On Whitehead's Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation

On Whitehead's Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation Vincent Brook Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation. By J. W. Whitehead. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 332 pp., ISBN 9-780786-471454, US $45.00 (pb). First, a disclaimer: This review will concentrate less on what Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation is (a consistently eloquent and insightful auteurist study of Mike Nichols's film oeuvre) than on what it might have been (a superb analysis of Nichols's work that factors in its substantial Jewish aspect). The disclaimer is doubly motivated: first, by the review's appearing in a Jewish-oriented journal whose main reason for choosing a book on Nichols derived from the director's Jewish identity; and second, because a solid case can be made for the more than ethnocentric relevance of Nichols's Jewishness to his significant cinematic achievement. The relevance was not entirely lost on J. W. Whitehead, who opens his first chapter with a quote from Nichols about his life, which began (as Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky) in Berlin in 1931: "I was insanely, unfairly, ridiculously lucky. All Jews went to the camps, but we not only didn't go to the camps, we were allowed to leave the country" (13). The opening also references the anti-Semitism Nichols experienced as a youngster growing up in New York City, and its role, along with his German accent and permanent loss of all his hair from a whooping-cough vaccine, in turning Nichols into "as far outside as an outsider can get" (14). And it dutifully links him, via his "Russian Jewish parentage ... to a great generation [End Page 232] of Central European émigrés ... that stretches from Ernst Lubitsch through Billy Wilder" (14). From there on Whitehead rarely mentions Jewish aspects in Nichols's work, addressing them only where their occurrence is overt and their significance indisputable. In Neil Simon's semi-autobiographical Biloxi Blues (USA, 1988), Whitehead outs the protagonist, Eugene Morris Jerome (Matthew Broderick), and his roommate Arnold Epstein (Corey Parker) as New York Jewish "misfits" (141), and describes Epstein, "the vaguely effete Jewish bookworm," as facing a boot-camp-mate's "anti-Semitic onslaught" (141). In The Birdcage (USA, 1996), he backfills the unspecified Jewishness of the female-impersonator lead, Armand Goodman (Robin Williams), via a Nichols quote deeming the film's message to be about reconciliation "not just [between] gays and heterosexuals but Jews and gentiles, Democrats and Republicans" (200). And in Angels in America (USA, HBO, 2003), he acknowledges prominent Jewish members of the multi-character epic—the fictional Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman) and historical Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) and Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep)—and notes, in passing, several Jewish "moments": a rabbi's eulogy, a Kaddish recitation, and several Old Testament allusions. Overall, an unintentional but unfortunate dejudaizing pattern prevails and is established early on—counterintuitively, in the discussion of the second film Nichols directed and the one for which he is most revered: The Graduate (USA, 1967). Whitehead can be forgiven for ignoring the pride of place of this "milestone in cinema history" (36) in the late-1960s–1970s Jewish New Wave that unprecedentedly brought proudly Jewish actors (Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Richard Benjamin, et al.), directors (Nichols, Allen, Mel Brooks, Paul Mazursky, et al.), and Jewish themes (schlemiels and schlimazels, Jewish mothers and Jewish princesses, etc.) to the fore in American cinema. Less explicable is the book's eschewing The Graduate's clearly Jewish elements in favor of code: such as generically describing protagonist Benjamin Braddock (played by Hoffman) as having "ethnic features" (38) and referring to both Benjamin and his father (played by Williams Daniels) as "small men" of "diminutive size" (41). Another Jewish stereotype, Mr. Braddock's miserliness, isn't mentioned at all, nor is the striking Jewish-gentile contrast between Benjamin and Carl Smith (Brian Avery), his tall, blond, uber-WASP romantic rival. The Jew-WASP elision is especially curious: first, because Whitehead is otherwise perceptively attuned to extratextual details; and second, because the [End Page 233] details in The Graduate's case come straight from Mike Nichols's and Dustin Hoffman's mouths. As Nichols recounted in an interview

Art · Art history · Disclaimer · German · Judaism · Movie theater · Political science · Theology · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Law · Philosophy