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Could be Mike Nichols’ best film (or is it Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Discuss). An acerbic, unforgiving, frank look at male sexual arrogance and frustration, it makes a pointed contrast to Nichols’ inability to capture the same rude honesty with Closer. Where Closer was vague, self-satisfied and arbitrary, Carnal Knowledge is precise, telling, and well-built.
Nichols came straight off his biggest let-down, his clumsy adaptation of Catch-22, with this Jules Feiffer screenplay that tackles, sans sentimentality, the lives of two college friends, embodied by Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel as Jonathan and Sandy, who spend twenty years or so chasing sexual fulfilment regardless of the cost to themselves or the women they know. In college in the late-‘40s, they compete for the love of Susan (Candace Bergen); in their late twenties, working in New York in the ‘50s, where Garfunkel, having long since snared and been bored by Bergen, takes up with a mistress (Cynthia O’Neil) whilst Jonathan engages in a torturous affair with a slightly older model (Ann-Margaret) that resolves, or rather fails to resolve, in a disastrous attempt at partner-swapping and an overdose. Middle-age sees Sandy romping around with a teenager and indulging in late-‘60s groovy-isms, and the other stricken by impotence, alimony, and raw resentment.
Leaving behind the tone-poetics of The Graduate, and the stilted artiness of Catch-22, Nichols moves his camera and frames his shots with a subtle spareness and unforced period detail – the college scenes flow to the zephyr strains of “Moonlight Serenade” – light years from the plasticised blandness of his recent work. It’s dated, almost inevitably, detailing the travails of a generation giving up on old-world ideals (notably, the characters are guys who narrowly missed out on WW2 service) but unable to find a way to redefine their attitudes, with the women in their lives defined as almost purely reactive subjects – but even this is worth glancing at again in the light of renewed interest in the ‘50s milieu of urban male swingers and their cultural influence, as portrayed in Mad Men.
In its way, it’s a rather moralistic take-down, like Alfie, and never really blooms into a truly persuasive drama, more a set of acidic notes for a thesis on the decline of an era in white male ascendency. Jonathan character takes refuge in ballbuster clichés and stale misogyny, his impotence only assuaged by a prick-worship ritual offered by a hooker (Rita Moreno). Nicholson’s portrayal of a hysterical boy-man utterly terrified by the idea of commitment is as devastatingly accurate now as then.