California Suite (1978)

So much average

The first must-see film of the year.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

In the film adaptation of Neil Simon's play California Suite, four couples stay in a Beverly Hills hotel. It's divided up into four sections, showing where each out-of-towner comes from. Parts of it are very funny, and parts are so true to life they'll inspire tears. While everyone has their favorite Neil Simon play, this one is very good and just might snag a special place in your heart.Now for the plots: In the first segment, divorced couple Jane Fonda and Alan Alda argue over custody of their teenaged daughter. Next up is the most memorable part: Maggie Smith is up for an Academy Award, and her husband Michael Caine isn't able to give her the support she needs. While Maggie lost the Oscar in the film, in real life, she won Best Supporting Actress in 1979. She and Michael have wonderful, realistic chemistry together, and her performance is very touching. In another room, Walter Matthau has to hide a sleeping prostitute from his wife, Elaine May. And finally, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Gloria Gifford, and Sheila Frazier are taking a couples vacation together and wind up playing tennis.

I didn't go to movies often in the 1970s when raising my family. Of course, I took my oldest three children to see the first Star Wars flick, "Episode IV – a New Hope," when it came out in 1977. I had seen parts of "California Suite" in the past – probably late night TV or something. So, I finally watched this recently on DVD. If most of the 1970s film fodder was like this, I can see that I didn't miss much. (I have watched a few 1970s films that I think are quite good). As a comedy, which I understand it mostly was supposed to be, "California Suite" fails miserably. The only laughter we get is from Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. They are two doctors, Willis Panama and Chauncey Gump, who are in-laws and supposedly good friends. They are on a vacation together with their wives, and butt heads throughout in some very funny slapstick scenes. The dramatic and slightly comedic witty part of the film is taken up with Maggie Smith and Michael Caine, both of whom give excellent performances. Smith won her second Oscar playing Diana Barrie, a British actress who was nominated for an Academy Award in the movie. Caine is her husband, Sidney Cochran. Smith's Oscar was one of three nominations the film got, and it's curious that she was best supporting actress to Jane Fonda's Hannah Warren. The two seemed to have the same screen time. Fonda plays opposite Alan Alda as Bill Warren, but he has very few lines. Her part is mostly a running diatribe against everything. First, her ex-husband Bill; second, California and its lifestyle; and third, anything and everything else that comes to mind after that. I'm sure that Neil Simon wanted this to be a funny part in his screenplay, but neither actor does well in their respective roles. Alda is a bland wall off which Fonda's character can bounce her vitriol at break neck speed. Fonda delivers her lines like a robot – just seemingly spewing some lines she has learned. There's no emotion or even fluctuation in her voice. On the other hand, Simon was a clever writer. So I wonder if maybe he didn't intend her character to come across the way I saw her. She was definitely an itch in the film, and with a "b" in front of the word, one will have her character down pat. Walter Matthau is OK as Marvin Michaels. We don't see much of his scandal, but his scenes were as much pathos as comedy. Elaine May, who plays his wife Millie, was an interesting role to put in this film. But, I'm glad Simon did it, because we seldom see such characters in movies. She is a character with great character. She knows he's telling the truth when he says he would never do anything to hurt her, and that he loves her. She has the wisdom, and the love and understanding that transcend 90 percent of us most of the time. There would be no sense, no value, and no good in her dumping her husband and fighting him in court. Instead, she can forgive him. I wonder why Hollywood so rarely shows something like this. I sat through this film, expecting that it would get better, but it didn't. The short part with Matthau and May was good, Cosby and Pryor gave some laughs, and Smith and Caine were interesting and very good. All the rest was pretty dismal.

