Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987)

Road to nowhere

Saw Elaine May's Ishtar again after so many decades. In my book still holds up (thank god), an early masterpiece of cringe comedy.

Course you've heard the stories: the ballooning budget, the clashing egos. Warren Beatty proposed financing May's next project, and she suggested a comedy like Bob Hope and Bing Cosby's Road to Morocco, complete with song numbers. The production shot on location-- not New Mexico but the actual Sahara desert, complete with political tensions (Morocco struggled with an insurgency movement); expenses included an endless search for a blind camel, a helicopter gunship, and a square mile of artificially flattened desert. May reportedly demanded fifty takes to capture a single shot involving vultures-- an extravagant ratio that puts her within striking range of Stanley Kubrick.

Within striking range of Kubrick? On a budget several times the size of Barry Lyndon? How dare she?

Easy to say the cause of May's downfall was sexism; you'd be right, but only partly. The finished film was too idiosyncratic, too invested in its concept of endearingly inept entertainers to appeal to a large audience (Can a large audience appreciate a parody of inept entertainment when they often prefer the real thing?). Without that mass appeal the film bombed ($15 million in domestic grosses against a budget of $51 million), and the resulting scandal would hang from May's neck like a lead albatross for the next thirtysome years. 

The opening alone is a tipoff: Chuck Clarke (Dustin Hoffman) and Lyle Rogers (Warren Beatty) sit at a piano trying to piece together the lyrics of "Dangerous Business:' "But we can sing our hearts out / And if we're lucky then no neighbors complain / Nobody knows where the beginning part starts out / But being human we can live with the pain."

You see and hear the problem: the lyrics are meant to express a loneliness not to be shared with others (else they'd complain) but to relieve a longstanding frustration (they've lived with it for so long "nobody knows where the beginning part starts out"--love the clumsy vagueness of 'the beginning part'). Dark thoughts sung tonelessly by dancing klutzes with limited vocabularies--if you're not shrinking into your seat at this point you're likely deaf and blind.

Which is May's point; two singer-songwriters so delusional about their talent they're willing to fly halfway across the world to Morocco to prove themselves, all the while oblivious to the political tensions the corruption the crushing poverty surrounding them.

Depressing enough, only May doesn't stop there: at a certain level these sadsack songwriters know they're delusional. Chuck suffers from depression and at one point has to be talked off a high ledge by Lyle; one could argue that Chuck suffers not from moments of melancholy but of clarity, and the knowledge nearly kills him. Lyle doesn't save Chuck by giving him a reason to live, he saves Chuck by giving him an excuse to climb back into their shared delusions.

Here's the thing about May; she doesn't hand out happy endings or comforting platitudes, not really (see The Heartbreak Kid, May's response to Mike Nichols' The Graduate); she pushes situations as far as they go and how they land and how we ultimately feel about them sprawled facefirst on the ground tells us something about ourselves. The guerrillas Chuck and Lyle meet turn out to be fellow dreamers of strictly limited means, all too willing to sacrifice lives (Chuck and Lyle's in particular) to their cause (Chuck and Lyle by way of comparison don't sacrifice anyone-- well maybe their audience's sanity). Turns out the CIA is also made up of dreamers (perhaps the desert heat is to blame for all the rampant fantasizing): by propping up a fascistic Emir they hope to counteract the threat of communism in the Middle East. The crucial difference between rebels and CIA is that the CIA have near-bottomless pockets-- when they screw up they have the money and resources to bury their mess, and everyone involved (the Emir, say, or anyone else the agency is obliged to keep happy) benefits handsomely. All at taxpayer's expense, at which point the joke stops being funny-- or gets exponentially funnier, depending on how you feel about footing the bill. 

