Paul Mazursky’s comedy about a Manhattan wife whose husband walks out is funny, exact and unusually honest about what a good marriage looks like from the inside. Jill Clayburgh carries it. A few scenes lecture where the rest of the film simply watches.
Paul Mazursky opens An Unmarried Woman on a marriage that is working. Erica and Martin Benton have sex before breakfast, jog together in the cold and argue about their daughter’s boyfriend, Phil (Matthew Arkin). Mazursky, who wrote the script as well as directing it, spends the best part of half an hour on this, and the time is well spent. By the time Martin (Michael Murphy) goes, we like him, and the film has no villain to lean on.
He goes on a pavement, in daylight, and it is the scene we thought about on the way home. Martin starts to cry before he has said anything, and Murphy plays him as a man who wants to be held while he explains that he is leaving. Erica listens, walks a few yards, and is sick into a litter bin. Arthur J. Ornitz keeps the camera among the passing strangers rather than cutting to a clean close-up, and editor Stuart H. Pappé stays on Clayburgh for longer than is comfortable. We watched it with a hand over our mouth. It is the most honest account of being left that we can remember in an American comedy, and it is over in about three minutes.
Jill Clayburgh carries the rest. She plays Erica as a woman who has been competent all her life and is now, for the first time, not sure of anything, and she does it without one speech asking for our sympathy. It matters that Mazursky shows her content before Martin has gone: we have seen her happy before the film asks whether she can be on her own. Lisa Lucas, as Patti, gives her a teenage daughter who is angry with the wrong parent, and their kitchen conversations are as good as anything here. Kelly Bishop, as the friend Elaine, gets the sharpest lines and delivers them from behind a glass.
Ornitz shoots Manhattan in cold winter daylight, and the Benton flat, designed by Pato Guzman, looks like somewhere a comfortable Manhattan couple have lived for years rather than a set dressed for the week. Albert Wolsky dresses Erica in long coats, boots and camel and grey wool, so that when she does put on something else we notice. Bill Conti’s score follows her down the street, and it sounds like 1978 in a way we found we did not mind.
Not everything is watched so patiently. Erica’s sessions with her therapist, Tanya (Penelope Russianoff), are the film stopping to tell us what it has already shown, and Mazursky returns to them more often than the material needs. Cliff Gorman’s Charlie, a man who thinks frankness is the same as charm, is a good sketch, but he is there to be got wrong. And when Alan Bates arrives as Saul, an artist with a sense of humour, the film softens around him. Saul is the kind of man scripts invent for women who have earned one, and Bates is so likeable that we forgave it, mostly.
Mazursky had spent a decade on the comfortable American middle class, in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Blume in Love, and this is the film where he stopped teasing them. The charge laid against it in 1978 was that it feels pleased with its own good sense. That is fair about the therapy scenes and unfair about everything else. Put it next to Kramer vs. Kramer, made a year later, which handed the divorce to the husband and was praised for it, and this one looks braver and less certain, which we take to be a compliment.
At 124 minutes it is a little long, and the last stretch could lose ten of them. The final scene we will not describe, except to say that it does not tie anything up and that we laughed out loud at it. Watch it with someone you have lived with for a long time, and do not talk over the first half hour.
