Between the Lines of Joan Micklin Silver

Similarly, when Lynn (Jill Eikenberry) quits her job in protest at the finale, she becomes another Micklin Silver female who cuts through empty manners and polite euphemism when submissive men attempt to interpret for her. After Jeff Goldblum’s Max interjects on her behalf, to soften her acrimony toward their new boss, Lynn indignantly claps back, “No, that’s not what I’m saying! Boy, we really stick together, don’t we? We want to work for the Mainline, not some communications empire. You don’t have to learn my name, because I quit.” The film’s women are the only ones with the wherewithal to truly tell it like it is—in other words, the true keepers of the revolutionary spirit, and the last with any esprit de corps. The film’s men are, on the whole, a rather impotent contingent relative to their distaff counterparts. If unable to document for posterity the hallowed recent past, or package it for their own advancement, they fold. For example, Harry can only fantasize about defying authority when it really counts most. (In a momentary wish-fulfillment break from reality after his unceremonious firing, he leaps onto the new corporate overlord’s desk and fires a plastic dart at his head.)

In Chilly Scenes of Winter, Peter Riegert’s character, Sam, inadvertently defines the epithet we-could-haves for sixties radicals. As his friend Charles (John Heard) is getting ready for a date, Sam scoffs at a suggestion by Charles’s younger sister that he buy new clothes, joking, “What do you want from a child her age? She never even went to Woodstock!” Charles, at first puzzled, replies, “Neither did we.” Sam pauses in a way that indicates that his explanation so obviously speaks for itself: “We could have.” Charles can only concede. In the sixties, a romantic notion meant the orchestration of a fashionably scrappy but successful revolution, or changing the world in some sense, however vaguely. In the seventies, lonely Charles’s romantic notion is to change his own world by rescuing his beloved Laura from a neglectful husband. He also endeavors to save her from what he sees as her own low (she would say realistic) self-image.

Both Between the Lines and Chilly Scenes of Winter are very “zeitgeisty” films, specifically made for and suited to the time in which they were produced. That said, they are not mere artifacts. John Heard as performer is an appealing, effective, and affecting avatar in both: a scrupulously bottled-up, weltschmerz-y embodiment of generational angst, one who set the standard for what was fast becoming a prevailing Joan Micklin Silver male archetype. This archetype manifests again later in Finnegan Begin Again (1985), with Robert Preston, and in Crossing Delancey, with Peter Riegert. These are all restless figures living less for the now than for a romanticized then. Their life rhythms hinge on comforting haunts, ingrained habits, and moribund ideals. The anomalous, the passé, and the obsolete are their security blankets. Riegert’s Sam the Pickle Man’s personal constitution involves going to shul for morning prayers, acquainting himself with and even patronizing the most provincial neighborhood businesses (including Sylvia Miles’s yenta matchmaker), and . . . well, he sells pickles right out of the barrel . . . for a living. In all these ways and more, he lives in a world similar to the one inhabited by the staff at the Mainline in Between the Lines. For these Micklin Silver men, the pulse of an old world, whether from one, ten, or a hundred years ago, still beats in symphonic palpitation.

The Mainline staff individually make a trial-by-fire conversion from the Fitzgerald-defined sentimentality—in this case a form of denial—to become apostates, orphans, and martyrs of a kind. As more change is foisted upon them, their “desperate confidence” about things not lasting becomes conspicuous.

Micklin Silver stated in an interview, “When things are very sad, I can always see a funny thing in them. And when things are funny, I still see a sad thing in them. I’ve always thought that was a little bit Jewish and a little bit female. It’s a point of view, where I see material maybe a little differently.” This perspective, which propels all her films, lends further specificity to her authorship.

Few filmmakers contemporary to Joan Micklin Silver, besides perhaps only Woody Allen and Elaine May, gave voice to an unapologetically Jewish American sensibility. May, who along with Micklin Silver was among just a handful of female directors working in Hollywood at the time, imbues A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and Mikey and Nicky (1976) with a similar streak of uproarious, often dark, often outrageous, and (most importantly) often tastefully cruel humor. In The Heartbreak Kid, newlywed Charles Grodin crafts, connives, and contrives various schemes to ditch his schlumpy new wife on their honeymoon, until he finally succeeds in one painful—but painfully funny—sequence at a seafood restaurant. In Hester Street, the would-be tragedy of the Steven Keats character Jake’s caddish behavior toward the very old-world wife he’s trying to ditch, and later in Chilly Scenes of Winter, Charles’s ultimately unrequited infatuation with Laura, are grounded in a curious, just-short-of-caustic, but nevertheless humane humor. In all cases, distressing situations that might be played straight and thus tragically in other hands ingeniously become the stuff of distinctly Jewish comedy in the hands of May and Micklin Silver.

Micklin Silver once ever-so-slightly resisted my making the assertion that all her films had a Jewish voice, especially in discussions of what I consider her masterpiece, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which features no outwardly Jewish characters, and Between the Lines, which features only one (Jeff Goldblum) out of the large ensemble. I retorted, “It’s not out of place for a rabbi to make a joke or a humorous aside at a funeral, and for the funeral-goers to at least chuckle. Charles, Gentile or not, is a handsome schlemiel in whose misery we unexpectedly find laughs, to keep from crying. Crying from what? Most of all, from recognition.” She understood the point.

I met Joan by the strangest and most cosmic of coincidences, on a gray December morning in what was (most appropriately) a Manhattan chilly scene of winter. The night before, I had attended a 35 mm screening of Chilly Scenes of Winter and had intended to propose a book project to her at the venue: the first to ever cover her life and career. She was swarmed by adoring fans and friends after her Q&A, so the moment was not opportune.

In asking around for an email address that might connect me with Joan, I was given a phone number instead—one that its provider wasn’t sure still worked. That Sunday morning, the streets were strangely desolate walking past Bloomingdale’s on my way to catch the subway. I tend to get nervous on the phone, especially with cold calls to strangers, so I was rehearsing what I might say to Joan if she picked up. I also strategized what to say if someone else picked up. It was just at this very moment of composing and rehearsing this script that Joan herself turned the corner, strolling directly toward me. It was as if I, or my intensity of purpose, had conjured her. I couldn’t believe my luck—and even weirder was that it seemed we were the only people on this normally busy New York street, with nary even a car whizzing past. In approaching her, I stuttered, attempting to explain myself and my proposition. In a rush herself, she rattled off an email address and told me to message her. That’s how it all began. (When I later asked her why she offered her email address so easily to a perfect stranger, she simply replied, “I don’t know, but somehow I just trusted you, I guess”—the beginning of a beautiful friendship.)

Over lengthy sessions in her parlor and chats over breakfast in her kitchen (usually English muffins and soup), we started the process of getting her on the record. Throughout multiple conversations, Joan made her personal stakes in her choices of material abundantly clear. One particular recording I made reflects this: “I wanted to make films that meant something to my family—which is why I made Hester Street—and to my generation. Perhaps because I’m a woman, I felt I had another way of saying that and doing that, one that people maybe hadn’t seen before, so I was determined.” The filmmakers we cherish, we cherish because they show us “new ways of seeing.” While that is certainly true of Joan Micklin Silver, her films also reveal new ways of understanding what we’ve lost to the past—whether the recent past or the distant past—both individually and collectively. And most remarkably, she dares show us how that can be funny.