Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 8-October-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium

The Apartment (1960)

"The Apartment" is an unsettling film. I've watched it three times in different phases of life and it has always left me uncomfortable and a tad perplexed. I know it's a classic. I know it has impeccable stars. I know it's one of the few "lighter" movies to storm the Academy Awards. (Billy Wilder won statues for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay.) I know it has a happy ending. But for a romantic comedy it just doesn't make me feel good.

Is that why it succeeds?

Unlike most boy-meets-girl flicks, which rescue its leads from unfortunate personal situations like bad engagements, "The Apartment" paints the world at large as bleak. Its principal theme is that humanity consists of takers and those who are taken, so that when boy meets girl it's likely that one will be battered. The action moves back and forth between a horrifying insurance company where peons are plugged into a grid of 30,000 desks, a smoky bar where said company's execs put the moves on gullible stenographers, and a bachelor pad where such couples retire when they want to be alone. The rent for the apartment is paid by company small fry C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who agrees to open his home to randy muckamucks in the hopes they will help him climb the corporate ladder. In other words, the hero of this "light" tale is a bit of a sleazebag, or worse, a sleazebag's hanger-on. He's not your average cinematic sweetheart, i.e., so cute and put-upon that he simply must be rescued by fate.

The hardships of Baxter's arrangement shift from merely annoying (he has to sleep on a park bench one night) to positively torturous when he enters into a romantic triangle with an elevator operator named Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) and a married executive who can make or break his future (Fred MacMurray). Wringing irony and pathos from its yuletide setting, the plot takes a grim turn at the end of the second act and throws Baxter and Fran together at his place. It isn't love that blooms, exactly, but the shared understanding of two little people who are used to getting reamed by bigger ones, and don't appear to have the spine to resist. Aren't future mates in the movies supposed to be mussy instead of messy, wistful instead of wretched? Not so here. It's painful to contemplate that two such people could exist.

By the time "The Apartment" concludes the viewer isn't panting for caresses and consummation; she's relieved that in this twisted world even losers can occasionally make a play for happiness. Wilder's payoff (following on the heels of some fine acting) is basic kindness and dignity which feel quite fragile and tenuous. Hence, the film is unsettling. But perhaps (*gulp*) it reflects truth more accurately than most and thereby sets itself apart.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.