Mixed Doubles

By Frank Rich

CALIFORNIA SUITE

Directed by Herbert Ross

Screenplay by Neil Simon

To call California Suite uneven doesn't really begin to describe the movie's split personality. This latest Neil Simon-Herbert Ross collaboration is by turns silly and thoughtful, tedious and charming, broad and delicate. It contains some of Simon's best writing as well as his worst: childish jokes about vomiting coexist with wise statements about the art of marriage. So mixed are the returns on California Suite that, if it were an election, one would insist on a recount.

The movie is an adaptation of Simon's Broadway hit, a collection of four one-act plays set in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Rather than film the segments in succession, as Arthur Hiller did in his ill-fated screen version of Simon's Plaza Suite, Ross cuts back and forth among them. The result looks not unlike an episode of ABC's The Love Boat. The approach at least keeps the audience awake. One never knows when Ross will break away from the more tedious subplots to reveal a Simon zinger.

Two playlets are quite dreary. In the weakest, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby appear as vacationing Chicago doctors whose Los Angeles visit is ruined by slapstick mishaps involving torn clothing and wayward automobiles. It is a thin recap of an old Simon screenplay, The Out-of-Towners. Jane Fonda and Alan Alda fare only slightly better in their sketch. She plays a tart-tongued Newsweek editor who has flown West to fight with her ex-husband over the custody of their daughter.

After exchanging some worn New York vs. Los Angeles one-liners, far inferior to Woody Allen's in Annie Hall, Fonda and Alda get all bittersweet. The heroine's lacerating wit, it turns out, is but a mask for her insecurity. The superficial writing is not helped by Alda's unprepossessing screen presence, Ross's melodramatic use of closeups, or by a gratuitous beach scene that exists only to show off Fonda in a bikini.

In the other segments, Beverly Hills starts to look like comedy nirvana. The movie's biggest laughs occur when Walter Matthau, as a square married man, wakes up one morning to find a whore passed out in his bed. His wife (Elaine May) arrives, and what to do? The ensuing low farce is Simon's variation on James Thurber's The Unicorn in the Garden, and the team of Matthau and May roast an old burlesque chestnut to a perfect crisp.

Michael Caine and Maggie Smith have never worked with each other be fore, but in the remaining subplot they make a perfect match. Smith gives her best screen performance ever in the role of a hard-drinking, hard-talking actress who arrives in Beverly Hills for Oscar night. Alternately buoyant and defeated, youthful and aging, she transforms a potentially campy character into a woman of great complexity and beauty. As her loving husband, an antiques dealer who prefers sex with men, Caine sets off Smith's brittle wit with soothing tenderness. Together these actors prove that a marriage of convenience can be a dynamic emotional affair. They also demonstrate that Simon, when he puts his mind to it, can be a worthy American heir to Noel Coward.

--Frank Rich

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