May's a wonderful comic writer who has used this ability to keep herself working the past few decades despite being the director of Ishtar; the tragedy of her circumstances is that she is the director of Ishtar-- one of the most gorgeous-looking comedies to come out of modern Hollywood (sunset-tinged lighting by Vittorio Storaro, who clashed with the director over the film's look) and one of the most visually inventive. The souk sequence for example: a bustling cacophony of a location, swirling with brightcolored merchandise and blaring hawkers. Chuck and Lyle walk obliviously through the chaos, trailing an entourage of spies so long and elaborate a CIA agent has to explain to his partner the dramatis personae ("The KBG is here, I recognize two agents." "The ones dressed as Texans?" "No, the ones dressed as Arabs. The ones dressed as Texans are Arab agents." ). A man is shot and all hell breaks loose; Chuck and Lyle survive not through the flexing of their combined brawn or use of superior firepower but with the help of local natives, who in a deftly staged bit of misdirection (think Jacques Tati only with Persian rugs involved) stir up enough confusion to allow the pair to escape. 

Likewise the climactic helicopter gunship assault-- May reportedly panicked at the prospect of staging such a big scene; I submit she was stubbornly delaying the shoot, scaling back the hardware to the point where it wouldn't overwhelm the characters. Spectacular as the large-calibre fireworks may be the best effect in the sequence is the copter pilot's head turning in numbed disbelief to follow a Stinger missile's near-miss trajectory. May is a master at recording minute human responses to ludicrous events; the clash of big-boy toys is Spielberg's forte, not hers. This large-scale depiction of CIA gutlessness, incidentally, might have contributed to the film's hostile reception in Hollywood.    

We know May to be a wonderful observer of human and institutional folly, but who would have ever guessed she had a gift for directing animals? Yes she spent fifty takes on the vultures but I submit they were fifty well-spent takes-- the scavengers glide gracefully into the shot and waddle up to Beatty and Hoffman with an insulting familiarity. Yes there's that story about the blue-eyed camel-- but the camel they did choose blue-eyed or not is an excellent slapstick farceur, deftly knocking CIA agents aside left and right on cue, and willing to trod on Charles Grodin's foot without hesitation (knowing Grodin that's an act of courage right there). 

I kid-- for all I know Grodin's a sweetheart (But then there's his impassive Dr. Hill in Rosemary's Baby and his sociopathically manipulative Jonathan 'Duke' Mardukas in Midnight Run). As Agent Jim Harrison, the official face of the intelligence organization's Moroccan division, Grodin is the film's MVP-- witness the scene where he sits down to tea with Emir Yousef (Aharon Ipale), elevating mendacious groveling to an art; after firmly informing the Emir that "The United States government will not be blackmailed," he amiably adds "However I see no difficulty in meeting your timetable." Grodin's interpretation of institutional evil under May's direction is sharp-etched: smoothly banal, faintly ridiculous (despite or because of the fig leaf he wears proudly on his sleeve), casually almost obliviously powerful. 

Interesting how May approaches the character of Chuck and Lyle's love interest Shirra (Isabelle Adjani). Female comic leads are oft subject to considerable slapstick abuse, and Shirra is no exception-- if anything is subject to more abuse than is standard in a female-directed comedy. For much of the film she's dressed as a boy, her gorgeous visage hidden in a scarf (you think of Orson Welles' perverse impulse in casting his then-wife Rita Hayworth as the femme fatale in The Lady From Shanghai with her most glorious feature-- her cascade of rich red hair-- hacked to a brief pixie cut dyed blonde). Adjani is groped, punched in the face, at one point wrestles her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty to the ground. Interesting to learn that May didn't get along with the actor, hence a possible reason for the hostile treatment-- only, at film's end, we do see her liberated from her baggy disguise, face haloed in soft curls tears streaming from her eyes as she watches her boys perform-- ineptly of course-- on the concert stage. You wonder if perhaps May was just holding back till the carefully chosen moment when she can unleash the full force of Adjani on us: "I think they're wonderful," she murmurs. We few-- we appreciative few-- can't help but think the word applies to her (and the film) as well.