Marital Pulp

By JAY COCKS

Director Frank Perry and his scenarist wife Eleanor have a bad habit of taking important themes and mashing them into pulp. They did it with mental illness (David and Lisa) and youth and violence (Last Summer). Now, with Diary of a Mad Housewife, they have reduced the agonies of middle-class marriage to a snide, skin-deep Cosmopolitan-style short story of social climbing and terribly sophisticated adultery.

Diary's hapless heroine is Tina Balser (Carrie Snodgress) who has a set of hang-ups that might shock Mary Worth. Jonathan, her lawyer husband (Richard Benjamin), is an Ivy League cretin who announces to their children at the breakfast table: "Your mother made Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, but I don't think she can make a four-minute egg." This sort of thing is hardly conducive to connubial bliss, so Tina tends to get turned off when Jonathan yearns for a "little old roll in de hay." She begins a passionate "sex thing" with a surly, sarcastic, sadistic writer who taunts her and lusts after her with equal ferocity. After one such session, when the writer (Frank Langella) has roughed her up pretty badly, Tina screeches the kind of lumpish epiphany so typical of Mrs. Perry's scripts: "You're sick! Sick! You have to put on that big virile act because you're really a fag." She returns to Jonathan who humbles himself before her, and there is a hint of --as Mrs. Worth might say--a rosy dawn.

Every character in the script is a clumsy caricature, so there is not much the actors can do. Carrie Snodgress is good enough as the bedeviled Tina, and Frank Langella contributes many moments of force and subtlety to his boisterous role. But Richard Benjamin, one of the standouts of Catch-22, takes a giant step backward. The part is a ludricrous stereotype; Benjamin plays it--or is directed by Frank Perry to play it--like a buffoon.

None of this would make much difference if it weren't for the fact that the Perrys are considered courageous East Coast film makers, fierce independents who are battling the System. But the Perrys are independent of Hollywood only geographically; aesthetically they are at its very core. People like the Perrys, in fact, are the System. There are many talented and truly independent film makers in the U.S. But the Perrys peddle mediocrity as surely as Ross Hunter or any other Hollywood schlockmeister.

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