How a Friendship Dissolves: On Mikey & Nicky

Let me preface this by saying that as a freelancer, there are moments of frustration—regularly. Without naming any names, there is something deeply frustrating about a publication that requires the delivery of full manuscripts before agreeing to publish, and even then only pays a paltry sum. This is an essay I wrote for one such publication, which was rejected (if i can’t use this blog to complain, what good is it?). I spent a lot of time on it, so I figured it should be posted somewhere. So here it is. If you have The Criterion Channel, I encourage you to watch Elaine May’s Mikey & Nicky. It’s a phenomenal film. My essay contains some spoilers for it, FYI.

How a Friendship Dissolves

On Mikey & Nicky

“And that doesn’t scare you? To think that one day you’ll die, you’ll be over. Won’t be anything. You won’t know anything. There’ll be nothing.”

Friendship dissolves gradually, and then all at once. Mikey (Peter Falk) and Nicky (John Cassavetes) are each other’s only real friend, a duo forged in circumstance and hate. The past ripples into the present, informing each gesture, statement, or action, giving every single moment greater tension, begging for release. Mikey and Nicky, well, they belong to each other, it just rolls off the tongue. Mikey and Nicky. Two gangsters, running out of time, seemingly existing in a system that no longer wants them, if it ever did.

Elaine May could relate. The production of Mikey and Nicky is notorious for the ways in which May clashed with Paramount, ultimately leading to litigation and May losing final cut privilege. With that in mind, the film as it exists, and as we remember it, is a bit of a miracle, considering Paramount decided to quietly release the film in only a few theatres to satisfy its contractual obligations but otherwise let the film disappear. May didn’t make another film for a decade.

Primarily taking place over a single night, May shot a remarkable 1.4 million feet of film, which some speculate could be close to a record. In the duration of that night, Mikey and Nicky trade open-hearted revelations, unrelenting ball-busting, and devastating character takedowns in equal measure. We are made privy to every dimension of their relationship, and the ways in which its closeness accounts for its toxicity. Mikey and Nicky are the only people in the world that can validate and identify with each other’s experiences, and that leaves them in a haunted present. Haunted, but at times one can see what draws them together and how beautiful that can be. Throughout the night, we bear witness to their bruised masculinities and flawed conception of what it means to be a gangster and what it means to be accountable for your actions. The fact that they can only find comfort in each other makes it clear that they are unwanted by practically everyone else, which clarifies their strange and reckless bond.

They are not traditional gangsters. They are low on the food chain, and desperate even then. They experience none of the benefits one would expect from mob life, for anyone accustomed to The Godfather or even The Sopranos. Instead, they wander from rundown motels to dirty dive-bars to abandoned alleyways, as Nicky runs for his life because he can’t pay someone back and Mikey tries, reluctantly, to help him make it through the night. Peter Falk brings none of his Columbo charisma to Mikey, instead imbuing him with impossibly soulful eyes and a slight wobble, as though he could collapse at any moment. Mikey is tired of dealing with Nicky, his best friend in the world, but he can’t see that he’s no better. Nicky, meanwhile, has more at stake but feels almost more repressed, frantic but utterly unable to see what’s in front of him. They are a pair, aren’t they?

May’s over-budget production and uncooperative stance turned her into something of an industry pariah, and she struggled with that reputation for years (certainly we can assume that a man behaving the same way would be seen as a visionary). In 1986, she said, “It was difficult for me to get directing jobs because I seemed sort of crazy…Hollywood doesn’t care what you do as long as you’re making money for them.” The decade in between Mikey and Nicky and May’s follow-up as director, Ishtar, was her own long night, barred from directing although not idle. In the meantime, she co-wrote Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty and did uncredited rewrites and polishing on the scripts for Reds, Tootsie, and Labyrinth. Ishtar cemented her status with budget overruns, on-set clashes, and box office failure. She hasn’t directed since, beyond a one-hour documentary in 2016 about the life of her one-time comedy partner, Mike Nichols.

