Down And Out in Manhattan

By Richard Zoglin

Tommy Wilhelm has lost his job, and now he seems on the verge of losing his mind. Living temporarily in a hotel on Manhattan's upper Broadway, he is surrounded by a depressing gallery of old people, among them his coldly uncaring father. The city is too hot, the elevator doors are too slow, his money is running out, and the wife whom he left but who will not give him a divorce is pestering him for support payments. Worse, a shyster doctor has talked him into squandering his piddling savings on the commodities market. "What's the matter?" asks his father, to whom he turns as a last resort. "Everything," Tommy replies. "Just everything."

The PBS adaptation of Saul Bellow's 1956 novella Seize the Day stands apart from the usual run of prestige TV drama in several respects. First, for its unrelenting bleakness: the only possible relief from Tommy's mounting misfortunes is a bitter laugh at their Job-like extravagance. Then, for its particularity: the movie is a vivid portrait of a fortyish Jewish man on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the mid-1950s, yet it refuses to promulgate a larger message about Jews, New York City or life in the '50s. And finally, for the very fact that it was made. Despite his widespread acclaim (and a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976), Saul Bellow has never before had a novel turned into a film. It is hard to imagine anyone doing a better job. The adaptation, written by Ronald Ribman and directed by Fielder Cook, takes a few careful liberties with Bellow's story but packs its essence into a compact, ruefully funny and tensely moving 90 minutes. In odd but inspired casting, Robin Williams plays Tommy and delivers the best dramatic performance of his career. In past roles, Williams has sometimes seemed mechanical and pinched. Here his hyperactive face and vocal tics are orchestrated into a wrenching picture of panic and desperation.

Jerry Stiller, another actor known primarily for comedy, is equally impressive as the loudmouthed charlatan Dr. Tamkin, who dispenses folk wisdom between gulps of pot roast and watermelon. Joseph Wiseman is a bit too pat as the unfeeling father, but there are finely etched cameos from Katherine Borowitz, Tony Roberts, William Hickey and, particularly, Jo Van Fleet as a dowager who defiantly stares down Tommy while her dog urinates at his feet. (Bellow himself appears in a walk-through as a hotel guest.)

This modestly budgeted effort, from the producers responsible for a fine PBS adaptation of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, uses its resources well. The New York setting, for example, might have been sketched more elaborately. But a single scene of Tommy hustling an irascible old man (Tom Aldredge) across the street before the light changes conveys all that is needed. Trying to squeeze his car into a tight parking space, Tommy huffs mightily as he turns the steering wheel back and forth while his front-seat companion, the indomitable Tamkin, rattles on: a perfect visual metaphor for Tommy's plight. The makers of Seize the Day did not settle for translating words to screen; somebody gave this one some thought.