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The Essentials: The 5 Best Mike Nichols Movies

null“The Graduate” (1967)
Nichols’ best-known, best-loved movie was only his second film, coming hot on the heels of “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” However, that film didn’t have even a fraction of the impact that “The Graduate” did or continues to have to this day. The plot’s the kind of stuff now that dominates festivals like Sundance and Tribeca: Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, in his star-making role) is a recent college graduate with no clue what he wants to do with his future, who begins an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), an older friend of his parents, only to fall for the woman’s daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). But arriving in 1967, just as the traditional studio system dominated by roadshow musicals and Biblical epics, the superhero movies of their day, was collapsing, and New Hollywood was taking over, the film was like a fireworks display going off, with Nichols and Hoffman adopted as the mascots of disaffected youth. Benjamin represents a generation’s rejection of their parent’s values, their sexual liberation, and their fears of an uncertain future, and became a beloved character and model for countless angst-y screenwriters, as a result. But to talk about the film only in terms of its impact on pop culture is to do it a disservice, because it’s damn near perfectly executed. The specificity of the California setting; the sharp Calder Willingham and Buck Henry script; that classic Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack; Nichols’ increasingly brilliant visual eye and innate sense of visual rhythm; that iconically, neurotically sexy lead turn from Hoffman; Ross’ irresistibly wide-eyed, fiery, flirtatious counterpoint; the sad ache under Bancroft’s bravura; that wildly romantic finale followed by the even more perfect coda on the bus—it’s a film that, 47-years on, keeps on giving.

null“Carnal Knowledge” (1971)
From the start of his career to the very end, from ‘Virginia Woolf‘ to “Closer,” Nichols (who was married four times himself) always had a particular and close interest in the raw truth of love and sex between men and women. As the title suggests, “Carnal Knowledge” is almost entirely about that subject, and the resulting picture is one of the more undervalued of the filmmaker’s career. Penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, the film tracks college pals Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel), and their complex relationship with women over a 25-year span from the late 40s to the early 70sCandice Bergen and Ann-Margret being the most prominent of their would-be conquests. The film’s something of an early precursor to someone like Neil LaBute, digging in and exposing the misogyny of its never-grew-up, thinking-with-their-dicks subjects, boys with lots of talk and not a lot of walk, pursuing their ideal women without being prepared to deal with them as human beings once they land them. Nichols’ canny eye for casting pays off hugely here: Bergen and Ann-Margret are about as good as they ever were, while Garfunkel, not an obvious choice, is perfectly utilized as the deeply insecure beta of the central pair. In their first collaboration, Nicholson couldn’t be better: the director has clearly worked out the actor’s borderline animalistic charm (which the pair would capitalize on further a couple of decades later with “Wolf“), but also the neediness that lurks beneath it. Firmly ahead of the curve, the film struck a real nerve at the time: a theater owner in Albany, Georgia was prosecuted and convicted for “distributing obscene material” after showing the movie, with the case making its way to the Supreme Court before it was overturned. These days, you can get away with what Nichols and Feiffer do here on basic cable, and yet “Carnal Knowledge” remains more shocking than the much more explicit “Closer” (a definite close cousin in the director’s filmography) did 30-years later.

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  1. His 1975 Nicholson/Beatty/Channing screwball comedy THE FORTUNE is hugely underrated. Maniacal, dark and giddy at times, it plays like a Coen Bros film 10 years before the Coens.

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