Down and Out in Beverly Hills (aka Into The Blue Again, After The Money's Gone...)

Note: this review was written as part of the Pop Stars Moonlighting blogathon being hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews from 12th to 14th March.

Also, spoilers right out of the gate.

The ending to Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Paul Mazursky's 1986 take on Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning, is nothing if not confounding.

The film follows the adventures of Jerry Baskin (Nick Nolte, who went on to star in this blog's favourite ex-musical, I'll Do Anything), a down-on-his-luck drifter who ends up being inducted into the lavish household of Dave Whiteman (Richard Dreyfuss), a millionaire who made his fortune selling clothes hangers to motel chains, after Dave catches Jerry attempting to end it all in his swimming pool. Dave's life of material luxury is experiencing something a drought on the emotional front - his marriage to Barbara (Bette Midler) has long run out of steam, prompting Dave to seek an alternative outlet in a not-so-illicit affair with the family maid Carmen (Elizabeth Pena), while Barbara attempts to turn a blind eye by immersing herself in a variety of New Age philosophies. Jerry's arrival at first appears to provide Dave with the radical shake-up he has long been craving, but over time the novelty of having a vagabond around the house begins to wear off, and Jerry, far from cleaning up his act under the guidance of the Whitemans, comes increasingly to represent a threat to the equilibrium, and to Dave's sovereignty, something he demonstrates through his systematic seduction of all three female members of the household, starting with Barbara, then Carmen, and finally Dave's 19-year-old daughter Jenny (Tracy Nelson). Indeed, one suspects the only thing preventing Jerry from also seducing Dave's son Max (Evan Richards), who is heavily insinuated to be a closet gay, and possibly even Dave himself is the fact that this was the mid-80s, and no mainstream Hollywood production would ever have been so audacious at the time. One might posit that, being a mainstream Hollywood production, the film was likewise not audacious enough to follow through on Renoir's ending, substituting it with something more befitting of the studio playbook. Unlike his French counterpart, who ultimately resumes his life of vagrancy, Jerry flirts with the idea of returning to the streets, taking with him a souvenir of his stay in the form of Matisse, Barbara's neurotic dog and the bane of Dave's pre-Jerry existence. Apparently, though, Jerry realises that he's found belonging and acceptance among the Whitemans, who forgive him his foibles, and chooses to settle with them.

It's an ending that struck a bum note with A.A. Dowd of The AV Club, who who complains that,"Down And Out only really falters in its final moments, with an ending that’s a bit more sentimental than the loopy one Renoir concocted." Ostensibly, it's the textbook Hollywood ending, and yet it doesn't exactly play like one. Shelia Benson of the Los Angeles Times was onto something when she described the final sequence as "enigmatic and curiously unsatisfying". It is a strange ending, and not just because it involves the entire Whiteman household congregating around Jerry as he gets down on all fours and attempts to feast on pate freshly harvested from a neighbour's garbage can. For all of the unity on display in that closing sequence, it's an ending that seems deliberately engineered to be unsettling, as if goading us into contemplating if we really are happy with the outcome in question. There are three details in particular that serve to disturb our sense of warm resolution:

• By the end of the film, Matisse seems to have graduated from being a manifestation of the neurotic savagery of his uptown environs to the facilitator of family togetherness. It his he who alerts Jerry to the presence of the Whitemans, who have followed him out into the streets. He also accompanies Jerry as he makes his way back toward the family. Look closely, however, and you'll see that Matisse never actually enters back in through the gate. In fact, the dog seems to completely disappear from the scene for the final moments of the film.
• The last one to step back through the gate is Dave, who lingers thoughtfully outside for a few moments, as if contemplating if he himself really wants to return to the life that lies within.
•  As the end-credits scroll across the screen, we the viewers remain out in the streets among the garbage cans of Beverly Hills, where another, unknown vagrant, Jerry's doppelganger, wanders into view and past the camera.

