Love the Second Time Around

By Frank Rich

AN UNMARRIED WOMAN

Directed and Written by Paul Mazursky

Paul Mazursky's best movies -- Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Blume in Love and now An Unmarried Woman -- are bulletins from a combat zone. The battlefield is affluent urban America; the war is the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Mazursky describes the skirmishes in all their neurotic glory, tots up the emotion al casualties and tries to identify the survivors. He does so with both compassion and dark wit, and the result has been a remarkable string of films that document the changing mores of an exasperating decade. Indeed, Mazursky's social report age is so accurate that one can almost ignore his failures of style and storytelling.

In An Unmarried Woman, the director leaves his favorite turf, swinging Southern California, for the less laid-back precincts of Manhattan. He has the terrain down pat. The film unfolds in chic SoHo lofts, Upper East Side high-rises and glittery mock-deco bars. The characters are people who favor art by Paul Davis, go to sleep to the purr of the cable-TV news ticker, wear Adidas sneakers when jogging and fall in lust while shopping at Bloomingdale's. They are well-intentioned people, but they have a sad habit of wounding each other. Mazursky --whose sensibility is half John Cheever, half Jewish mother -- wants to love them all.

His greatest affection is reserved for his title character, Erica (Jill Clayburgh), a Vassar-educated 37-year-old who suddenly loses her seemingly devoted husband of 16 years (Michael Murphy) to a younger woman. For the first time, Erica is without a man, and she must learn how to adjust. Eventually she does, but not without the help of a therapist and a new lover, an artist played by Alan Bates. By the end, Erica has arrived at a state of hard-won feminist bliss.

The film's tedious final half-hour is more ideologically right-minded than dramatically convincing. Mazursky never has figured out how to wrap up his movies. Yet along the way his script offers one moment of recognition after another. Some of the funniest occur when Erica and her female friends get together for in formal consciousness-raising sessions that are accurately described as "part Mary Hartman, part Ingmar Bergman." Mazursky has also written some moving scenes for Erica and her 15-year-old daughter (Lisa Lucas); he understands painfully well the bottomless angers and conflicting loyalties that divorce creates among both adults and children.

The acting is exemplary: everyone onscreen seems to be an old friend. Some minor players make uncommon impact, especially Andrew Duncan as a lecherous pressagent and Linda Miller as a divorcee who takes up with a 19-year-old lover. As the not wholly unsympathetic husband, Murphy pulls off a daring piece of acting--a faked yet affecting crying jag that accompanies his guilt-ridden confession of infidelity. Bates, of course, is the most appealing suitor that any woman, married or unmarried, could wish.

The film's most sustained triumph belongs to Clayburgh. Erica is the role this gifted actress has deserved for years, and now that she has it, she doesn't fool around. She swings gracefully from mood to mood--from hostile confrontations to hysterical shrink sessions to intimate and comic romantic interludes. She even dances a daffy Swan Lake in her T shirt and panties. Though An Unmarried Woman is otherwise populated by busted couples, Clayburgh and Mazursky make a sublime pair. -- Frank Rich

There is a restaurant in Manhattan whose walls are covered with posters of Broadway flops. If a show has had a run, forget it; it won't even be allowed over the grease trap. Jill Clayburgh has the same perverse delight in failure, and, without once batting her intense blue eyes, she will reel off a list of her own disasters long enough to paper the Taj Mahal. There was the time she played Desdemona in Los Angeles and audiences almost cheered when Othello smothered her. Then there was the opening night of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers in Washington, D.C.: she opened a door and it crashed down.

Wait. Things get worse. In New York City, in the same play, she screamed to backstage technicians about misplaced cues, not knowing that her body mike was still on. Her complaints thundered all the way to the last row. Then, in a performance of The Devil's Disciple in Stratford, Conn., she stuck a hatpin in her chest, puncturing a lung. "I wasn't doing very well, anyway," she sighs. "I just didn't understand the part." To end the list, add only three words: Gable and Lombard, possibly the worst major movie of the decade. Says she: "You would think I would never have worked after that turkey."

But if Clayburgh is one of the best at being bad, she is also one of the best at being good. She was fine as the prostitute in ABC's Hustling; her presence made bearable even a bore like Silver Streak; and as the rich Texas tomboy she more than held her own with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson in Semi-Tough. But in An Unmarried Woman she has found the role all those disasters may have prepared her for. As Erica, the wronged wife, she is vulnerable and tough, innocent and cynical, cool and sexy. Erica comes alive in a way film characters rarely do. "You know she's right there," says Director Paul Mazursky, "close enough to get hurt. She doesn't have the self-importance that most actresses get."

The kind of instant success a film like An Unmarried Woman can bring has been slow in arriving, and in between those disasters were years of hard work. Though Clayburgh, now 33, likes to think that she just wandered aimlessly through her high school and college years, her father, Albert Clayburgh, a rich Manhattan businessman, tells a different story. "Jill was driven," he says, "always taking singing, dancing and acting lessons. The thing I remember most is her determination and ambition."

High school was Brearley, a fashionable Manhattan girls' school, and college was Sarah Lawrence. With the security of a $200-a-month trust fund, Clayburgh then apprenticed at Boston's Charles Playhouse. Another young actor, Al Pacino, was also learning the craft in Boston, and the two of them set up housekeeping, an arrangement that lasted for five increasingly difficult years.

"Two actors living together," she says, "was just ridiculous. One has to go to Minnesota, the other to Detroit. Your problems are different, and neither has patience to listen to the other. Thank God we broke up! We were all wrong for each other. I didn't even know who I was." Pacino's quick success was also a problem, and Clayburgh remembers with some bitterness that reporters would sometimes interview her just to get to him.

For a time Clayburgh considered giving up acting altogether. She started spending much of her time on the couch (and still keeps an appointment with an analyst every Wednesday). Then, following the inexorable law of any success story, her luck changed. The parts began coming in, and two years ago she met and began living with Playwright David Rabe, who has written The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers. She and Rabe, 37, now share a big apartment on Manhattan's West Side, together with a mongrel puppy and, occasionally, Jason, Rabe's five-year-old son by a former marriage.

Out of work since An Unmarried Woman finished shooting seven months ago, Clayburgh is beginning to get nervous again. "I always thought every job could be my last," she says. "I guess I still do sometimes." She turns down most of the scripts she receives, chews her fingernails, and jogs five miles a day. "It's an incredible high when you hit your third wind," she says. In a sense, she is summing up her career. After years of just running around, Clayburgh has hit her third wind and is flying high.

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