Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky is one of the great achievements of 1970s cinema. Recently released in a properly sparkling edition from the Criterion Collection, it is less well known than many of the celebrated New Hollywood films—but stands alongside the very best of them in the pantheon. Featuring Peter Falk (Mikey) and John Cassavetes (Nicky) as life-long friends (note the diminutives), it is a film of many strengths; here we hone in on its masterful treatment of loyalties. Not of the loyalty between the two characters, but rather how May transfers the audience’s loyalty back and forth from one to the other, eventually leaving us adrift and alone—as any seventies film worth its salt should.
In an earlier discussion of the film, we described it as “a Shakespearean tragedy in three parts and seven movements.” And those three phases are defined by shifts in our loyalties. In Act I, we are squarely with Mikey, during a bravura twenty-minute sequence in which he is called to a squalid hotel room by his desperate friend, and comes to the rescue. Calming the wild-eyed, paranoid Nicky with embraces, reassurances – and antacids for his burning ulcer – our loyalties are with Mikey as he nurses his friend back from brink. He then eases him out of the hotel with an exchange of intimate items (Mikey’s watch and Nicky’s gun). We don’t yet know how meaningful that watch is, but the transfer of the gun is quite something, and suggestive of Nicky’s self-destructive streak.
Nicky’s In Trouble
Mikey to the Rescue
Take my watch
Give me the gun
Here, go ahead
You can watch these riveting 20 minutes again and again and you will not see a hint of anything from Mikey other than his love for his friend. Which is why the audience is unprepared for what comes next, as May pulls the rug out with an incomprehensible betrayal—and the end of Act I.
Mikey Drops a Dime
With the narrative turned upside down, our loyalties now shift suddenly to Nicky. He was right all along, and Mikey was lying. But was the film lying? (That is, did it cheat in the way it portrayed Mikey in Act I?) Among the achievements of Mikey and Nicky is that it was not. The burden, and the brilliance, of Act II is to implicitly bring us around to an understanding of the possibility of that phone call.
The boys are now on the run, with a hit man (Ned Beatty) in pursuit. We now see each of the protagonists with new eyes: more tolerant of Nicky’s impulsive eccentricities; more wary of Mikey’s motives. So when Nicky announces that on the way to the airport they should stop at the cemetery where his mother is buried—well, why not? This detour initiates a pivotal sequence of events that fills in all the missing pieces of this relationship. At the cemetery, in another long, searching scene, the chips of decades of friendship are pushed across the table—these are men who have been to the funerals of each other’s parents, adults who knew them as children, and shared in their upbringing.
At the Cemetary
With the long shadow of the past now in plain view, it is not shocking that immediately afterwards, back on another city bus, and accompanied by some childhood game-playing, Mikey changes his mind—he’ll chuck everything and join his friend on the lam. For a few fleeting moments, the audience is safe: the boys are on the same side, and we are with them. Such a nice movie.
I’m coming with you
But there is something in Nicky that can’t leave well enough alone. And so the next stop is another impulsive detour, to pay a late night visit to one of his lady friends. In a long scene that is as discomforting to watch as anything Cassavetes himself ever put on film, Nicky utterly humiliates his friend.
After too much time in the apartment the action spills onto the street. Mikey is – quite rightly – furious. (There was a gap in the shooting of the two scenes and legend holds that when they resumed May went up to Falk as if to give him a kiss—and then bit him on the lip so hard that it bled, so as to remind him of how he was supposed to be feeling at that particular moment.) The argument that follows fills dark streets, and it becomes clear that this blindsiding humiliation was but one in a long lifetime of betrayals that Nicky has visited upon his best friend (and it also becomes clear that by crossing their boss, Nicky has put Mikey in danger as well).
“You had to do that to me?”
Mickey has had enough. “I just don’t want to do it anymore,” he finally explains. He wants his watch back, offering the gun in return. But Nicky throws the watch to the ground, shattering it. And doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of what he has done.
Here’s the gun
What’s left of the watch
“Can’t you understand that my father gave me this watch,” Mikey asks, plaintively, “that it’s the only thing I have from my father?” “Don’t you have any idea how people feel?” And there on the street at three in the morning, it becomes possible to understand how Mickey could have done what he did, a few long hours ago. On this turn, as the men go their seperate ways, we enter Act III, with our loyalties uprooted again. We can’t be with Nicky anymore, not after what we’ve just witnessed him do to his friend (which is why we had to squirm though that scene in the apartment). As Nicky later confesses, “I did too much to him.” And so we’re back with Mikey—not all the way back, but we’re in his company when he makes that final, now seemingly inevitable choice.
