Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Jules Feiffer
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Arthur Garfunkel and Ann-Margret

Index: The First Thirty.

I saw and reviewed Carnal Knowledge in 2009, but I remembered little of it from then, maybe because it’s such a pessimistic film. I have less tolerance for people like these today than I did in my thirties and attempt to keep their brand of toxicity out of my life. Subconciously, I may have forgotten it deliberately.

However, it’s a powerful film because it’s so raw and honest, especially so for the time, so soon after the demise of the Production Code. It feels like a film made in the early seventies, even though it shows us Jonathan and Sandy in three very different timeframes.

The performances are up front and visceral, often feeling like they’re delivered on stage, so there’s no surprise learning that Jules Feiffer wrote it as a play. The direction is quiet, often invisible, Mike Nichols’s touch obvious when he doesn’t do things instead of when he does.

When we want to look away, he cements the camera in place so that we’re forced to watch. When we want a couple to come together, he cuts back and forth between them to highlight the vast distance separating them. It’s like he’s picking off emotional scabs in front of us and the result is brutally honest if abhorrent.

Jack Nicholson dominates the film, but he’s playing Jonathan, the least likeable of a pair of friends who are open books to each other. I’ve never shared like this with a male friend. Then again, my life has never revolved around sex, even when I was a young, horny virgin like the two friends are here when we first meet them in college. The other is Sandy, who’s played by Arthur Garfunkel, presumably not using Art to delineate his acting career from his music, as Simon & Garfunkel had split up a year earlier.

Critic Ed Howard, commenting on my 2009 review, pointed out that these two characters are archetypes that Feiffer brought to the film from his comic strips. Jonathan is Huey, who’s only interested in women for one reason and usually gets it. Sandy is Bernard, who wants a lot more from a relationship but often doesn’t get anything beyond friendship.

I see more layers of pessimism in this film now than I did sixteen years ago. The first was obvious even then, which is that the dominant archetype is Huey. That’s depressing but likely true and we see that through Susan, played by an elegant Candice Bergen.

Sandy sees her first, at a college mixer, and is so passive that she has to open conversation before he walks away in defeat again. They hit it off and start dating and now he’s in love and everything is right with the world. Except that she isn’t sleeping with him and he has no idea that it’s because he wants more than she does. Nowadays, we’d call it the friend zone.

So he seeks and follows Jonathan’s advice to get between her legs, a decision that turns his friend into an object. It’s the beginning of the end for the relationship, even though she does marry him, if only to not hurt his feelings for her by being honest about hers for him.

What’s even creepier is that Jonathan starts to pursue her as well, without telling Sandy, a sure sign that he’s not a real friend. And, while she doesn’t connect with him in the same way, she does sleep with him before she sleeps with Sandy. However, this is animal attraction; she might not even like Jonathan.

I’m not sure that I fully grasped this in 2009 but there’s ironic pessimism in play here. Both Jonathan and Sandy get what they think they want from Susan, but neither does. Sandy gets his ring onto her finger but that doesn’t make her love him. Jonathan gets sex but finds that he’s jealous of the deeper connection that he’d reject if it was ever offered.

As we skip forward to other times and other women, Jonathan and Sandy remain our focus. This movie never cares about what any of the women think. They’re all MacGuffins and they come and they go, used and discarded. In fact, the only thing Jonathan works at harder than conquering a woman is resisting any urges on her part to settle down with him.

The one that comes closest is Bobbie, who’s Ann-Margret at her most voluptuous. Initially, they have a wonderful time together, free and spontaneous. Over time, of course, she wants more but he stubbornly refuses to give and it doesn’t just tear them apart but damages them both right in front of our eyes.

I didn’t like Jonathan from the very start. He epitomises what we think of today as pick up culture, which makes him a surface character. Nicholson’s greatest achievement here is to go much deeper than that. Jonathan’s story arc is all downwards, his many conquests becoming a slideshow he calls Ballbusters on Parade, none of his many women meaning anything. By the time he trawls that out, outrageously in front of Sandy and his latest girl, who’s half his age, if not a third of it, he’s become bitter, pathetic and utterly tragic, unable to perform unless he hires a prostitute to work from a script.

Jonathan’s a horrendous character just from a human perspective but Nicholson makes him a gift to an actor willing to be this raw and this honest. As in Five Easy Pieces, he’s not just able but willing to play a deeply flawed character, a decision that actors make but stars rarely do. I must say that, as much promise as he showed in a number of earlier films, he delivered a lot more in these two pictures. No wonder he was nominated for a Golden Globe, as indeed were Garfunkel and Ann-Margret, who won and also landed an Oscar nod for her work.

She’s blisteringly good here too but she’s a supporting actor, her role restricted to a third of the film, as was Bergen’s. Garfunkel’s there throughout but, even though Sandy’s far more successful in traditional ways, Jonathan is our focus and Nicholson revels in our attention.

Talking of Sandy, I may be judging him too harshly. He’s more sympathetic than Jonathan because unrequited love is almost universal as a human experience but he moves on to other women too. On both my viewings, I felt that he was doing that while still with Susan, meaning that he’s cheating on her. From what I read, it seems like they split up first, meaning that he isn’t, but I never heard that said in the movie.

This isn’t a film to particularly enjoy. Even if Sandy isn’t a serial cheat, there’s plenty in him not to like and Jonathan is a loathsome human being. However, we can appreciate the film as a stark and honest character study, mostly of the men but, to a degree, of the women too. It just isn’t a film I’d want to watch often, just as I wouldn’t want to know any of the characters. They’re all too toxic for me.