Sad Men in Film
Watching Chilly Scenes of Winter, the (500) Days of Summer of 1979
This week’s newsletter is true to the spirit of No One Asked. No one asked me to write about the 1979 film Chilly Scenes of Winter, and yet I could not be stopped. I tried to keep it to an Instagram story but I just had too much to say.
Prior to watching CSOW, I was mostly familiar with director Joan Micklin Silver because of her romantic comedy Crossing Delancey. Calling it a rom-com feels almost misleading, because it’s a rom-com in the way that, say, Moonstruck in a rom-com. It’s based in reality and the comedy comes from human interactions, not broad physical comedy. You might even say it’s a movie Dave Franco would approve of.
So when Micklin’s film Chilly Scenes of Winter entered the Criterion Collection, I was eager to see it. For starters, Crossing Delancey love interest Peter Riegert (the Pickle Man himself!) is involved. It stars John Heard, who I find delightfully strange, even if my brain is always going to shout, “hey, it’s the dad from Home Alone!” when I see him on screen. And it’s set in winter, which is one of my favorite scenes to watch or read about. People walking around in the snow, wearing large coats, defrosting their cars, etc. No other season can be both romantic and heart-crushingly bleak like winter…she really is that girl.
And when I finally watched it, I was delighted to discover that it was an offbeat and surprising entry into a genre I didn’t really have a name for until now: A Sad Man Examines a Past Relationship and Tries to Get Her Back cinema (we’re workshopping the name).
You know what I’m talking about. It’s (500) Days of Summer. We meet a man, we think he’s adorable because he’s Joseph Gordon Levitt and we formed a real bond with him through repeated high school viewings of 10 Things I Hate About You, and we want him to succeed in his relationship despite a few initial red flags. This is also the plot of High Fidelity, a movie in which John Cusack just cannot forget about his girlfriend even though she left him and moved in with be-ponytailed Tim Robbins (there are other things going on in this film, but it’s been a minute since I saw it and that’s what I remember).
Both of these are movies I loved when I was younger. (500) Days of Summer is a film about how Tom and Summer should not end up together1, and they don’t, although at the time I wondered how any girl couldn’t see his (quite apparent to me) charms. High Fidelity appealed to me because honestly, on the inside I’m kind of a Rob sometimes :( It has a happy-ish ending that seems like it could’ve just as easily gone the other way, but in high school I couldn’t understand why anyone would leave John Cusack (he knew so much about music and loved making lists!) only to live with Tim Robbins and his ponytail. Mind boggling!
But with age and wisdom (?) I’ve come to understand that these relationships are not good ones. We see these films through the eyes of our male protagonists, and so we only see their viewpoints, only hear their thoughts. And that’s not to discredit the films, because that’s the point. We see their points of view, perhaps initially sympathize with them, and then slowly realize that we’re not seeing the entire picture, that there’s a whole other person in this relationship whose needs aren’t even being remotely met. We’ve been enjoying the indie rock soundtrack and ignoring one half of the relationship, forgetting that a woman doesn’t exist to fit squarely into some guy’s predetermined fantasy of an ideal relationship.
Chilly Scenes of Winter does this gradual realization, I’d argue, even better and more clearly than either of the aforementioned films. John Heard as Charles is easy to sympathize with when we meet him as a heartbroken man who misses his ex-girlfriend, Laura. Mary Beth Hurt2 plays Laura, and she really plays the hell out of what I think is a difficult role. When she and Charles meet, she’s recently separated from her husband and living in an empty box of an apartment where she doesn’t even have a chair. You can imagine how easy it is for Charles to fit this woman into his life—she’s currently directionless, as much of a blank slate as her empty walls. He can bring her a chair and a purpose.
The film jumps around, showing Charles and Laura in happier times as well as Charles in the present, where he mostly laments Laura’s absence and stands outside her A-frame home where she lives, once again, with her husband. She broke up with Charles to go back to her husband (who’s named Ox…details are free!).
