A New York City Icon

THE DISTANCE between Brooklyn and Manhattan has always been made greater than the trip across the bridge. While Brooklyn is the image of Coney Island, of chicken soup, of stickball in the streets, Manhattan is incarnated as the hub, the paradise that children dream of, the place where stars are made. It alone is seen as the true city, desired by all those ambitious enough to imagine themselves there.

In Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Paul Mazursky offers yet another slick version of an autobiographical-fifties odyssey across the Brooklyn Bridge. At the age of 22, Larry Lapinsky leaves a mother who "invented the oedipal complex," and a father forever hidden behind the pages of The Daily News, to seek love, fame and fortune as an actor in the big city. What he finds are more old cliches: unfurnished pads and wild parties, abortions and carrot juice squeezers, coffeehouses, Freudian analysts and old young people, everywhere, waiting to be discovered. Mazursky's film is less the personal journey its title suggests than a description of a time and place trapped in its own image. It is a mood piece, soaked in Technicolor's blue, 'fifties light. Like the Dave Brubeck jazz it is scored to, Next Stop emerges super-cool, sophisticated and non-committal.

The people in the film have very little emotional effect on one another--for them the pose, the image is everything. There is hardly a period-character who isn't included in Larry's group of artsy Village friends. His girlfriend, Sarah, is a Jewish princess who sleeps with him even though she is restless for a less loitering life. Robert is a suave, narcissistic poet-playwright: Anita, suicidal; Bernstein is a cute black homosexual; and Connie, the old maid, everybody's best friend. Although they spend hours together in heavy intellectual raps, when something important happens--the suicide of Anita, Sarah running off to Mexico with Robert, Larry getting a role in a Hollywood movie as a neighborhood tough--none of them know how to respond. They only draw on their cigarettes and look more lost, leaving the emotion unrecorded while the image remains.

The character of Larry is, if possible, even more stereotypical. He hovers over each scene like a one-man Greek chorus. "While it's happening, I see the humor of it all," Larry tells Sarah after his mother's first visit to his Village apartment. And when he heads out for ultimate success on Sunset Boulevard, the tenderest thing he can tell his tearful Mama is "You're a funny lady, Ma." Larry did not need New York to corrupt him; detachment and glib posturing must have come easily to him even before he bought his first authentic-looking French beret. Still, the image would be all right if Mazursky did not spoil the effect by having his mother reply, "My life has not been very funny." Something lurks beneath this array of facades, but Mazursky will never let us see what is there.

MAZURSKY'S FASCINATION with images ultimately limits him to surface details. The characters play "truth" at a party only to reveal that underneath their masks are just more masks. As Bernstein says, with the blankets over his head, all their lives are fictions since it is safer to remain "under the covers." But without any three-dimensional character to compare them to, the final judgment on their image remains ambiguous. The life of a young artist in the fifties seems attractive on Mazursky's screen, but was it really, after all, this way?

As Larry, Lenny Baker personifies the flaws of the film. Leading a seductive tango or impressing a film producer with his wit, Larry is as adept as any young actor could hope to be. And he is even better at impersonation. Waiting on an open-air subway platform in the middle of the night, he comically plays Brando, Edward G. Robinson, his mother, and himself accepting an Oscar to rounds of imaginary applause. But Baker can't play without posing--his mouth freezes into the armored look of detachment.

Shelley Winters as the mother is an even sadder case: a good actress trapped by a bad role. No matter how hard she tries, the camera insists on seeing her second hand. We see her only as Larry sees her or, more correctly, we see her looking at him looking at her, wrapped in the director's gray nostalgia.

In spite of Mazursky's apparent intention, Sarah emerges as the emotional center of the film. In her dissatisfaction with Larry and her resentment of her own humdrum life, Ellen Greene's Sarah seems more honest than the rest, a woman hopelessly caught in the emage of an era. Her final rejection of Larry tips the balance against him, leaving him free to take one last, self-conscious look at his Brooklyn tenements before fading out into the image of the sun in the west.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village lacks intrinsic content. Hollow as an icon, its stereotyped forms have to be filled with one's personal evocations of the era. Otherwise the picture is left empty.