Movies : COMMENTARY : Artistic Vision--Still a Hard Sell : The art of film making vs. the business of making movies: Mazursky’s ‘Enemies’ is another case study

In the heyday of the studio system, and for some time thereafter, a successful director who routinely took on assignments from his bosses would occasionally be rewarded with the opportunity to make his “own” films. These films would not infrequently turn out to be less enlivening than the director’s crass commercial work, but not always. Corporate policy at least begrudgingly recognized the right of artists to be artists.

The current brutal bottom-lineism of Hollywood precludes such recognition. Consider the strange case of Paul Mazursky.

After directing Disney’s 1986 “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” one of the highest-grossing comedies of all time and the first big hit of the Eisner/Katzenberg regime, Mazursky was geared up to direct an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1972 novel “Enemies, A Love Story.” According to Mazursky, he approached Disney about the project and was offered some development money and a budget that proved unmanageably low. Since Mazursky had made the studio a fortune, not to mention a terrific movie, Disney’s decision not to make the $10-million film would appear to be the height of bad manners--not to mention bad business. But the decision is perfectly in keeping with a Hollywood where successful directors are working, all right, they’re just not working on what they want to be working on.

For example, at roughly the same time that Disney passed on “Enemies,” it was employing Roger Spottiswoode (“Under Fire”), a major director without a major hit to his credit, to direct a hand-me-down action thriller, “Shoot to Kill,” and a stupid-pet-tricks movie, “Turner and Hooch.”

Of course, this particular saga has a happy ending. “Enemies, A Love Story,” a film Mazursky wanted passionately to direct ever since he read the Singer novel 18 years ago, has been made, though not, of course, by Disney. The risk-taker turned out to be Morgan Creek, the production company co-helmed until last October by James Robinson and Joe Roth. Roth is now the movie production chief of 20th Century Fox, which is distributing “Enemies.”

“Enemies” has proven to be a major critical success, and though its ultimate box office performance is still in doubt, it has been drawing a healthy, steady following in limited release. (This being Hollywood, where resentments are as long-lasting as tomorrow’s three-picture deal, it’s not surprising that Mazursky is once again working for Disney on his next film, “Scenes From a Mall,” starring Woody Allen and Bette Midler.)

The dread stigma of uncommerciality no doubt prompted Disney, and every other major studio, to reject “Enemies.” A movie derived from the work of a Nobel Prize winning novelist about despairing, polygamous Holocaust survivors in 1949 New York is not the sort of film that traditionally lines the corporate coffers.

Studio bosses aren’t wrong in believing that these elements, at least in theory, are risks. Movies with frankly Jewish themes, or frankly dark themes, for that matter, have never found much of a home in Hollywood. Neither are they wrong in assuming such a film would be a difficult sell requiring careful handling. But studios aren’t challenged by difficult sells anymore, if they ever were. The prevailing Hollywood attitude is, if you can’t think of a way to sell the movie, better not make the movie. It used to be a joke how the schlock film companies would create grabby titles for horror flicks and then make the movies to fit the titles. The major studios aren’t operating on a much more elevated level.

Even if “Enemies” were to end up limboing below the break-even point, hasn’t Disney reached the point of profitability where it can afford to “carry” a film of this quality? According to my calculations, shouldn’t this be the moment in its evolutionary history when the studio, no longer simply content with its loot, hankers for some heavy-duty prestige?

But perhaps the seriousness of “Enemies” isn’t the kind that gratifies studio heads. It doesn’t have the weighty meritoriousness of blockbuster message movies like “Gandhi” and “Cry Freedom”; it’s not the sort of film that makes studio bosses feel like humanitarian healers. Neither is it an inflammatory “issue” film like “Do the Right Thing,” or a scandalous controversy-in-a-bottle movie like “The Last Temptation of Christ.” (The latter two films, to its credit, were distributed by Universal.)

