Boys Will Be Boys: “Mikey and Nicky”

Elaine May has always had a fraught relationship with Hollywood. After her early glory years as one-half of the Nichols and May comedy duo, she wrote and directed her first feature film, a pitch-black comedy called A New Leaf, in 1971. It fared poorly at the box office, but is now considered a cult classic, inducted in 2019 into the National  Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The following year, May directed a Neil Simon script that became a major hit: The Heartbreak Kid, starring Charles Grodin as a jerk who dumps his annoying bride (May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin) during their honeymoon and jumps into bed with a beautiful blonde (Cybill Shepherd). Frankly I’ve often found this film disturbing in its reliance on ethnic stereotypes, but audiences responded with glee, and Berlin won several major awards for her outrageously unattractive portrayal.

 So May was riding high the following year when she wrote and shot Mikey and Nicky (1976), a so-called “neo-noir” starring good friends Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. When I watched this film, I knew nothing about where it was going. Frankly, I thought it would play up the comic aspects of a longtime relationship. And so it did, if you like your humor very dark indeed. The film, set amid the squalor of an east-coast city, starts with Cassavetes’ Nicky holed up in a seedy hotel room, frantically summoning his lifelong pal Mikey to save him from the wrath of a boss who’s clearly a dangerous thug. (He’s played by the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner.) There are some laughs to be had in Mikey (Falk) showing up with a cache of Gelusil for his buddy’s ulcer and then trying to hustle him out of town.

 Thus begins an odyssey in which the half-crazed Nicky keeps getting distracted from his own escape plans, with Mikey keeping him company every step of the way. The full story of their relationship unfolds particularly in a midnight over-the-wall jaunt into a local cemetery. There we come to fully understand how long these two have been a part of one another’s lives, sharing tender memories of family members now long gone. They also almost share the favors of a (sort of) prostitute: it’s her angry rejection of Mikey that becomes one of the film’s key turning points.

 h both men are husbands and fathers of young children, they are not what I’d call mature adults. In their slightly different ways they treat women badly: Nicky has destroyed his marriage (to one of my longtime favorites, Joyce Van Patten) with his overt philandering; Mikey treats his wife better but clearly doesn’t regard her as an equal. Certainly he doesn’t share with her his many secrets, including the fact that his younger brother died in childhood The film suggests that the central relationship in Mikey and Nicky’s lives is with one another, with all that implies about nostalgia, affection, and jealousy.  Which makes the film’s ending truly poignant.

 From what I’ve read, Elaine May did herself no favors on the set of Mikey and Nicky. Determined to capture the improvisational style of her two leads, she spent far more time and money on the film than her studio had allotted. (I’ve learned she shot almost three times as much footage as was required for Gone With the Wind.)  That’s why the final cut was taken away from her, and the version rushed into theatres by Paramount was haphazard at best. It was 1986 before a May-approved version finally emerged. And she didn’t direct again for eleven years. Yes, it was the notorious Ishtar.