Cinema: Threesome

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WILLIE AND PHIL

Directed and written by

Paul Mazursky

The guys (Michael Ontkean and Ray Sharkey) meet at a Greenwich Village revival showing of Jules and Jim early in the last decade. They are impressed by it, and before long their lives imitate cinematic art. Margot Kidder turns up in Washington Square Park to play the Jeanne Moreau role in their lives, and in due course they establish their own —not ménage à trois—trilateral commission. Thereupon their lives are laid out in tedious, unedifying detail.

Willie, a teacher, looks for spiritual sustenance by dropping out in variously predictable ways (subsistence farming, for example, or an ashram in India). Phil, a photographer, provides contrast by selling out as a director of television commercials. The lady (with her inevitable child) shuttles more or less agreeably be tween them until she finally leaves them both wrestling on the beach—at first angrily, then playfully. Other things may come and go, but male bonding is apparently forever.

Even in this lamentable movie sea son, it is hard to think of a less memorable movie than this one. Its social commentary is without energy or originality—strictly Paint-by-Numbers. That may be Paul Mazursky's message: the '70s were a decade singularly without singularity. But that is not the most promising premise for a movie. Maybe he gave up on the period too easily.

Mazursky's 1969 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was a sharply sketched comment on sexuality in the Esalen age. In the years since, his work has gone soft; with An Unmarried Woman, he finally arrived at his present state, where he sentimentalizes the mildly eccentric, celebrates sweet-spirited rebelliousness and generally goofs off on promising themes. The result has been a series of truly enervating movies, of which Willie and Phil is but the most spineless. Its three leading players do what they can with the material, but their task is quite hopeless. —R.S.