ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May ed. by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum

Abstract

Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May ed. by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum Martha Shearer (bio) ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May. Edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 264 pp., ISBN 9781474440189 (pb), US $24.95. Elaine May is a notoriously elusive figure. She has had a lengthy and rich career, first in improv with her comedy partner Mike Nichols in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then later as an actor, film director, and screenwriter, with her most recent stage work winning her a Tony in 2019. Yet she has also been marginalized and demonized, especially in the wake of the spectacular commercial and critical failure of Ishtar (1986), and she is herself reclusive and oblique in her public statements. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes in her introduction to this new collection of essays on May, she has been at best overlooked and at worst actively derided in scholarship on both New Hollywood and women’s filmmaking. This book, however, comes at a time of increasing public and academic attention to women filmmakers in Hollywood cinema’s auteurist 1970s, when May made three of the four feature films she directed, including film seasons at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2017 and The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2018, the 2020 season of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast on the producer, screenwriter, and production designer Polly Platt, and recent academic publications, most notably Maya Montañez Smukler’s Liberating Hollywood.1 That has also included a resurgence of interest [End Page 236] in May specifically, from “written and directed by Elaine May” t-shirts to film seasons such as Painfully Funny: The Complete Directorial Works of Elaine May, programmed by the Badlands Collective at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2018. She has become, in short, something of a cinephile cult figure. Refocus: The Films of Elaine May has two broad projects: first, to understand the reasons behind and resonances of May’s prickly reputation and negative press; and second, to resituate her as, for Heller-Nicholas, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest comic writers, performers, and screenwriters” (1). The broader May revival has largely focused on the four feature films she directed: A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and Ishtar (1986). This collection grants them prominence, with a chapter devoted to each individual film as well as their discussion throughout. But it also draws valuable attention to the breadth of May’s career as a performer and writer, from her early success in sketch improv with Nichols to her work as a screenwriter and script doctor and her recent return to filmmaking with her 2016 PBS documentary American Masters: Mike Nichols. The collection is structured in four sections: the first on her early career, the second on broader critical contexts (Smukler’s chapter on her career in 1970s Hollywood, Jake Wilson’s on the centrality of improvisation to her practice), the third on each of the films she directed, and the final on “Collaborations/Revelations,” with chapters addressing her performance style, her screenwriting work on Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971), and her late-career collaborations with Nichols, including her screenplays for The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998). The chapters on her early work usefully situate Nichols and May’s improvisational work in a broader cultural context. Mark Freeman’s chapter, for example, foregrounds the relationship between their Method training (Nichols having studied with Lee Strasberg and May with Stanislavsky acolyte Maria Ouspenskaya) and improv practice. In one of the collection’s highlights, Wilson argues that Nichols and May turned the Method against itself, using satire to forestall self-reflection and keeping the audience at arm’s length, and teases out the significance of improvisation for May’s craft as both a performer and a director. May’s combination of an interest in improvisation with critical distance extends to her public persona. May rarely grants interviews, and Wilson suggests that she has treated the ones she has given as yet another improvisational game. Yet it is not just her own personal style...