Down and Out in Beverly Hills

Mazursky does this wry satire in which a bum (who is far more than he first appears) transforms a family of Beverly Hills narcissistic, nouveau-riche bourgeoise. The film is exceptionally well made, photgraphed, directed, but while there are some funny moments (and indeed it is engaging throughout) it is never as good as I kept hoping it would be, and certainly never as funny. Nick Nolte (an actor who gets better with every performance, I think) is great as the bum, with a wonderful matter-of-fact attitude, and he is the highlight of the film. Richand Dreyfuss (looking incredibly like Paul Newman in The Color of Money) is a close second. Mazursky doesn't run amuck here, as he has in the past (as we know) but he doesn't quite clinch it either.

What are we to really think at the end, when Nolte joins the team that had been so mercilessly lampooned throughout the picture? I don't know, and probably neither does anyone else. It's almost as if they are saying, “Hey, this is pretty pathetic, but it's an awful lot of fun, and lots of money redeems anything, so what the heck." Am I demanding too much to ask for a moral persprective? Perhaps, but I think if you promise one, you ought to at least attempt it. Thinking about it, much of the same tone as “Moscow on the Hudson,” but that was a better, more sharply focused film. Ridiculing the ridiculous is easy--much too easy, in fact. Extracting something worthwhile out of it is the tough part, and this just misses. Still, Mazursky's near misses are a lot more rewarding than many people's complete successes.