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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
Whatever you think of that defense, it's not empty. Some of Ephron's movies have been mushy, yes, some fun and feathery, some just not very good. But running beneath even the most popcorny of them has been a pragmatism: Small independent bookstores get smushed by big chains; married boyfriends never leave their spouses; husbands fall in love with other women while their wives are pregnant; alcoholic fathers make ugly scenes at grandchildren's birthday parties. Behind Meg Ryan's gummy grin there has often been a scalding and improbably side-splitting realism. Not always -- but enough to support an argument that it's the hearts-and-flowers, frankly feminine energy of the work, and not the sometimes unpretty guts of it, that leaves it open to detractors. After all, it's about as easy for a movie made by a woman to get labeled schmaltzy as it is for a book by a woman to get labeled chick lit.
Mostly, though, Ephron gauges her cinematic triumphs based less on critical response than on attendance. "There's no question that if you make a movie and people don't go see it, in some way it didn't work," she said when asked whether she has ever agreed with her critics. "Movies I make are made to be seen by large numbers of people. So if they don't like it, you can't say 'This movie secretly worked and nobody knows it,' because I'm not making little independent movies." Ephron's box-office disappointments include "Mixed Nuts," and "Lucky Numbers." "My Blue Heaven," a Steve Martin take on Henry Hill's witness relocation (Pileggi, her husband, wrote "GoodFellas") got, in her words, "killed" by critics, but has since attracted a cult following. She also claimed that it is Sammy "The Bull" Gravano's favorite mob movie.
Despite the flops, Ephron has been one of the winningest female writer-directors in Hollywood, which is no mean feat. She's been nominated for three screenwriting Oscars, including one for "Silkwood," which she co-wrote with Alice Arlen, about a plutonium plant employee who died mysteriously before she could talk to reporters about unsafe workplace conditions. Directed by Mike Nichols, it makes "Erin Brockovich" look like, well, "Sleepless in Seattle." Nichols also directed her adaptation of "Heartburn" in 1986. Ephron first took the helm herself on the small 1992 film "This Is My Life," and found monster directorial success the next year with "Sleepless in Seattle," starring Ryan and Tom Hanks; it grossed $220 million worldwide. "You've Got Mail" re-teamed Ryan and Hanks and made $115 million domestically. Even "Bewitched," which got savaged in reviews and was considered a box-office disappointment, managed to make enough money ($62 million domestically) to be the 42nd-highest-grossing film of last year; more notably, Ephron was one of only three female directors in 2005's top 100.
And then there's 1989's "When Harry Met Sally." Can men and women be friends? Are you high-maintenance or low-maintenance? I'll have what she's having. It's one of those movies that changed the lexicon. "There are quizzes about it that I can't answer two out of the hundred questions!" Ephron exclaimed. "I mean, I can't get over how people know it by heart." Harry and Sally also breathed modern life into the romantic comedy, a genre that was flagging in the decades after sex became a readily available commodity. Ephron said she made three successful romantic comedies by "creating three contemporary obstacles. One ["Harry and Sally"] was, 'We're not sleeping together because we're friends.' One ["Sleepless in Seattle"] was, 'We're not sleeping together because we don't know each other,' and one ["You've Got Mail"] was, 'We're not sleeping together because a) we don't know each other and b) we do know each other and hate each other." But she also said that contemporizing a cinematic genre was not what she set out to do -- "I was certainly not meaning to reinvent anything with these movies," she said.
Ephron is currently writing a movie about Julie Powell, who cooked her way through the Julia Child cookbooks; a script about journalist Mike McAlary is at HBO. Still, she has enjoyed returning to her old genre with "I Feel Bad About My Neck." "It's nice to be able to do things that are simply about you and what you're writing -- as opposed to you and what you're writing and will they make it and if they want to make it, can we cast it, and all of those things that are sitting on your shoulder as you write a movie."
Ephron has also lately become a Web-based answer to Maureen Dowd in her role as a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. In her dispatches, she frequently lays a personal template over a political situation, as when she recently compared Al Gore to a former flame. Ephron described Gore as "the ex-boyfriend who's starting to look good after forty bad dates with other guys. He's gained a little weight, but who hasn't? He's still unexciting, but excitement turns out to be overrated. He's not great in bed, but the last guy you slept with who was great in bed never called. What's more, he's on the board of Google, he was in on the IPO, so now he even has a little money. He's starting to look like the man of your dreams ... There's a little voice telling you that once he has something to lose, he'll go back to his old habits and blow it all over again, but you're not listening because you're desperate: you need to find a guy to marry. After all, time is running out."
In the 1970 introduction to her first essay collection, "Wallflower at the Orgy," Ephron wrote of the topics she was then covering -- from Cosmopolitan to Craig Claiborne to Jacqueline Susann to beauty makeovers to the Hamptons -- "I could call these subjects Popular Culture, but I like writing about them so much that I hate to think they have to be justified in this way -- or at least I'm sorry that they do." In fact, Ephron wrote, "I care that there's a war in Indochina, and I demonstrate against it; I care that there's a women's liberation movement, and I demonstrate for it. But I also go to the movies incessantly, and have my hair done once a week, and cook dinner every night, and spend hours in front of the mirror trying to make my eyes look symmetrical, and I care about those things, too."
Thirty-five years after her "Wallflower at the Orgy" introduction, Ephron is still exploring the relationship between the trivial and the profound. "The constant confusion in life for me is that you honestly do feel bad when you see in the mirror that yet another coup de vieux has happened to you," said Ephron, "while at the same time understanding that it's better than being dead. There's this gigantic distance between those two things. One is the most superficial, idiotic thing -- I ruined my manicure! And the other is: I could be dead tomorrow." In some ways, bridging this chasm is what Ephron's career has been about. As one of the few female stars of the journalism world of her youth, and one of even fewer successful women filmmakers today, she has peddled her keen observations about everything from divorce to insanity to Betty Friedan right next to her thoughts on pesto and People and Bill Blass. Sometimes she has mashed them all together in movies that feature pretty people who share pretty kisses at the end.
When you're young, Ephron continued, "you're indulging yourself by feeling too bad about what you see in the mirror because you're going to have plenty of time to feel really bad about it, and you're also indulging yourself if you think that the pain in your hip is kidney cancer, because it probably isn't." The older you get, "the more reality there is to feeling bad about what you see in the mirror and feeling worried about the pains and aches. But there's still a huge gap between those two things. That's a metaphor for everything. That it's possible to be completely trivial and completely serious at the same time, which is something by the way, that women get to do a little better than guys do. And good. Fine."
