The Essentials: The 5 Best Mike Nichols Movies

As you’ve probably already heard, director Mike Nichols passed away last night. Our obituary is here, with a wealth of supplemental material to help you remember the man and just what a remarkable legacy he leaves. We also wanted to add our own thoughts on some of his greatest films.

Nichols was something of a polyglot, though perhaps not working across different genres so much as different moods, and polylgot doesn’t quite capture just how effortless he made the business of directing seem. Working mostly within a category that could be loosely defined as the mid-budget adult drama (exactly the kind of films that are getting squeezed out these days, between big blockbusters on the one side and tiny, low-budget indies on the other), Nichols found space to range from the broad comedy of “The Birdcage” (featuring a lovely turn from the late Robin Williams) to the solemnity of “Silkwood,” hitting all points in between, even some duff ones, like “The Day of the Dolphin.”

However, the throughlines remain no matter how disparate the films: a witty sort of intelligence, a quiet but rock solid visual confidence, and a total command of all the tools at his disposal, especially in regards to eliciting performances from actors. In fact Nichols directed 17 actors to Oscar nominations (and Meryl Streep twice) and himself picked up four directing nominations, winning once for “The Graduate.” Not only that, he also received two directing Emmys—for “Angels in America,” and “Wit”—a Grammy for Best Comedy Album, and six directing Tonys, making him an EGOT several times over.

Nichols leaves a decent-sized directorial filmography of 22 titles spanning just over four decades (the fun, fast-paced “Charlie Wilson’s War” was his last completed film, featuring a great performance from the late Philip Seymour Hoffman—anyone else really starting to hate this goddamn year?) but, though he died at the age of 83, there was still a sense that there might be more to come. Indeed, as recently as June, we reported that he was due to take the reins on a Maria Callas biopic that would have marked his fourth collaboration with Meryl Streep, and just last year he was rumored to be attached to the JJ Abrams-produced “One Last Thing Before I Go.”

Those titles sadly are now relegated to the realms of what-if for Nichols, but he’s left us a great deal of terrific work to remember him by nonetheless. Here are the five films that most define all the facets of his appeal for us, but there are many more we could have chosen, so please feel free to add your own picks, or your favorite anecdotes or quotes from Nichols long career, to the comments section below.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966)
To mark this touchpoint adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 play down as Nichols’ debut is a little misleading as he’d been a huge success as a theater director for years before (especially with a series of Neil Simon plays). Prior that he was one-half of a comedy duo with the brilliant Elaine May (our retrospective on May is here). But even that cannot detract from just what an amazing job Nichols did his first time at bat in cinema. There are layers here for which he was not responsible, most notably the casting of real-life, notoriously tempestuous couple Elizabeth Taylor (who gained 30lb for the role and played much older than she was) and Richard Burton as the film’s adversarial spouses (also, as my typo just had it “souses”), adding an inescapably metatextual layer to the proceedings. The performances that Nichols coaxed from them are career high points for both, and the subtle way he mines their interaction to bring forth even more subtext about grief, aging, and the recriminations of long-term coupledom, is almost absurdly sophisticated. Simply one of the greatest, most terrifying portrayals of a crumbling marriage ever committed to film (and here are a few more), Nichols really arrived on the scene fully-formed as a film director, and his trademark unobtrusive intelligence, and his way with performances, are given early expression here. Instantly adjusting his approach to work within the language of cinema rather than the theater, he, and screenwriting great Ernest Lehmann, maximized the use of new locations and even small twists (the other couple, George and Honey, drunkenly discussing Honey’s pregnancy is an invention for the film), while remaining overall extremely faithful to the spirit of the play. As a result, ‘Virginia Woolf’ moves like a whippet, skating across the scabrous surface of this rotting marriage, and hinting just enough, between gasps of painful laughter, to allow us to imagine the monsters that lurk beneath. As active as our imaginations might be, however, the final reveal never fails to shock as the bile boils away to leave nothing but tragedy behind. Nominated in every single category (13) for which it was eligible at the Oscars (including Director and Picture), the film won five: Actress (Taylor), Supporting Actress (Sandy Dennis), B/W Cinematography (Haskell Wexler), Costume Design and Art Direction, but even more importantly it established Nichols’ credentials with Hollywood, so he could go on to make his sophomore masterpiece.