Nothing Applies

By JAY COCKS

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

Directed by FRANK PERRY Screenplay by JOAN DIDION and JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

Better stop, look around

Here it comes, here it comes

Here comes your 19th nervous

breakdown.

--The Rolling Stones

Los Angeles is a cul-de-sac at the end of the continent. With the desert before it, the ocean beyond it, there is nowhere left to go. Even the sun is seductive, sinister somehow, sapping life instead of giving it.

Raymond Chandler knew the territory well, Nathanael West wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has recently taken the measure of the neon void with such savage precision as Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays was a novel about a young actress, Maria Wyeth, crumbling into the pieces of a psychic jigsaw. Didion drew the Southern California landscape with poisonous accuracy, using its shifting scenes to delineate states of an increasingly troubled mind.

Thus for Didion the beach, the desert, the freeways and the plastic extravagances of architecture were metaphors. For Director Perry they are just locations. Shorn of image, the story is a poor and predictable thing. Moreover, dialogue like "She has these very copious menstruations" and "That lemon is not artificial. That lemon is reconstituted" reads better than it sounds.

Maria (Tuesday Weld) passes her days wandering about the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where she is a patient. "Nothing applies" she scrawls across the battery of psychological tests they give her. Her husband Carter (Adam Roarke) is a pompous young hack who makes motorcycle movies and discusses the auteur theory. His producer B.Z. (Anthony Perkins) tries both to meddle with and mend their broken marriage. Maria has already had one child--Kate, herself disturbed--and aborted a second. In her sickness and despair, she clings to Carter, who humiliates her with the kind of bitter brutality she usually heaps on herself.

There is not a great deal that Tuesday Weld can do with any of this. She is an actress of a curious and unique talent, especially adept at expressing elfin, vaguely threatening sexuality. Maria, obsessive and tormented, eludes her. Less introverted than preoccupied, Tuesday seems as lost as Maria herself, although the only good moment in the film is hers. "See the pyramids all wet with rain / Cross the ocean in a silver plane" Maria croons, stoned crazy in an old 16-mm. verite documentary of Carter's, and in those few seconds Weld touches some of Maria's torment and vulnerability. Perkins has a little more success in the role of the producer, which is less complex and demanding. Both he and Weld struggle to bring some depth of feeling to the trite and turgid proceedings.

Perry (David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife) resists their every effort, and eventually defeats them. The novel had Maria crushed by the anomie symbolized--perhaps too patly --by Southern California. The movie explains nothing. Perry is like a snorkle diver bobbing about in a bowl of angst. Content to float along watching the curious creatures beneath him, he never gets below the surface.

"By now," Joan Didion wrote once in a shrewd essay, "the corruption and venality and restrictiveness of Hollywood have become...firm tenets of American social faith--and of Hollywood's own image of itself." Perry is a film maker who generally works far from Hollywood, but temperamentally and intellectually he is at the very center of the system Didion so deftly described.

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