Not to sound like a completely snoody film buff, but I'm becoming a huge Jack Lemmon fan. The man's timing is impeccable. He plays the sweet moron and conniving neer-do-well perfectly, often both at the same time as a matter of fact, and if you keep your eye on the guy he's always doing something sharp in the background that adds to the scene. I like that about him. I like that I'm never waiting for the funny, or plodding through dialogue with him on our way to the punchline. Indeed, thank God for Jack, because without him I expect this movie would have been swiftly forgotten not long after its release.
This movie came recommended wholeheartedly by a dear friend who was no doubt anxious to see the review, so I find myself at an impasse. My natural tendency toward Authentic Material and instinctive high sense of order completely override gratitude in essentially every situation, naturally, but constructive criticism is never out of reach and I have no real reason to be nasty.
The pacing was my first issue. This was no so much a plotted storyline as it was a rambling tale. It came across in much the way you might imagine your grandfather telling you about this apartment he once had. I could understand if that was the intention, but I'm not sure that it was. It is in attempting to tell a story honestly, the way things likely would happen, that most movies find disagreement with me. I live real life every single day. I am virtually soaked in reality, wrought of its charms and malice minute by minute. I do not move to my telelvision or movies or video games to experience more of it; I want fantasy. This was indeed a fantastical story, but the story matter itself is not on trial here - really more the narrative.
Narrative is more than script. It's the way the medium communicates itself as a whole. That's what I missed here: a cohesive entity unraveling before me with every resource it had at its command. Psycho did that. It was geared for relaying a perplexing story. Not just the set design and lighting and camera work, but also in editorial. I walked out of The Apartment feeling as though the creative team could have cut out about half an hour to forty-five minutes of what we saw without doing violence to the thing as a whole. Much of Baxter's puttering around in his apartment I could have done without, as well as the poor-me characterization of Miss Kubelik. I understood within fifteen minutes of the movie that this guy was loaning out his apartment to departmental-types out of obligation. For the next hour and a half we set up the confluence of events that finds an attempted suicide in Baxter's bed. Why?
The movie was very funny, and very touching, but ther was all this gravity I wasn't expecting. All these people were so exhausted and lost. Even Baxter himself was completely unlikable for nintey-five percent of the movie despite his dithering demeanor and entertaining predicament. Even Fran, though gorgeous and charming, spent so much time pandering after Sheldrake that she lost me early into the flick. I just couldn't care about any of them. Maybe it was a critique on the changing values of the time or a reflection of what big business valued in an office setting juxstaposed against what fulfillment and happiness actually means... I don't know. It didn't speak to me.
But all in all, I'm glad I watched it. Those characters I didn't like? They filled the screen with personality and color such as is too oft uncommon in a black and white. Without realizing it, by the time we hit that two hour mark I'd come to know many of the characters in word and deed. I felt included in the office gossip and real context for the small-world feel I recognized right off the bat with these people. The story is fantastical and tragic and funny and at some times dark, very human overall, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I guess the lighthearted initial feel prepped me for a comedy and delivered a sobering story of lost love and publicly private indecency. If Mad Men stole anything from anywhere, I wouldn't be shocked to find this classic as their case study.
Watch The Apartment.
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