The film was marketed as a romantic comedy, and inititally had the much more happy-go-lucky title Head Over Heels. It also had a happy ending, where Charles and Laura end up together! While my romance loving heart has, on some level, a desire for every movie to end with the couple happy and together, there’s no denying that a happy ending for this movie doesn’t even make sense. It would be like (500) Days of Summer ending with Tom and Summer getting married. Every scene, every action, every performance in Chilly Scenes of Winter points toward Charles and Laura ending up apart.
John Heard is amazing in this role because he has to play a man who is sympathetic, a little pathetic, and also vaguely menacing. His love of Laura, or what he thinks of as his love for Laura, is suffocating. At one point, she tells him she has a gynecologist appointment and he grills her over where she’s really going and asks why he can’t go, too. “There are a few things I like to do by myself, and one of them is go to the gynecologist,” she says (a hilarious line), but Charles can’t forget about it. That night, he does a deeply strange bit where he tells her he needs time away from her, too, and that he has many friends (“I just haven’t met most of them yet”), and that he isn’t going to give up poker night with the guys just because he has a girlfriend. Then he says he’s going to find her gynecologist, beat him up, and come back home and beat her up. “I’m not really going to beat you up,” he mutters, and then the scene cuts to present day where he says, “I guess she thought I was weird.” Reader, I laughed out loud.
During their breakup scene, in a strangely monotone voice, he tells her he’s going to rape her, and then the scene cuts to present day, where he says, “She left that night.” Yeah, I bet she did! An A-frame salesman named Ox is looking mighty good right about now.
The movie itself holds just as much barely contained rage and darkness as John Heard’s performance. The specter of suicide and mental illness is threaded throughout, with Charles’s mother frequently threatening to kill herself and at one point staying in the hospital after a breakdown. This is not a movie that should have a neat, romantic ending.
What it deserves is the ending Joan Micklin Silver eventually gave it, when she recut the film several years later and changed the title to Chilly Scenes of Winter (which it probably should have been in the first place, given that it’s the title of the Ann Beattie novel the film is based on). In the new ending, Charles and Laura don’t end up together. He meets with her after she once again leaves Ox. Now she’s staying in a friend’s apartment, one that’s fully furnished. He asks her to give him a clear answer: can she be with him again, or not? But she won’t answer, and he finally realizes that he has to accept that as a no. The final shot is of him running through the park, wearing jeans, as if he’s trying to outrun his feelings in his street clothes. It’s perfect.
This is an underappreciated film, although perhaps the newly released Criterion edition will change that. I would be surprised if the people behind (500) Days of Summer and High Fidelity hadn’t seen it, because it seems to be such a clear inspiration. It felt surprisingly fresh and modern to see John Heard breaking the fourth wall in a sad sack pseudo-rom-com way back in 1979.
What I wonder is this: what films look at this from a female point of view? A woman looking back at a relationship, trying to get back with a man, and then she (and/or the viewer) realizing that they shouldn’t be together? One example that sort of fits is Someone Great, but that really doesn’t have the tone I’m seeking (and given that my examples of Sad Man Examines a Past Relationship and Tries to Get Her Back cinema are from 2000 and 2009, I fear that this tone might not even exist these days). I know there’s a Zoe Kravitz led High Fidelity TV series, but I would much prefer a film.
Chilly Scenes of Winter is now on DVD, and although I checked it out from the library, I’ll probably buy in the next Criterion sale. I’d love to hear your suggestions for further Sad Man cinema, as well as any suggestions for any Sad Woman films.
I’m working on first pass pages for Faking Christmas now, so there may or may not be a newsletter next week. Either way, I’ll see you soon.
One decision about this movie that’s always confounded me is the text at the beginning that refers to the writer’s ex-girlfriend as a bitch. Seems like a weird move!
Mary Beth Hurt was once married to John Hurt and is now married to Paul Schrader. What a life!
You have completely sold me on this one!