Down and out in Beverly Hills.

Down and Out in Beverly Hills

SATIRE, while Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills purports to be, requires Swiftian saeva indignatio: the savage indignation of a good hater. Mazursky, however, is a mushbrained lover who cannot ridicule anything without falling in love with it. But there are no satirists in the Salvation Army. How could Mazursky, who wouldn't hurt a fly or a dyed-in-the-wool villain, skewer humanity? The only things he has made shish kebab of are the major works he has chosen to remake--or not so much remake as undo: 8-1/2 into Alex in Wonderland, Jules and Jim into Willie and Phil, The Tempest into Tempest.

Now, with Leon Capetanos, the coscenarist for his last two dreadful movies, he has remade Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), Jean Renoir's tougher movie version of a boulevard comedy by Rene Fauchois. There is disingenuousness in the very credits: Mazursky acknowledges Fauchois's play, but not Renoir's film, although the play is unfindable even in French, much less in English. But Mazursky must have read somewhere that the play, unlike the film, has a conventionally happy ending, nearer in spirit to what he has tried to do.

Having had the idea for Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Mazursky found himself, as he told an interviewer for the Denver Post, "immediately challenged by a whole set of realities." I doubt very much whether Mazursky, in all his filmmaking days, ever encountered a whole set of realities; if he did, you may be sure he did not recognize them. His specialty is to take a core of sentimental goo and coat it with either bittersweet nostalgia or crude jokes--preferably both. If you want a quick, easy lesson in spotting the difference between art and pseudo-art, compare two films about old men and their pets: De Sica's Imberto D. and Mazursky's Harry and Tonto (one of our director's better efforts); the disparity will hit you smack between the eyes.

Down and Out starts with Jerry, a bum, wandering through Beverly Hills only to be abandoned by his mutt: A woman jogger gives him a tidbit and, thinking him a stray, takes him home with her. Already the tone is set. In Renoir's film, the dog simply disappears; here, dog and jogger meet cute, and we feel reassured that the mangy mutt has improved his condition. Jerry, who on a filth and disreputability scale of one to ten would rate a mere four, proceeds to behave like a madman (though later he will prove pre-eminently sane), and pesters the customers at an outdoor restaurants with loud demands that they return his dog. Finally, for no very good reason, he picks the pool of Dave and Barbara Whiteman's house to drown himself in, even though there is a much more convenient nearby ocean at his disposal. For ballast, he loads his pockets with rocks; you'd think the ones in his head would have sufficed.

When Dave, a humanitarian millionaire clothes-hanger manufacturer, pulls him out of the pool and installs him in the poolside cabana, Jerry may have merely gone from the heated pool into the fire: The household he further incenses is already crazy enough. Dave (Richard Dreyfuss) is tortured with guilt feelings about his prosperity; Barbara (Bette Midler), is your typical rich, sexually unfulfilled California housewife, condemned to gurus and shopping malls; son Max, a transvestite given to preening in tutus and filming everything that goes on around him, can communicate with his parents only through MTV-style videotapes; daughter Jenny is anorectic and insists on going to East Coast colleges, which she changes frequently; Carmen, the maid, services Dave with full-blown sexuality but is nevertheless full of Chicano discontent; worst of all, Matisse, the border collie, has gone over the edge into sociopathy, terrorizes everyone, and is being unsuccessfully treated by a dog psychiatrist.

Note, however, that all these fundamentally lovable people have good and sufficiently stereotypical reasons for suffering: too much money, too little communication, not enough love. Poor Barbara complains of not having had an orgasm in nine and a half years; by casting Bette Midler in the role, Mazursky makes this sound like the film's only understatement. Even when these good folk and their guests end a party by jumping fully clothed into the swimming pool (albeit without rocks in their pockets), we are given to understand that this is not merely funny (which, incidentally, it isn't), but also touching: a need to experience, to feel, to live. Contrast this with a similar scene in Bruce Beresford's Don's Party, where you can see what real boredom, frustration, and human insufficiency are like. Mazursky's people are not acutely, one cutely, crazy, like that adorably snarling and amusingly biting pooch, Matisse (although his black-and-white markings are more Motherwell or Kline than fauve), and all it will take to cure them is a lovable and loving derelict.

