THE FRESHMAN
“The overwhelming attractiveness of the screwball comedies involved more than the wonderful personnel. It had to do with the effort they made at reconciling the irreconcilable. They created an America of perfect unity: all classes as one, the rural-urban divide breached, love and decency and neighborliness ascendant. –Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money (1971)
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In the early 80s Bergman formed a production company with producer Mike Lobell, which has been responsible for The Journey of Natty Gann (1985) and Chances Are (1989), as well as So Fine and The Freshman. Like most people, I didn’t make it to So Fine (1981) during its short commercial run, but I caught up with this goofy farce on video. It has an exhilarating wildness and a manic energy that are, to my mind, distinctly urban-Jewish in flavor–but a lot closer to the Marx Brothers than to Woody Allen insofar as much of its comedy derives from the warmth, and not merely the cultural conflicts, of family bonds. (It might be noted that the Marx Brothers appear to have a special place in Bergman’s pantheon. As a colleague has pointed out, a name on a fake Italian passport in The Freshman belongs to a character in A Night at the Opera, a movie that clearly inspired the climactic sequence of So Fine; and Pauline Kael has aptly compared Mariangela Metalo, the female lead in So Fine, to Harpo.)
The cumulative impact of The In-Laws, Big Trouble (intended as a sort of In-Laws spinoff), and now The Freshman leaves me no doubts that Bergman is a distinctive auteur with thematic preoccupations and talents all his own. His outrageous plots all involve hapless, innocent heroes becoming trapped inside dangerous, threatening worlds totally outside their previous experience–a bit like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours minus the misogyny, although Bergman’s movies are certainly male-oriented. (The women who pursue and seduce the heroes are often passionate and aggressive, but never predatory; if they’re “dangerous,” it’s usually because of the men they’re connected to.)
Both movies have crazed satirical subplots involving aberrations of consumer society–a fad for jeans with see-through bottoms in So Fine; in The Freshman a secret gourmet club featuring outrageously expensive meals made from endangered species. Both movies lampoon aspects of Italian culture and make extensive, self-conscious use of a “found” cultural object that relates to this culture–a production of Verdi’s Otello in So Fine, the movie The Godfather (both parts) in The Freshman. (Appropriated cultural icons can also be found elsewhere in Bergman’s work; Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, and Richard Nixon all function memorably as characters in Hollywood and LeVine.) More generally, both movies delight in anomalous movie references: the hilarious villain in So Fine is a Neanderthal gangster played by Richard Kiel who is clearly patterned after the monster in Frankenstein; in The Freshman, the Komodo dragon on a leash recalls the leopard in Bringing Up Baby, and a rival family of Italian gangsters is named Minnelli. And both movies feature ice-skating sequences.
If Don Corleone was larger than life, Carmine Sabatini is never more (or less) than life-size–a modest character scaled to the dimensions of a particular film rather than a mythical being designed to dominate that film. (To drive this point home, one of the running gags in The Freshman is the degree to which everyone around this character insists on treating him as mythical, in spite of his more earthy qualities.) For better and for worse, Brando’s performance has almost none of the egotism and scene-stealing that marks much of his earlier work; he doesn’t hog all the laughs, and seems happy to accommodate whoever else the scene requires. Ensemble acting seldom wins prizes, but Brando shows himself to be as much a master of this mode as he is of solo flights.
