Word: phil
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Willie and Phil contains few brilliant insights into the 1970s, but rather a string of overwrought cliches. He gives us the hedonistic and self-conscious '70s, a time when people seek instant gratification and big bucks. In his movie, Jeannette (Margot Kidder) epitomizes Self-Gratification, admitting "all she wants is to feel good." Phil (Ray Sharkey) plays Big Bucks, the New York photographer gone to California to bring in big money and live in big houses, with glossy pictures of himself hung all over his mansion. The Mystic is Willie (Michael Ontkean). Mazursky, whose last movie, An Unmarried Woman, successfully...
...MOVIE BEGINS with an audience watching the end of Truffaut's classic picture about two friends falling in love with the same capricious girl, Jules and Jim. Mazursky thus claims to be updating and Americanizing this classic. Willie and Phil meet outside the theater in 1970 in Greenwich Village and, as the narrator tells us, "became great friends." They hated the Vietnam war, and they loved Truffaut. One had a predilection to Dante, the other to baseball. They shared lofts and aspirations, beer and self-condemnation...
Willie and "Phillie," in fact, are almost interchangeable. Willie Kauffman, a Jewish English teacher, wants to find himself. Phil D'Amico, an Italian photographer, wants to be a Jewish intellectual. They both fall in love with the same woman, both accompany her to the hospital when she bears one of them a child, take saunas together and play chess. In short, they are two-thirds of an isosceles triangle. But still, Willie and Phil is not a movie about this menage a trois as much as about the times...
Mazursky attempts to create a mood of self-consciousness, a theme he perceives as archetypal of the 1970s. Mazursky uses mirrors and cameras in this way throughout the film. Willie and Phil opens with an audience watching a movie. That Phil is a photographer is no coincidence; he takes pictures of the three of them. Jeannette becomes involved in the film business when she moves to California. The movie ends as it began, with a film, though this time Willie and Phil are strolling outside the Rocky Horror Picture Show...
...time that people will look to it ten or twenty years from now as the definitive film about the 1970s. His eye for detail is often marvelous--from waterbeds to thin ties, from dropping acid and the emotions that follow (Jeannette claims her hands have flown away while Phil screams his head weighs a thousand pounds) to well decorated lofts...