To some extent, those films carry their own imprimatur of outrage that helped buy off, or at least set the terms for, the inevitable controversy that followed their release. But a movie like “Enemies” has nothing going for it except the artistry and the emotional depth that Mazursky brings to Singer’s material, which is to say, it has everything going for it except the standard commercial reassurances.

Actually, I suspect Paul Mazursky has a bit easier time of it than most film artists in Hollywood. His commercial instincts and his artistic instincts are often in sync, at least in his comedies. “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” does not look like the work of someone reined in and compromised; neither did Mazursky’s very first film, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” He has a gift for expressing the human comedy in a way that engages audiences without playing down to them. In other words, he’s commercial in the best, if not the most boffo, sense.

Still, the depth of emotion in “Enemies” is greater than anything Mazursky has attempted before. Most directors contemplate their “dream” projects for so long that, when they’re finally made, they seem stillborn. “Enemies” is unusual in that its long-term delivery has resulted in a richness and a meditativeness that seems truly vital. It’s a movie of great feeling about people who believe they have no feelings left. Ron Silver’s Herman Broder, who survived the Nazis by hiding out in a hayloft, is still in hiding from his fears in New York. The three women in his life serve discretely different functions.

With his gentile peasant wife Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), his family’s former servant and the woman who hid him from the Nazis, Herman is dutiful and distant--a husband by obligation. Yadwiga represents the Old World comforts he indulges yet no longer believes in. With Tamara (Anjelica Huston), the wife Herman believed died in the camps only to reappear in New York, Herman is sorrowful, piteous, desperate for succor. Huston’s Tamara is a formidable wraith, and, cradled in her arms, Herman is temporarily stayed from oblivion. Masha (Lena Olin), his mistress, matches his fatalism; the lust they share blots out their terrors. The survivors in “Enemies” form a secret society of the living dead, but Mazursky, and his co-writer Roger Simon, taking their cue from Singer, also suggest that, for these people, the Nazis were a confirmation of fears already long held.

“Enemies” is an “idea” movie in the same sense that Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is, and it expresses a similar controlling theme: Is a belief in God necessary for anarchy not to prevail? But whereas Allen, by temperament, is analytic and explicit, Mazursky allows the ideas to seep into the movie’s emotional subsoil. He understands that, if “Enemies” is a dirge for the doomed, it’s also a farce--a romantic roundelay for four players. These people who are trying so desperately to escape the world are nevertheless manifestly entangled by its rules. They are revivified by the possibility of catastrophe.

The central point here is that good “serious” movies transcend labeling. Story is not destiny. To state categorically, solely on the basis of its subject matter, that “Enemies” is a depressing experience is to misread not only the movie but the function of art.

The other extraordinary “depressing” movie of the season, “My Left Foot,” is an equal case in point. A film about a cerebral palsy victim, Daniel-Day Lewis’ Christy Brown, would seem, on the face of it, to be a dismal downer. But no one who sees this film experiences it as anything but a high, because the performances and the dramatic content are so rich, so incendiary and life affirming . Any film that sways the senses and provides a complex emotional and intellectual engagement is not “depressing.” Would anyone call “King Lear” depressing? The movies that are truly depressing are not films like “Enemies” but, rather, the aggressively empty studio product that is constantly being dumped into our collective lap. The industry-wide categorization of movies as feel-good entertainment for the undemanding is responsible for the ongoing frustrations most film artists continue to face today. And I include actors here as much as directors and writers. One of the joys of “Enemies” is seeing actors seize roles which allow them to measure up to the full challenge of their gifts, instead of playing stick-figures in yet another mindless moviescape.

Only several short years ago many of us held out the hope that the proliferating small independent production companies would rescue the movies by financing the kind of offbeat, “uncommercial” projects that the major studios avoided. With the demise of most of those companies, it’s more vital than ever that the major studios provide a home not only for the directors who are trying to function as artists within the system, but also for those artists who have been shut out, or unwelcomed, by it.

It’s not enough that a very few renegade individualist/auteurs like Woody Allen get carte blanche to direct their own serious, personal projects. One Wood Man does not a forest make.