed, but we all came across Matthau as a kid in one of the aforementioned roles. But I don’t know how many people have enjoyed him in this. He’s great in A NEW LEAF!

Let’s move from Henry to Henrietta, played by this film’s director.  This wasn’t the original plan, as May originally wanted somebody who would disappear completely, believing (correctly) this was Henry’s story; the studio’s original suggestion of Carol Channing wasn’t going to work.  Paramount also weren’t going to let her pick a replacement, but offered her the same money to play Henrietta herself.  And thus, May’s contentious relationship with studios began in earnest.

Although May can’t help but shine, making her maybe technically a poor fit for the role relative to the stated goal, she does help take the edge off of what could be an impossibly black comedy.  Her Henrietta is a klutz, and she makes the most out of the simple act of holding a cup of tea, but she’s also earnest and genuinely interested in life.  Her role as a botanist doesn’t just provide the movie with its punny title; it’s also the impetus for the movie’s turn to the sincere in its closing moments, as she discovers a new breed of plant over the course of the film’s runtime.

(Also, I should point out that May took the botany aspects of A NEW LEAF seriously, consulting with Dr. Dominick Basile, who was a professor of botany at Columbia, writing scientifically accurate lines of dialogue into the movie and providing accurate equipment for the scenes in Henrietta’s office.  Not being a botanist or really anything resembling any type of scientist, I don’t know that it made a difference to me one way or another, but her attention to detail was impressive to me nonetheless).

Perhaps the most telling aspect of A NEW LEAF is the behind-the-scenes chaos surrounding it which, as mentioned above, would become a recurring theme in Elaine May’s directorial career.  The movie as it currently exists (and likely will always exist) is not technically Elaine May’s vision of the film.  Instead, it’s more of a producer’s cut.  Whole subplots were excised completely by the studios after the fact, including Henry successfully murdering two members of Henrietta’s inner circle.  Even in 1971, it appears that studios weren’t quite ready for their wacky protagonists to be able to be cold-blooded killers.

In the studio’s defense, May went way over budget on A NEW LEAF, going from a $1.8 million budget to $4 million by production’s end.  She went almost a month and a half over schedule, and editing took nearly a year, at which point producer Robert Evans snatched the film from her, going against her “final edit” contract situation.  She subsequently sued Paramount to remove her name from the film to no avail.  Whether this budget inflation and slow editing process was due to inexperience or (more likely to me) May’s quest for perfectionism, I can’t say with the information available to me.  But it is always unfortunate to know that an artist’s true vision on something they created is non-existent.  

Although it’s never been confirmed how long May’s cut was, the rumor is almost three hours.  The final film is right at 102 minutes, so clearly a lot was left on the table here.  It’s very possible this shorter version is the superior one (three hours is long for a comedy), but again, it’s a shame that we’ll never know.

I will say that, for a movie that may be missing up to 75 minutes of content, you don’t really feel much of this studio meddling for most of A NEW LEAF’s run.  The only real evidence of something going down is that it feels like it ends right when the story is about to jump up into another gear.  The surprisingly sweet ending seems to betray the much darker undercurrent the entire movie seems to have, especially when you consider that the final setpiece involves Henry attempting to drown Henrietta on a boat trip on the lake.  It’s not so much that the ending doesn’t work, per se, it’s just that it felt like there were steps missing to get us there.

A thought crossed my mind several times while watching this.

You know what movie A NEW LEAF reminded me of, to the point that I think the two would make for an interesting double feature?

BARRY LYNDON.

I mean, think about it.  Isn’t Henry Graham’s arc over the course of A NEW LEAF sort of the inverse version of Barry Lyndon’s?  Both appear to be guided along by forces beyond their control (beyond Henry’s desire to live comfortably although, Barry also wouldn’t say no to).  The key difference is that Barry seems to keep finding further fortune and success, while Henry’s journey is a continuous struggle against further misfortune.  Barry seems to keep falling upward; even as he becomes a bigger and bigger asshole, fate intervenes to save his skin.  Henry, on the other hand, keeps running into roadblocks keeping him from his selfish goals.  Both movies also give us protagonists played by very of-their-time male actors speaking essentially in prose as they wander against opulent settings they find themselves on the outside of.  

I don’t think there’s any real connection, mind you; A NEW LEAF couldn’t possibly be a riff on BARRY LYNDON since it, you know, came our four years earlier, and BARRY LYNDON is very much a singular auteur-driven take on very specific source material.  But I’d like to think May and Kubrick might have found the same things funny; the absurdity of life and the chaotic randomness that dictates our circumstances at any given time. 

So, even though A NEW LEAF ultimately feels a tad uneven, the comedic voice, the eye for shot composition, the knack for casting, all of it is on display here already.

As is the knack for finding herself on the bad side of a major film studio.

Next week: THE HEARTBREAK KID