Mikey and Nicky
The From Below celebrates Valentine’s Day with a preeminent portrait of masculine kinship, Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976), on TUESDAY, February 11th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10! Note that this screening is on a Tuesday!
Elaine May is perhaps 20th century America’s best portrayer of couplings. She first established herself through her improv comedy shows with Mike Nichols (another future director of note) before moving to the director’s chair for four incredible films (with a potential fifth on the way this year, at the age of 93!) Her first two, A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, steer headfirst into romantic disfunction of a heterosexual nature. In both, she shows a canny knack for nailing down the particular ways in which men usually turn out to be spineless and dishonest turds, to astonishingly hilarious effect.
With Mikey and Nicky, she switches the dynamic from man-and-woman to two men (arguably a dynamic in which many men find themselves more comfortable expressing their true selves, in a sense.) Perhaps less of an outright comedy than her earlier work, Mikey and Nicky applies a slightly more sardonic tone to the type of talky dramas that John Cassavetes, starring here alongside Peter Falk, creates in his own directorial work. The two are low-level mobsters and longtime friends, with Cassavetes’s Nicky calling on Falk’s Mikey at a moment of being a Man On the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, convinced that his mobster boss has put a hit out on him for expropriating some finances. What follows is a long dark night of the soul for these two buds as they wander the New York streets together, hashing out their relationship and a sense of foreboding mortality.