Jerry promptly displays remarkable sanity, astuteness, and therapeutic skills.

He can play Debussy on the piano as soothingly as he recitesapt passages from Shakespeare; he is as adept at yoga as at what appears to be Reichian therapy: The orgasm he gives Barbara does wonders even for the Whiteman garden, where the sprinkler system goes off in unison with her. He regales Dave with tall tales about how he became a bum, which confirm the millionaire in his zeal to right enormous wrongs, so that he forgives Jerry for making love to his wife and even for stealing the maid from him. Besides, Barbara is now so filled with love that she makes the garden of conjugal sex grow again, even as the reading matter Jerry plies Carmen with raises her political consciousness into soul-satisfying Marxism. For Max, Jerry has a butch, fatherly bit of man-to-man advice, which promptly reconciles both the boy and his family to his picturesque homosexuality. When Jenny comes home on vacation, Jerry ecstatically seduces her, too, which automatically reanimates her grosser appetite for food along with her nobler passion for him. Best of all, Matisse, who immediately took to Jerry, can now dispense with his shrink even as Barbara with her guru: It is under Jerry's tutelage that the family, their friends, and the blissful dog achieve Shantih by running barefoot over a bed of glowing coals.

Matisse is the perfect ready-made symbol: His erect ear points heavenward; his other, floppy one is of the earth, earthy. Somewhat tautologically, he has one sky-blue eye and one meadow-green one. (In real life, such dichotomies are harder to resolve, it having taken two canine lookalikes, Mike and Davey, to portray Matisse.) Thanks to Mazursky, Capetanos, and his trainer, the dog is as anthropomorphized as the people around him, salivating at Jerry's bidding, are cynomorphic. But Jerry is not an exploiter or, like Renoir's Boudu, an anarchic vandal: When an ostracized Iranian neighbor child looks wistfully over the dividing wall, Jerry is as quick to toss an apple at him as he is, later on, to divest himself of the $500 the rich Iranian father rewards him with. There is too much sweetness and light here for an old-style Disney kiddy adventure movie, never mind a satire. Incidentally, the film is distributed by Touchstone Films, Disney's "adult" line, which also gave us Splash.

But Mazursky's softness of heart and other parts makes itself felt even in an episode one would have thought foolproof, where Dave lets Jerry introduce him to his fellow bums on the beach for an evening and night of shared fun. No social comment of any sort, let alone satirical thrust, emerges from this; the payoff is Dave's proud declaration to the worried Barbara, who didn't know what happened to him, "I ate garbage and loved it'" (Needless to say, we don't see this; it might offend.) To which Barbara angrily replies that he can go on eating garbage from now on. All this is not satire, only low-grade farce.

Richard Dreyfuss, however, does manage to give a decent performance as Dave; as Jerry (about whose true identity and real problems we learn nothing), Nick Nolte is morely boring in a way pioneered by Kris Kristofferson. No one else distinguishes himself, and even the dog (or dogs) overacts (or overact). Tracy Nelson, as Jenny, is especially irritating with her inexpressive face, mannered performance, and anorectic voice. And Bette Midler, with her endowments, should hold out for a genuine freak show rather than settle for Mazursky's version of it. The director has even gentrified the gifted Australian cinematographer Don McAlpine into Donald McAlpine, and set him to shooting, for example, blue-and-pink skies that look like a cotton-candy monster about to gobble up the people in the foreground.

At the final party, Max, en travesti, shows up with his outlandish dragqueen friends, which, again, is all sight gag and no satire. Jerry decides to go off with Matisse, but when the pooch refuses to eat vagabond's cuisine, the pair promptly retraces its few freedombound steps toward the Whitemans and Carmen, all of whom, bereaved and tearful, have trooped out into the street to see them off. Jerry will stay on, presumably to service wife, daughter, and maid sexually, and the menfolk spiritually. What the unthinking Mazursky intended as a sappy, sentimental ending turns out to be the nearest the film gets to satire: It is heartlessly amoral for anyone not too brainless to think it through.