At Home with Paddy

Me and Chayefsky, we got a thing going on.

Every summer, around this time, when movies sink to their absolute worst, I invite over my friend Paddy and light a flame under his ass. Then I sit back and watch. As the top spins off his head, I get that robust, crisp-mountain-air feeling of beholding a Zeus-like captain of the Judeo-Roman world, an embittered shaman touched by a most splendid and clarifying anger. It feels good; the thunder burns you up and the rain rinses you out, like a hard loofah scrub to your guts.

I am of course talking about Marty, The Hospital, and Network (Paddy won an Oscar for each; he’s the only writer on record with three for Best Screenplay), but I might as well be talking about Middle of the Night or Gideon, or any of the other plays. And in particular, I’m talking about George C. Scott in The Hospital. He is the closest Paddy ever came to himself.

At one point in The Hospital, Barbara (Diana Rigg), compares Scott’s Dr. Boch to a bear. I think that’s right. Ferocious in food, depression, and work, Chayefsky was a human bear, a kind of broken down Falstaff of the city, who split his life prowling the neighborhood for material and napping back in his cave high above 57^th Street. Also, he grumbled a lot. When a friend of his, laid up in the hospital after a long stretch of open heart surgery, murmured something about wanting to see his daughter who he missed very much, Paddy looked up from his paper and said, sarcastically, “Awwww, isn’t that sweet?” It made them both laugh.

That right there is my friend Paddy. Even when you don’t want it, he’ll give it to you straight. It will likely hurt, maybe even forever, but the upshot is you’re guaranteed to come out the other end a sharper, better, unhappier man.

On Robert Duvall in Get Low

Get Low is a misshapen, well meaning, squishy-hearted half-feature that’s both too short and way, way too long. But Robert Duvall is in it.

Mr. Duvall is one of those actors that makes everyone around him look like they’re in a very good high school production of The Glass Menagerie, that is to say, ridiculous. A few scenes into the picture, it becomes clear that alongside Duvall even Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray – on his own one of the cinema’s great miniaturists – can’t find their way to the buried, haiku-essence of things. But not our Bobby. Before he opens his mouth, Duvall lets you know just where his nerve endings are, and after only a few shots-worth of his company, he manages to unfurl himself out like a map. For the rest of the picture, he goes about dropping hints – and always indirectly – to the buried treasure.

In real life, closed off people don’t tell you who they are. They hide. In movies, where we have to see inside of people, weak actors try to cheat around it. They give their astringent, opaque characters unearned changes of heart brought on, generally, by trembling strings, the love of a good woman, or the pressures of running time. This is why no one who saw Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People will ever forget it. She never once condescended to the level of her character’s “arc,” but instead built wall upon wall upon wall, until, near the end of the picture, and at the absolute precise moment, she shattered the whole edifice and – without the help of strings – there she was. Ah. Of course. It was you all along.

In Get Low, Duval is working with a similar mechanism. A lesser actor (one, say, who worshipped Daniel Day-Lewis,) would have emphasized the odd-duck, Boo Radley elements of this character, declaiming his weirdness like a missionary his religion. But not our Bobby. He reveals by showing us how he conceals. Soon the patterns emerge. A little later we begin to understand. And by the end of the picture, we may be convinced we saw something invisible.