#40 — Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971)
One of the things that I can never quite get over when considering the general cinema of the seventies is the mad rush of mature content, not just in terms of bouncing nudity off of curse words and leaning back to watch the audience revel in or recoil from the freedom in creating content that still incredibly new. It’s also in the simple but profound act of considering the furtive messiness of adult lives. Movies could now veer further away from cops and gangsters and detectives and wealthy doyennes submerged in melodrama. They could be about lost, lonely, lusty people fumbling towards some sort of physical pleasure meant to patch over existential wounds. The abandonment of the old production code that formerly guided the content of Hollywood product roughly coincided with the launch of sexual revolution. With Carnal Knowledge, director Mike Nichols simultaneously tried to make sense of the expanding boundaries that came with both transformations.

In loose, episodic fashion, the film follows the exploits of young men dealing with the emotional repercussion of letting their libidos guide them, with the main thread belonging to Jonathan, played by Jack Nicholson. The year before, Nicholson epitomized generational aimlessness in Five Easy Pieces earning his second Oscar nomination is as many years. Carnal Knowledge similarly touched upon the unnamed agony of being adrift in young adulthood, this time using the most primal biological urges to ground the story and simultaneously show the ways that people–especially men–used those instincts to lash wildly at the misty sorrow of the world. Whether with the comely co-ed played by Candice Bergen or the tense-lipped bombshell played by Ann-Margret that he’s entwined with later in life, Nicholson effortlessly, icily shows the ways his character uses and abuses human sexuality to mask his own lack of self-understanding. The film is bleakly humorous, but it’s the sort of laughter that dies in the throat as the cruelest implications of what’s happening on screen start to settle in. By now, Nicholson has established dozens of times over that he’s the master of playing characters with this sort of snarled conscious, but back then he was early enough in his career that his acting had to be electrifying, even a little frightening.

The screenplay was written by Jules Feiffer, then and now best known as a cartoonist for the Village Voice. He excelled in his regular strip of exposing the inherent hypocrisy of humanity, reworking it in a gentle, telling irony. He brings that sensibility to the story, although his trademark kindness was submerged in favor of something rawer, harder, tougher. He traces the lives of these characters, especially his main character, from the eager fervor of college-age conquests to the embittered weariness that comes with arrived on the verge of middle age with nothing to show for the years but an accumulated sense of baffled betrayal. Mike Nichols is the ideal director for the material, operating with a controlled visual elegance that undercuts any possibility for the film to slide too close to the plainly crude. He has such a keen sense of balance in the film, always finding smart, insightful ways to frame the images, often to show how each person in a relationship is reacting to the same fragile moment. Perhaps more than any of his peers, Nichols understood how to probe a scene by pulling back rather than driving in. Carnal Knowledge is about intimacy, but it takes someone as confident as Nichols to realize that what’s required to realize that is an openness to the whole world rather than an anxious need to burrow in. To a degree, the people on screen have no sense of control. The same certainly can’t be said about Nichols.