BEFORE: Already I'm wrapping up the Jane Fonda chain - geez, I feel like I just started it. But I can't dwell on it, I've still got 82 films to go before I close up the book on another year.
THE PLOT: Misadventures of four groups of guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
AFTER: This is a collection of four stories taking place in different rooms at the same hotel, presumably at the same time. This is a tricky thing, I think other films have tried it, like "Four Rooms" and "Blame It on the Bellboy", and most recently "The Grand Budapest Hotel", which I would like to see at some point. Apparently audiences are fascinated by the way that hotels work.
This film is based on a Neil Simon play, and unlike typical one-room plays where the staging seems very simple and obvious, this makes me wonder how they presented a play that takes place in FOUR different rooms simultaneously - or was it done in turn? Since all hotel rooms tend to look similar, did they just close the curtain and re-open it on what was supposed to then be another room? Or did they divide the stage into four parts and then light up or darken the appropriate rooms at the proper times? I don't know...
EDIT: No, I was right the first time. But in the original Neil Simon play "California Suite", these four stories took place in the SAME hotel room, but at different times. The story of the first guests would be told, then those guests would check out of the hotel, and story #2 would be told. In the film, the four stories take place in different rooms, over the same two-day period, more or less.
Anyway, the main problem here is that the four stories are not connected in any way, which makes the whole thing feel rather disjointed. Jeez, even "Cloud Atlas" found small ways to tie its stories together, and they were happening decades or centuries apart! Even something small, like having a person from one story sitting in the hotel bar next to a person from another story might have been helpful.
Instead we get four stories that advance toward their endings in large chunks at a time, which is awkward at best, especially when some things happen during the day and other things happen at night - as a result we spend so much time away from one set of characters it's easy to forget where we left off with them. Yeah, maybe they're asleep for a few hours, or doing something really boring, but still there's no cohesiveness in this stop-and-go approach.
Another problem is that some stories are based on incredibly clever banter - the kind that very sophisticated married couples would have, and then the others basically feature physical comedy, like trying to hide the body of a sleeping person, or a bunch of slapstick injuries during a tennis game. Going from high comedy conversations to low-grade slapstick was pretty jarring - it's the comedy equivalent of "the bends".
So, as a result, I'm not sure how these stories were meant to fit together, or if they even work together at all. Just because they happen within close proximity of each other doesn't seem like enough. They don't all play off a similar theme, unless it's something along the lines of "adding insult to injury". But that seems like a stretch.
It's very meta that Maggie Smith won an Oscar for playing an actress who was nominated for an Oscar, and is seen attending the Academy Awards ceremony. I wonder if that has ever happened before, or since. (Ah, she's the only woman to win a Best Actress Oscar for playing a fictional Oscar nominee. Cate Blanchett won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing a real Oscar winner, Katherine Hepburn, in "The Aviator".)
I guess I need to take this more as a snapshot of the 1970's. Perhaps at the time it seemed really novel for divorced people to get along and discuss their teenage daughter's situation, for a man to have secret relationships with other men, or for black people to play tennis. But apart from all that, it just feels very dated somehow.
Also starring Alan Alda (last seen in "Everyone Says I Love You"), Michael Caine (last seen in "Get Carter"), Maggie Smith (last seen in "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Bill Cosby (last seen in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"), Richard Pryor (last seen in "Superman III"), Walter Matthau (last seen in "The Fortune Cookie"), Elaine May, Gloria Gifford, Sheila Frazier, with cameos from Dana Plato, James Coburn (last seen in "Payback"), Army Archerd.
RATING: 3 out of 10 desk clerks
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