Mike Nichols’s 1967 counter-culture touchstone, The Graduate, showed the United States to itself.TONY CENICOLA/The New York Times
America never ceased to amuse Mike Nichols, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker (for The Graduate) and hit-prone talking-point Broadway director who died this week at age 83.
Other movie makers of his postwar era might have been angry with the country Nichols settled in after his Jewish parents fled Nazi Germany, some perplexed, and others as smitten as calf-eyed teenagers in love. But not Nichols. In a filmmaking career that stretched from the home front A-bomb dropped by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 to the backroom Persian Gulf shenanigans depicted in 2007's Charlie Wilson's War, Nichols customary attitude was an eyebrow carefully cocked over an eagle eye. Like the theatrical director he always was and sketch-artist sniper he started as, Nichols was smart enough to know when to stand back and let the story drop its own pants.
This detachment might have resulted in a certain impersonality in his method – the charge most often levelled against Nichols was that he lacked a signature style – but he came by it honestly and ultimately it became his style. From the time his father died and the young Nichols was left to navigate his new country in a succession of odd jobs that led to a failed acting career and a pioneering role in the emerging satirical sketch movement of the 1950s, Nichols was the consummately composed outsider: Like his spiritual predecessor and fellow German-Jewish refugee Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), he observed his adopted country's postwar upheavals and spasms with the reasonable fascination and calm of someone who'd come from a place he'd been lucky to escape alive. The fact that America was so oblivious to its own plush insularity was nothing short of a satirist's all-you-can-eat buffet, and Nichols spent his entire career feasting on it.
The astringency of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? provided the novice filmmaker with a rubbernecker of a calling card, a play about a long night in a living room where a marriage splashed on the rocks of a bottomless highball. (It also single-handedly lifted Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor from the muck of tabloid squalor and indicated Nichols's extraordinary casting savvy.) But it was with The Graduate in 1967 that an entire country stood up, took notice and saw itself reflected in a state of generational civil war: a skirmish fought along the edges of swimming pools, sexual malaise and consumer culture alienation that played like comedy and cast the nation in plastic.
For all its status as a galvanizing counter-cultural touchstone, what tends to be overlooked in The Graduate is its sly insinuation of the terminal outsider's predicament in a country delirious with its own wealth and privilege, a place so giddy with material satisfactions and daylight cocktails it doesn't even seem to notice that young Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is like an alien being stranded on a strange planet, a dour Jewish kid lost in a goyim theme park. It was a conceit that not only gave the movie its added bite and comic edge, but introduced Hoffman as the decade's most unlikely pop cultural icon and expressed Nichols's own sense of terminal displacement.
If he never quite surfed the zeitgeist as gamely again as he did with The Graduate, it probably had less to do with the director's skills, taste and knack for nudging marquee performances than it did with the fickle whims of the zeitgeist itself. Indeed, in their way, both Catch-22 (1970) and Carnal Knowledge (1971) are as astutely attuned to Nixon's soul-stricken America as any of the dozens of anguished youth-market movies of their day, but by then the field was crowded with shaggier, angrier and hipper competitors.
And so Nichols retreated into a long, steady groove of prestige adaptations of plays (Angels in America), books (Primary Colors) and headline-fresh dramas (Silkwood), maintaining such a consistently high level of execution and performance that it became easy to take the man's talents for granted and confuse his considered restraint with a lack of style or engagement. It didn't help that movies themselves were shifting away from restraint and adult ambiguities in the meantime, which only left Nichols where he'd really always been in the first place: on the outside looking in, amused as hell at what his country was confusing with importance.
Time may provide opportunity for the reconsideration and revised appreciation of Nichols's movie career. He may yet emerge as a far more consistent satirical iconoclast than dull purveyor of intermittent Oscar-bait. Not that it likely would have mattered much to Mike Nichols himself. If you listen to him in conversation with filmmaker-fan Steven Soderbergh on the commentary track for the 2001 DVD release of Catch-22, what you hear is Nichols distilled. Mostly, it's him sitting quietly while the kid tries to convince him what a great movie he's made. Amused as ever.
Geoff Pevere