Many IMDb reviewers have expressed fondness for this movie, most with a few caveats. It's not surprising to me that others like it and I don't. What's surprising is that those who do like it seem to care about the same things I do - script, acting, story, emotional impact - yet come to the exact opposite conclusion that I do in evaluating each element.I didn't see this movie when it came out, and that may be a key point. I'm old enough to remember still loving Alan Alda and everything he did at the time California Suite was made. Maybe if I had seen it then, I would have been impressed by the verbal back-and-forth between Alda and Jane Fonda, or by the inclusion of Cosby and Pryor as unexpected African American professionals, or maybe even by the near coming-to-grips with queer politics in the Maggie Smith/Michael Caine scenes. At the age I was then, I also found Walter Matthau almost irresistibly funny.But here's the thing. I'm also old enough to remember when I began to find Alan Alda characters, both as they were written and as he played them, excruciatingly self-indulgent, insufferably self-righteous, and generally in love with the sound of their own voice, with the net effect that they couldn't genuinely connect with anyone around them and didn't seem to care. Where could you find the quintessential, I'm-so-sensitive Alan Alda character of the 70's and 80's? Staking out the moral high ground, while snidely pointing out how no one else was joining him.That's the case here. He chews through Neil Simon's contrived and repetitive dialog with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink smugness as if he's actually rendering astute, bullet point observations about Jane Fonda's character, or about the mature life choices he's made, and the epiphanies he's had. He's not. And neither is anyone else in this movie.Nevertheless, Jane picks up her flint, sharpens the edge and away we go, because that's what you do in a Neil Simon comedy. Except that no one goes anywhere. The script is so lacking in insight that waiting for these two to finish a scene, put down their tools, and go collect their checks takes a numbing eternity. With so many salvos fired, there should be some colorful bursts, but every one is a dud.Neither actor manages to pitch their lines with a single, convincing feeling, let alone build toward an emotional climax. The script simply doesn't provide one. So jarring in fact, is the why-not-here/how-about-there raising of their voices, that it brings to mind wartime speeches read aloud by captives. A few awkward cadences and over-emphasized words lets the home folks know they don't mean it. A rich irony indeed for Jane Fonda. Walter Matthau, I'm sorry to say, is just irritating. Even he can't redeem a trite, horrifying attempt at sexual comedy, without the sex, that would have been unworthy of a two-minute sketch on the Carole Burnett show. He deserved better. The late seventies were his salad days, when his gruff, call-my-bluff-if-you-dare persona usually generated laughs. Yet here is, downsized to a cloying, simpering imitation of someone funny that 1978 audiences no doubt expected to hit it out of the park. He tries everything but registering a complaint. I would have forgiven him for saying look, I'm usually good at this stuff, you know I am, but I got nothing to work with here.And don't get me started on Cosby and Pryor. From an inspired decision to write them as doctors, to a miserable, when-will-it-end insult to the audience, these two wasted talents are reduced to stumbling around in a dance macabre that the Three Stooges would have lent more dignity. It's as if the audience is being asked to laugh at a nasty, open secret: see, we let them play against race as urban sophisticates, but it's obvious what they're best at. Except it's not.Smith and Caine? Maggie manages what no one else does in this film, which is to draw us in, swinging deftly between rage and vulnerability. She occupies the only breathing space in the whole film. She's given little to do really, but succeeds well enough to be awarded that Hollywood staple, the make-up Oscar for having been ignored in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Michael Caine plays her bored, gay husband with as much restraint as possible, but even he can't overcome the cluttered, too-clever-by-half lines Simon has written.All in all, California Suite is an obnoxious experience, fatally lacking in wit. Bloated scene after bloated scene simply collapses under too many lines with too little substance. Almost everyone involved should have known better, and has done much better on other projects. For Neil Simon, it's as if he knew none of it was sticking, so he just kept throwing more spaghetti at the wall.

A bland quartet of tales via Neil Simon all set at the Beverly Hills Hotel is a West coast version of Simon's Plaza Suite. The film directed by Herbert Ross entwines the four stories that were presented separately on stage thus the film has no real climax, conclusion or resolution:it just ends. This film like so many others wastes Richard Pryor's genius, and the segment Pryor shares with Bill Cosby is an embarrassment. The scenes between Jane Fonda and Alan Alda couldn't be less interesting, in fact, the only interesting thing is that the late Dana Plato plays their daughter. Michael Caine and Maggie Smith are watchable as a couple in a third skit, though hardly worthy of the Oscar Smith received. For me, the film belongs to Walter Mathhau and Elaine May. Particularly funny is a scene of Matthau trying to put stockings on a passed out hooker. And this is one of the rare instances where Elaine May's distinctive comedic style has been put to good use on film, but 1 out of 4 does not make a worthwhile movie. Fonda fared better in Simon's Barefoot in the Park(67) as did director Ross with Simon's The Goodbye Girl(77). Say goodbye to this one.