Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		2.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Scenes from a Mall Blu-ray Movie Review

"Scenes from a Marriage" Was Taken

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 12, 2011

I miss Paul Mazursky. Now in his eighties, the director and actor still pops up in small parts (most recently as a voice in Kung Fu Panda 2), but he hasn't made a film in fifteen years. In his prime, when he worked from material that he originated or adapted himself, Mazursky had a unique style with both drama and comedy, because (among other things) he didn't distinguish between them. An Unmarried Woman and Moscow on the Hudson had strong elements of both. Enemies: A Love Story dealt with the gravest of subjects on the surface, but it worked only because at some point you had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. And Moon Over Parador, which is a full-on comedy studded with punchlines, is also a serious examination of the convergence of politics and show business. (It's a Latin American Dave, five years before Dave.)

Scenes from a Mall is second-string Mazursky, but even his trifles are more interesting than most of what's advertised as comedy today. Mazursky's comedy always arose from character, and if that meant forgoing punchlines in favor of the rueful smile that comes from recognizing something personal and familiar in the predicament of someone on-screen, it's a trade-off he was happy to make. And he could always get interesting players -- in this case, Bette Midler, who had starred in his successful Down and Out in Beverly Hills; and Woody Allen, making a rare appearance in a film he neither wrote nor directed and playing utterly against type as a devoted Los Angeleno.

The film takes place on the sixteenth wedding anniversary of Nick and Deborah Fifer (Allen and Midler). That's sixteen years of legal marriage, but seventeen years if you count the year they lived together first, which Deborah does. Both Fifers are driven and successful. Nick is a high-powered sports attorney and agent. His current project is negotiating a lucrative endorsement deal for a 13-year-old tennis prodigy. Deborah is a shrink specializing in marital problems (irony alert!). Her latest book, entitled I Do! I Do! I Do! Recommitting Yourself to Marriage in the Age of Divorce, has just hit stores.

After packing off their two children on a ski trip, the Fifers busy themselves preparing for a dinner party they're throwing in their honor for some friends that evening. A conjugal interlude to mark the occasion is interrupted, first by one of Deborah's patients in crisis, and then by the mother of Nick's client demanding an update. Then it's off to the local high-end mall (L.A.'s famous Beverly Center, though the interiors were mostly shot on soundstages on the east coast) to pick up sushi for the party from the Fifers' favorite chef.

This being the holiday season, the mall is alive with shoppers, Christmas decorations and seasonal entertainment like a multi-ethnic barbershop quartet offering a cappella renderings of familiar carols. Before picking up the sushi, Nick and Deborah stop to retrieve the anniversary gifts they ordered for each other (his is a surf board, though he doesn't surf; hers is a family portrait in an expensive antique silver frame). They also stop by a huge display featuring Deborah's new book, and Nick mortifies his wife by introducing her to patrons as the author and telling them to buy copies. Then, after they acquire the prepared raw fish, Nick asks his wife to sit down at a food court restaurant. He wants to talk to her about something . . .

From that point, tempers flare, scenes are made, sushi gets thrown and people get punched. By the time the film ends, the evening's festivities will have been repeatedly canceled and restored, the sushi order will have been discarded and repurchased multiple times, both Fifers will have entirely changed clothes, the surf board and silver frame will have suffered more abuse than anyone could ever have predicted, and the Fifers will have traversed most of the mall, consuming much alcohol in the process. The result is a more thorough airing of the Fifer marriage than Deborah might have recommended in the pages of I Do! I Do! I Do! (The film's title is a reference to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.) Nick and Deborah Fifer may be caricatures, but there's a lot of hard-won knowledge (though not necessarily wisdom) in their dialogue and in the actors' portrayals about the perils of long-term marital partnership between two ambitious people. Even if you or your spouse are nothing like either of the Fifers, I suspect that anyone who's been married for a long time can relate.

The film is full of signature Mazursky touches. A spouse's confession of infidelity invoking, as a defense mechanism, how terrible the cheating spouse feels about the whole thing, echoes a famous scene in An Unmarried Woman between Jill Clayburgh and Michael Murphy. Aspects of the Fifer life style and relationship recall the Whitemans from Down and Out in Beverly Hills. A scene involving security guards suggests a similar scene (set in Bloomingdale's) in Moscow on the Hudson.

Then there's the omnipresent mime, who becomes Nick's personal nemesis. He's played, wordlessly, by the extraordinary Bill Irwin, who has been showing up in regular parts now that he's getting older and less flexible. (Most recently, he plays a preacher in Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga's directorial debut.) But Irwin got his start as a circus clown, and in the era when this film was made, he was still spending much of his time doing the equivalent of silent film comedy live on stage, where, in the words of one critic, he maintained his own special relationship with gravity. Irwin's unique physical grace allows him to play more than just a nuisance that Nick (and Deborah too) keep encountering as they pass between shops. He also expresses some of what his mime character senses is going on inside Nick, which Nick is desperately trying to bottle up. (Of course, the mime also does what he does to get paid, either for being entertaining or just to go away. Eventually he succeeds in collecting.) It takes a writer-direcctor of Mazursky's off-beat sensibility to turn a mime into a real character instead of just background decoration, and he ends up becoming the single funniest character in the film.

Scenes from a Mall Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

This is another Mill Creek title that is labeled "1080p" but is really 1080i. Combing artifacts are not nearly as severe as on Mill Creek's Blu-ray of Holy Matrimony and should not be noticeable during playback. (I did not have major difficulty obtaining acceptable screenshots.) The image is reasonably detailed, with the softer film-like texture typical of films from this era. This is a look I happen to like, but I recognize that it may disappoint tastes formed by the sharp-edged style of 21st Century productions.

Colors appear to be accurate, which is to say that everything inside the mall looks stylized and artificial, with different locales dominated by specific color schemes. By comparison, the opening scenes at the Fifer household have natural-looking fleshtones and the L.A. sky looks appropriately gray with smog. Black levels are deep enough that Bill Irwin's mime outfit always appears solidly black.

As has been true on previous Mill Creek discs I've reviewed, there is nothing to indicate DNR or other filtering. I don't think they'd make the effort.

Scenes from a Mall Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As usual with Mill Creek, the soundtrack is DTS-HD MA 2.0, not "Dolby Digital 2.0" as indicated on the case. It's a functional mix that delivers the dialogue in the center and the sound of the mall to left and right with minimal surround separation. The soundtrack tells the story, as it should, but there's not much more to be said for it. The original scoring by the prolific Marc Shaiman, as well as the songs, including Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me" covered by both Marlene Dietrich and Middler, sound very good.

Scenes from a Mall Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

None.

Scenes from a Mall Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The technical quality isn't perfect, but it's the best we're likely to see for this obscure catalogue title that did relatively little box office. And since there's no sign of Paul Mazursky's major work on the Blu-ray horizon, Scenes from a Mall will have to do for now. If you're a Mazursky fan, then the title is recommended. If you don't know his other work, I suggest a rental.