The Pickle Exemplifies Everything That Made Paul Mazursky's Exhausting — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Throughout his career as an actor, screenwriter, TV writer and director, Paul Mazursky channeled the cultural zeitgeist. In the 1950s, he was in the seminal juvenile delinquent message movie The Chalkboard Jungle and starred in Stanley Kubrick’s directorial debut, 1953’s Fear and Desire. In the 1960s, he made the transition to screenwriting with I Love You Alice B. Toklas, a hit about a square (Peter Sellers) briefly becoming a flower child before making another leap, this time into directing, with the wife-swap smash Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. He also cowrote the pilot to The Monkees.

In the 1970s, Mazursky explored the endless self-obsession and seismic cultural shifts of the Me generation with movies like Blume In Love and An Unmarried Woman. And in 1986, he scored a huge hit with Down and Out In Beverly Hills, the perfect culture-clash satire for the Reagan 80s.

During his creative peak, Mazursky was in tune with the times but he was even more in tune with the issues and concerns of Paul Mazursky. Like Blake Edwards or Henry Jaglom, Mazursky just couldn’t stop making movies about himself, or a filmmaker very much like Paul Mazursky. After triumphing with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Mazursky decided to take advantage of the free-flowing pretensions of the time by deciding that dammit, the time was finally right for Paul Mazursky to make Paul Mazursky’s version of 8 1/2 with 1970’s Alex In Wonderland.

Seven years later Mazursky once again fixed his gaze squarely at his own navel with the lovely coming of age period comedy-drama Next Stop, Greenwich Village, which features one of Christopher Walken’s best, most overlooked, and surprisingly hunky performances, as well as an equally revelatory early turn from Jeff Goldblum.

Like a lot of filmmakers who did their best work in the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s, by the 1990s, Mazursky had begun a long, downward slide, epitomized by his final film as a writer-director, 1993’s surreally bad inside-show-biz satire The Pickle.

The Pickle is Mazursky’s 8 1/2, which would be pretentious and audacious enough even if he hadn’t already made his own version of 8 1/2 with Alex In Wonderland. That consequently makes The Pickle feel like a remake of what could alternately be deemed a rip-off or an homage to 8 1/2. It’s a film about how tacky, commercial Hollywood has run out of ideas from a filmmaker who had clearly run out of ideas himself.

Danny Aiello stars as the film’s Mazursky figure, Harry Stone. Aiello is a fine actor in the right role, but nothing about him says artistic, pretentious or irresistible to sexy younger women. That’s a shame, because the impossible lead role of The Pickle calls for an actor who can convincingly inhabit the outsized dimensions of a great, mercurial and easily enraged artist while also remaining sympathetic despite behaving in unsympathetic ways. I’m not sure anyone could pull off that role, not even Mazursky himself, so The Pickle ends up being a character study of a character you want to punch in the face.

As The Pickle begins, Stone is in a state of free fall. He’s compromised his integrity as a great artist, maybe the greatest, by signing on to direct the titular motion picture, a wacky science-fiction concoction about a group of wholesome, apple-cheeked Midwestern farmers who travel to outer space on a gigantic flying space pickle.

The film-within-a-film would have made more sense if The Pickle had come out a decade earlier and it could be seen as a riff on E.T. and Gremlins and other Steven Spielberg-fueled popcorn smashes about good-looking kids and crazy science fiction fantasy. In 1993, however, it sure looked like Mazursky was making fun of a kind of movie people hadn’t really been making for the last decade or so.

Then again, Harry Stone is a man out of time, with a deeply unhappy and dysfunctional relationship with the present and its myriad hassles. For starters, everyone knows him! This struggling, Paul Mazursky-like director can’t go anywhere without people recognizing him and wishing him luck on the big premiere of The Pickle, which everyone knows about as well.

Stone somehow being more famous than The President or Michael Jordan might qualify as a clever running joke in another film but here it only adds to the self-indulgence and narcissism. Harry Stone spends much of The Pickle fighting off the aggressive sexual advances of the vast army of beautiful, much-younger women who desperately want to have sex with the geriatric, deeply depressed neurotic. Early in the film, a female fan recognizes him, rips off her clothes and flings herself at him in a crazed carnal rush.

Then there’s Harry’s 22 year-old French girlfriend. Harry spends much of the film verbally abusing her for being a silly, stubborn girl who relentlessly pursues him even though he makes it clear he’s too old for her and she should find a nice young man her own age. It isn’t unusual in film for an ancient gargoyle like Aiello to be partnered with a beautiful woman young enough to be his grand-daughter. Yet there’s something particularly unsettling about seeing this grouchy, self-absorbed and nasty man yell at a woman who is only in her early twenties, but looks like she could easily still be in her mid-teens. Everything about Aiello seems wrong for the role; when he smokes a joint, it looks like a toothpick in his meaty, bear-like paw.

At regular intervals in The Pickle, our hero stops verbally abusing his girlfriend and writhing in ugly, unjustified self-pity over having to compromise his precious art just long enough to favor us with one of his ideas for a real movie, something of substance, unlike the brain-dead science fiction nonsense he’s convinced will kill his career.

The permanent scowl Harry wears throughout the film morphs into the warm, infectious grin of someone overjoyed to be talking about something not just important but sacred to them. Michel Legrand’s lovely score soars alongside Harry’s spirit as he temporarily casts off the shackles of being a sell-out commercial filmmaker and is an important artist once again, if only in his mind and in his imagination.

This, the movie lets us know, is what an auteur of Harry Stone’s stature (or Paul Mazursky’s) should be doing. He should be making serious films, ambitious films, films that aspire to art as well as entertainment, films that serious adults would savor while their dumbass kids are chortling at The Pickle. But the more The Pickle strains to establish its protagonist as a great artist, the more he seems like a narcissistic fool.

Harry’s ideas feel disconcertingly like middlebrow hackwork. He wants to make a gritty, revisionist contemporary update of Huckleberry Finn with Huck as an abused child and a metaphor for our nation. He also wants to make an even grittier, even more updated version of Anna Karenina and though the soaring score and Harry’s look of utter delight are designed to convince us that these are wonderful, important ideas that would lead to great art if realized I couldn’t help but think that the last thing the film world needs are further adaptations of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina.

And since The Pickle is nothing if not a meditation on Paul Mazursky’s career and life, it’s worth noting that his career has been full of those kind of updates, including Alex In Wonderland (again, his first 8 1/2 homage), Willie & Phil (Mazursky’s Jules et Jim), The Tempest (Mazursky updating Shakespeare) and Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning for the Reagan years). With the exception of Down and Out in Beverly Hills, they did not meet with tremendous success.

The Pickle takes aim at the immaturity, vulgarity and childishness of Hollywood filmmaking yet only ends up making Mazursky look bad. It’s a strangely lifeless piece of filmmaking, with the exception of a moment in the film-within-a-film that stands as both The Pickle’s nadir and apex. After flying to outer space, the space-traveling farmers meet Little Richard and for a bizarre minute or so, everyone dances awkwardly to “Good Golly Miss Molly.”

For the first, final, and only time, The Pickle is ridiculous in a fun, goofy, over-the-top, why-the-hell-not kind of way, instead of being morose and whiny. If Mazursky’s swan song as a writer-director represents his conception of art, I’ll take the flying pickle outer space movie, thank you very much.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure

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