May was treated like a cautionary tale, an artist so uncompromising and so irresponsible that she didn’t deserve to work again. What was often lost in the eyes of those executives was what she accomplished precisely because of her demanding spirit. Mikey and Nicky, supposedly based on a true story May heard about family friends, is one of our greatest films about men, and their failures. They are, together and individually, pathetic, and sexually incompetent. They are violent towards women, including their wives. Nicky is angry and drunk, whereas Mikey is quieter and more tightly-wound. They have tenderness for each other, but it’s warmth that must coexist with not only self-interest but incoherence. These men seem driven by incomprehensible desires, yet May infuses every moment with inevitability, the feeling that things will not end well for these two—and, moreover, that they probably don’t deserve a happy ending, anyway. So, Mikey and Nicky come together for one final night, one in need of the other’s help, with nowhere left to go, and all they can do is hide in the darkness of the night.

It helps that Cassavetes and Falk were remarkably close friends, having known each other for years (they filmed Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence together directly afterwards, as well). That built-in chemistry means there’s more opportunity for raw spontaneity, and the reason May let her cameras roll and roll and roll was because she knew she had to take advantage of that possibility. As she famously said after a camera operator was yelled at by May for saying “Cut!” after Cassavetes and Falk left the set: “they might come back.” That looseness and trust is key to the vibe May finds, as the two men bicker, bitch, and moan with an authentic familiarity. Their impotent machismo, and the obvious tension May reveals early on as Mikey lets Nicky’s assassin know what’s going on, offers us all we need to know about their shared history. Mikey, in some grotesque way, loves Nicky, but he needs to save himself above all. As we watch the disintegration play out over one long night, it all clicks into place because we can buy this relationship and its past, we can intuit every facet of their dynamic. It mirrors the unfortunate realities of many friendships, how they are entangled in years of love and dispute, until they reach their breaking point. Cassavetes, Falk, and May give us all of that in one night, simmering with the feeling that an intimate connection isn’t enough for them both to make it through the night together.

May invited a certain amount of controlled chaos to her set, and while she may have bitten off more resources than she was offered, she also gave the film room to breathe, to become something eternal. Nicky is the embodiment of that chaos, clinging to the memories he and Mikey share to prove to someone (himself?) that he lives and deserves to keep living. But those memories, though confirmed by Mikey, have a different meaning for him, because he’s reminded about how he feels dragged down by Nicky, put-upon and held back. So he decides to turn Nicky’s suspicions and paranoias into reality, fulfilling his fate and leaving him behind once and for all. What could be called their shared nostalgia is revealed to be the noose around both their necks, their camaraderie and dependence a mask for every resentment they’ve built in all that time.

For Hollywood, May was as troublesome, unyielding, and unamenable as Mikey and Nicky. Her relationship with the institutions there, and the traditions and expectations they came with, was as dysfunctional as Mikey and Nicky’s, a push and pull that finally gave way. May’s dissolution with Hollywood is reflected in the ending of the film, as the pair find themselves with nowhere left to turn, and May excels at depicting the climaxes of complicated relationships. Though darkly hilarious throughout, this is her first drama, and her approach to emotional realism (largely achieved through dialogue that seems improvised but wasn’t) culminates with Mikey’s betrayal of Nicky, leading to the latter’s devastating murder. In retrospect, it feels like a kiss-off from May, acknowledging her singular nature (she was, somehow, only the third woman to direct features in the sound era) and seemingly predicting Paramount’s abandonment, their betrayal. That might be too clean of a parallel, but it’s worth pointing out that May can be seen in both characters in that ending. Mikey becomes catatonic, fallen silent after spending so long striving to be listened to and understood. May spent her career wanting to be heard, and she consistently was met with an unwilling industry. She was silenced as a director, just as Nicky was permanently silenced and Mikey put an end to the only person that ever paid him any real attention.