A Not too Terribly Thought Out Look at The Landlord. (1970)
The Landlord’s reputation as one of Hal Ashby’s best is very valid. All of the things I like about Ashby are present and accounted for here: the beautiful, loose editing and cinematography (though Kael is right about the editing being a tad “showoff”). The fly by night one thing leads to another but not in that three act way plotting, the performances (Beau Bridges’ has never been better, Diana Sands is heartbreaking and tough), etc, etc. The Landlord also largely lacks that thing that sometimes tempts me to resist Ashby: a whimsy, a willed flakiness (it pops up most in his most famous picture Harold and Maude).
I think it has something to do with the racial tension of The Landlord, Ashby doesn’t get gooey on the subject like he did with the Vietnam War in Coming Home, Ashby (along with screenwriter Bill Gunn) stays tough and unsentimental. The film walks a tightrope of genres and emotions that most movies screw up: the racial tension picture, the disoriented, privileged twenty-something white guy picture, the coming of age romance, the film handles all of these moods exceptionally. The Beau Bridges character means well, and he thinks he’s tolerant, but the film never excuses him for simply “meaning well”, he’s a naive ass and Ashby and Gunn never forget it.
The black characters, the tenants of Bridges’ building, don’t warm to him by Act three so we can feel good walking out of the theatre: they find him just as bewildering and offputting as they did in the beginning. Bridges’ parents, which is the closest the movie comes to caricature, don’t accept Bridges’ ambition by the end, they still find it ridiculous, and the poignance of the film lies in the fact that it IS ridiculous. A white boy guilt thing that’s just as self-motivated, and more self-deceiving, as anything his rich bitch parents do. The Landlord, when you get down to it, is a grittier, more honest, just plain out better version of The Graduate, without the God awful all things to all people fairy tale that constitutes the latter film’s third act.
I haven’t gotten to why I really like The Landlord, and why I always forgive Ashby films, despite their indulgences. The intimacy. Ashby sells the ironic connection between characters that shouldn’t connect better than any filmmaker I can recall as I type this. There are moments, in all of his films, of tender, beautiful regard between his characters. Erotic, electric little moments that remind you what this medium can be all about. The Landlord has plenty of them: Bridges and his girlfriend’s fingers intertwining as he tells her something she doesn’t want to hear, a moment of post-coital, lonely cuddling between two characters, the way another character touches her husband as she confesses infidelity.
The movie also happens to be pretty funny, with shockingly blunt dialogue. So when, exactly, should we expect the Criterion DVD?
