Word: rafelson
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...KING OF MARVIN GARDENS. Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson are superb in Bob Rafelson's tenaciously fascinating rendering of the dead end of the American dream...
...RAFELSON'S MONOPOLY METAPHOR is too slick a formula. He has poached inconsistently on the terrain Arthur Miller familiarized: Shopworn sales talk has become the idiom of a society based on manipulation, commercial go-getting has been universalized as a private ethic, preservation of personal integrity means self-destruction. These are his cool assumption, the truisms of one who has seen-it-all. Sentimentially is a demon to him, so he lavishes heavy filmic methods in an effort to play it tough, and it is wholly at the expense of his material. He has twisted the form of his film...
WHAT IS CRIMINAL about this sort of self-centered expertise is that it usurps the film's only potential interest, its triangular network of human relationships. Rafelson splurges on suggestiveness and bankrupts the meaning of his suggestion. Sally's menopausal trauma is supposed to be a simmer that slowly comes to boil in manic proportions. But Rafelson dissects it into a series of chic vignettes; she throws a tantrum over rusty bathwater, is glimpsed through a bedroom door, naked, giddily squirting a watergun at a cowboy costumed Jessica. Tear-streaked, she burns her beauty aids with funereal ceremony, mourns...
...Rafelson's raw materials are first rate: sensitive acing (except for Julie Anne Robinson). Lazlo Kovacs's cinematography, a glib sharp-tongued script. But he Jumps them together without logic or order. The "no exit" situation would seem well suited to psychic drama. But Rafelson leaves unexplored Nicholson's talent for tempestuousness and dwells in a tone of wistful resignation. The problem again is Rafelson's self-conscious world-weariness. He shows Nicholson improvising in the bathroom. "The form of the tragic autobiography is dead. I have chosen radio...because my life is hopefully, comically unworthy." If this...
...flesh and muscle fabric. It is a blood brother of the genre established with Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces. These films bore the double burden of avoiding Hollywood debris and finding a voice independent of more practiced European avant-gardism. And they emerged as wholly American. Now Rafelson feels it his aesthetic duty to be new again. The problem is that his basic landscape hasn't changed, and so as be remodels his methods he sacrifices sincerity. The onetime pace-setter is pacing anew having lost his bearing...