Oy, oy, what can the matter be?

Press, 4 December 1978, Page 12

Oy, oy, what can the matter be?

I AT THE CINEMA Stan Darling

If Alexander Portnoy , were around today, he would have i plenty of complaints. About ithis movie. See it if you can handle . it, the advertisements say •about "Portnoy’s Complaint,” and we only wish • they would leave those •’ cheap double entendres in better hands. ■ Now playing at the Avon, this film was made in 1972. It has never been in New | Zealand before. The well- ’ known Philip Roth story of ’an anal compulsive, impotent Jew with an infantile i fixation was banned in the '. past. It must have been on • account of the language, and scenes (not really seen, in this civilised portrayal) of • things that are, well, better i off in a book. | j Parts of the film are very | funny, especially Portnoy’s monologues, but they are

e combined in a strange way e with background music and t occasional sight gags that make it seem that Portnoy e has been shoehorned into a y glossy situation comedy. -i He is first seen as a 1. Walter Mitty character, une • dressing women with . his n eyes while he tries to main-

n r tain decorum as the Com-' r missioner of Human Opportunity in New York City. He ' is troubled by visions of The Monkey, still jumping from e { buildings and screaming for • him. So he hoofs off to spill it all in another session ’with Dr Spielvogel. Mom is played by Lee Grant, an unlikely bit of I, casting that works well, and ! The Monkey is Karen Black. She is good, too. Richard Benjamin's Portnoy is not. • quite right, but even he will; do, and Jill Clayburgh does’ a quirky job as the Israeli• girl who beats him up. He is finally reduced to a man sentenced to impotence • by an unseen judge who tells him: “Your heart is an empty refrigerator.” Probably no-one could ’ have put “Complaint” oni the screen and made it work, but the director. ’ Ernest Lehman, does an in- ' teresting job of failing. ’ Michel Legrand’s background music, romantic and: uplifting, is way out off place, and one failure that is : ludicrous. • Lehman had never di-1 • rect'ed before. He is a good I • screenwriter (“North "by • •North-west,” “The Sound of' • Music,” "Whos Afraid of ’ Virginia’ Woolf?”) and he • • obviously admires the di-1 i reeling methods of Alfred I ’ Hitchcock. He copies some i of them. “This is my only life, and

I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke,” Portnoy says. One problem with the film is that it skips so painfully from joke to drama. What worked in the book doesn't come across.

Portnoy s always told to “be good, be obedient and a little gentleman” by Mom, but all he wants is to be bad and enjoy it. Scenes such as Portnoy and The Monkey talking dirty in a lift, in front of two little old ladies whose expressions never change (we sj?e later they are deaf, and talk in sign language) are touches right out of Lehman’s past work for Hitchcock. So is the kind of camera work that zooms slowly out a hotel room window and pulls back with no apparent cut through a covered bridge opening.

Unfortunately, the good parts do not add up to a good movie.

May we join you in your final agony, Alex? May we scream?