Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

An Unmarried Woman

5/15/2017

B-
2.73

A divorced woman readjusts to single life.

Directed by Paul Mazursky
Starring Jill Clayburgh
Initial Review by Drew Landry

An Unmarried Woman chronicled the life of Erica Benton who struggled to find her place and herself after learning her husband Martin planned to leave her for a younger woman.

To put it bluntly, the film did not get interesting until the end. To see Erica dating and finding herself were defining moments. The reason they were defining moments were for the time of the film and Erica's role in the feminist movement. Erica had moments where she could have stood down to the men in her life but she held her ground.

Despite the strength and sensitivity of Erica and her important role in the display of feminism in media, it was drowned out by the uninspired story of director Paul Mazursky. The film lasted thirty minutes too long and the supporting cast was equally uninteresting as the story.

A boring story mixed with a tired supporting cast and a great last twenty minutes equals an average piece.

Grade: C

4 Comments

Shane

5/18/2017 03:14:16 pm

An Unmarried Woman combines humor, raw emotion and a progressive message making this a surprise A- for me.

It's a movie that isn't quite a character study or a movie with an overt political purpose as director Paul Mazersky carefully weaves between the two types of films. Dismissing this as a feminist movie is missing half of the movie and would be an insult to enchanting and emotionally honest performance by Jill Clayburgh. Where Clayburgh is out there and in the viewer's face, the feminist (for lack of better word) message of the film is subtle. Clayburgh's character Erica is independent and doesn't just end up with an easy happy ending by frolicking around Vermont with a charismatic artist. Erica, who is real with us, deserves a real ending: Life is fucking weird and complicated and sometimes your boyfriend lovingly leaves you with a giant painting to carry through the streets of New York.

The only negative I see in this movie is that it is about 15-20 minutes too long, which is unsurprising for a film created in the 70's.

A-

Cooker

5/22/2017 11:19:44 am

One of the running themes of this movie is dog shit. That has to say something about it, right?

After one of the first conversations, I came up with a great album title, Dog Shit and Quickies. I’m getting off track here.

An Unmarried Woman was a typical, husband leaves wife, wife struggles to get back in scene, wife gets back in scene, husband tries to get back with wife, wife rejects him, and wife’s new boyfriend leaves her with a large painting.

A big issue I had with this movie were lengthy scenes that didn’t really contribute anything. Ice skating with friends, playing piano with her daughter, even her walking around the city carrying the painting at the end; these all could’ve been brief transitional cut scenes, but instead they went on and on.

There a number of dry boring “dialogue” scenes that also went on forever. Lengthy therapy sessions and talks with friends about her breakup. It was as if this was a director’s cut version.

During the scene when Charlie and Saul started fighting, I yelled out, “You can’t fight, you’re eskimo brothers!”

Pretty meh movie. Going C on this one.

Bryan

5/23/2017 01:11:08 am

Divorce is brutal. Honest movie with shitty background music. Such loud trumpets and such. Characters were realistic. Martin was a dolt.

B-

Jon

5/25/2017 12:38:15 am

Will the divorced wife of a wealthy stockbroker somehow be able to put her life back together?

Let's begin this review by acknowledging that the stakes are pretty low in An Unmarried Woman. I was thinking about where this falls in the lineage of single women stories, something that must have still been new in 1978, and starting with a protagonist from the top of the economic pyramid might not be the most sympathetic choice. Martin Scorsese did make Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1974 with a working-class single mom/widow, but nothing else from earlier than An Unmarried Woman came to mind. In Scorsese's film, Ellen Burstyn's Alice has an uphill climb far steeper than Jill Clayburgh's Erica, so Clayburgh has to work harder to get the audience on her side. I'm pleased to say that she achieves that goal.

The economic angle only occurs to me after the fact. It's easy to forget how easy Erica and her friends have it, because they all play dissatisfaction so well. The stakes are purely emotional, and Mazursky and Clayburgh manage to make them just as urgent as if they were life and death. The scenes of the foursome in a proto-Sex and the City lunch debrief have none of that show's world-breaking puns and double entendres, relying instead on natural dialogue and the ability to communicate their problems without self-pity. They don't laugh at each other, and are able to be honest about their feelings with no judgment. This kind of writing is what made the 70's the best decade for movies ever.

After we get to know the rhythms of Erica's life, her husband blows it all up. As he confesses his affair, Clayburgh again impresses with that face of uncontained disgust, a look she gets to practice as she reenters life as the titular kind of female. Like so many of us want to, she tells a guy in an ascot to fuck himself. We're reminded that things are changing for women, but men haven't adapted. Abortion might be legal and divorce might be easy to come by, but the abortion doctor will still try and kiss his teen patient after, and taking a ring off means men who one thought were friends are suddenly interested and one gets set up with jerks who engage in what modern eyes might call assault. Between awful encounters with the opposite sex, she goes to a therapist (an actor, like the cab creep, who would never be cast in a movie today with those teeth) and provides more stories of how supportive her childhood friends were, just like the ones she can now rely on. An Unmarried Woman doesn't have the rom-com problem of the 'friend with no internal life who only lives for the protagonist,' so ably represented in They Came Together. It's a misogynist trope to insist that women secretly hate each other, and An Unmarried Woman has no time for that.

Things start to work out for Erica as she begins a physically and intellectually stimulating relationship with Saul (Alan Bates) and gets acclimated to unmarried life. I like that Mazursky doesn't move her from one relationship to another, where by the end, she might stay with Saul and she might not. However, despite the ending, by the time the film has begun to curl its middle finger to trite romances back up, I'm less interested. An Unmarried Woman steadily loses me once Saul and the gross coworker have a fight at the party, and coupled with the overbearing saxophone score, I'm not fully in love with An Unmarried Woman. Clayburgh is giving the performance of the round (still need to watch Sunset Boulevard, though), and Drew surprises with a pick that I admit I did not have high hopes for. B+

An Unmarried Woman

B-
2.73

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An Unmarried Woman

B-2.73

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B-
2.73