By some distance, the best project writer/ director Paul Mazursky ever got his hands on; but alas not his best film. More comfortable with episodic structures, he misses the thru-line of interlocked story juggling built into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s wild, tragic, sex farce, making this something of a D.I.Y. assignment for the viewer . . . but worth the effort. Ron Silver (looking like Bob of Bob’s Burgers when bared in the tub) is a Holocaust survivor now living near Coney Island in 1949, scratching out a living ghostwriting lectures for rich, popular Manhattan rabbi Alan King. Married to the Polish shiksha peasant who saved him, he’s also carrying on with 'maybe' divorced manic/ depressive Concentration Camp victim Lena Olin. Then, as if life weren’t complicated enough, ‘dead’ wife Anjelica Huston shows up, very much alive and with her own claims on him. Singer runs this emotional CYCLONE Roller-Coaster as a horned-up elliptical roundelay, each new complication a painful laugh of emotion, shock & recognition. You get a taste of how good it could be when Mazursky pauses in the subway long enough for Silver’s eyes to study the directions pointing Right-to-Manhattan; Ahead-to-The Bronx; Left–to-Brooklyn. If only there were more visual wit and control of the purposefully messy storyline. A pivotal clarifying scene with Mazursky as Olin’s bitter husband should help, but doesn’t. Even so, with its fantastical story of a different kind of ‘living dead,’ and a distinctive cast bringing an absurd sense of comic/tragic fate to life, it’s an intensely enjoyable, great idea of a film.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: You get the feeling Mazursky was thinking Sydney Pollack (safe) when he should have been thinking Woody Allen (goosey). Still, to its credit, as FAIL-SAFE was to DR. STRANGELOVE in ‘64 (square, noble, slightly plodding); so SOPHIE’S CHOICE/’82 is to this.
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