Like the opening sequence to film, which shows Jerry drifting through the streets of Los Angeles with his dog Keroauc and a cart filled with various goods pilfered from trash cans, the ending is accompanied by "Once in a Lifetime", a 1981 single for New York art rockers Talking Heads, with its emphasis on the indifference and interchangeability of life (actually a parody of the kinds of proclamations that band frontman David Byrne would regularly hear from radio evangelists), and its repeated references to the water that proves integral to the narrative progression of Down and Out in Beverly Hills. It is this very sense of existential malaise encapsulated in the song that fuels Dave and Jerry's unlikely friendship, and eventually their rivalry. Jerry, who was outcast and forgotten by society long ago, reaches his lowest ebb after awakening to discover that Keroauc, the one being whose companionship he truly valued, has randomly upped and left him in his sleep, having been lured away by the seductive charms of a young woman with a paper bag filled with treats. His frantic search for his double-crossing dog leads him onto the Whitemans' grounds, where, after surveying his own reflection in their immaculately-kept swimming pool, he attempts to drown himself. Before he does so, he takes a second look at his reflection, and this time sees only a blank silhouette. Jerry's sudden appetite for self-destruction constitutes a rejection of the self; it is also cleansing, an opportunity to resurface as somebody else entirely. In that sense, the pool acts as a portal into another reality entirely, and the cleansing is experience not only by Jerry, but by Dave, who has the privilege of getting to dive in and deliver Jerry into this brand new state of being. Jerry's deliverance by Dave signals the beginning of a second shot at life for them both, or so Dave would undoubtedly love to believe. Dave's generosity toward Jerry offers him a gift-wrapped opportunity to jettison the guilt he complains of at the start of the film, but it is also implied that Dave takes such an interest Jerry in part because he sees him as his own distorted reflection; an inkling of how his own life might have turned out in an alternate universe where things did not run in his favour. As he tells Jerry, in outlining his own self-congratulatory case history of going from selling lingerie from the backseat of his father's oldsmobile to his present status as a clothes hanger mogul, "You gotta be in the right place at the right time...do you think I knew I was going to be in the hanger business?" Jerry, meanwhile, would appear to confirm Dave's view that one's station in life is determined purely by the circumstances of any given day; he recounts his own tragic case history of how he tumbled ever downward on the rungs of the social ladder, which involved a shot at an acting career that was thwarted when he was dumped by old flame Linda Evans and then deeply affected by the loss of his sister to leukemia. Dave, fed up with the stagnancy of his own life, seems appreciative of the glimpse Jerry provides into how things could just have easily gone for him had he not struck up a conversation with that businessman opening up a chain of motels on that fateful day, even going to far as to spend a night out on a beach in the company of Jerry's peers. At one point, Barbara telephones a radio shrink to vent her frustrations at Dave's latest passion project (she does so, characteristically, under a false identity, recasting herself as 26-year-old Dawn from Toluca Lake). The shrink suggests that Dave is "living a vicariously freer life through the presence of this displaced person," and while we suspect there is more than an inkling of truth to this, we likewise sense that Dave's infatuation with Jerry and with life on the streets never amounts to much more than simple novelty. This much is evident in the sheer condescension with which he later recounts the experience of camping out with a community of bums: "They live like animals, but they have great capacity for joy."

Dave may be drawn to Jerry for what he sees as an enviable lack of responsibilities, but paradoxically he must also deprive Jerry of that very freedom - have him leashed, groomed and neutered and inducted into the hanger business that he personally excelled in. His interest in Jerry, ultimately, has less to do with validating Jerry's existence as any more meaningful and fulfilling as his own than in doing a nice redemption job on the dirty bum who fell so low that he tried to destroy himself in his swimming pool. In part, Dave's desire to make a model hanger businessman out of Jerry may stem from his lack of a positive relationship with Max, and his need to mold someone in his own image in his place, but more crucial is Dave's need to eliminate the threat that the wily nonconformist poses to his own existence; by goading Jerry into following in his own footsteps, he is effectively reaffirming the supremacy of his own path. When Dave finally realises that Jerry is incorrigible, he is compelled to violently return him to the portal from whence he came, hurling Jerry back into the swimming pool and attempting to submerge him beneath the waters.

The film's greatest enigma is Matisse the dog, an animal who does not live like one and in the beginning has seemingly no capacity for joy. Although Barbara tolerates Dave's adulterous activities (she later professes to Jerry that she does so under the naive belief that Dave is simply seeking a sexual reawakening that he will duly transfer onto her), Matisse makes his disapproval plain; he lingers at the bottom of the stairway, waiting to snarl at Dave as he tiptoes down in the middle of the night, and while he can be temporarily placated with biscuits, he manages to sabotage Dave's sexual liaisons by activating the intruder alarm and bringing a squadron of police cars to the household. Matisse's uncanny behaviour seems to be rooted more in animosity toward Dave than loyalty to Barbara, whom he flabbergasts with his refusal to eat any of the expensive dog foods she buys him. Elsewhere, Matisse also attacks one of the family's neighbours, recorder producer Orvis Goodnight (Little Richard). It would be easy to label Matisse as the dog from Hell, were he not played by such an appealing-looking border collie (Mike, who would also appear in the film's short-lived TV spin-off*, and the 1986 Disney Channel movie Spot Marks the X). When Jerry arrives, Matisse takes an instant shine to him; in fact, it is Matisse who beckons Jerry onto the Whiteman grounds in the first place, for Jerry is drawn in by the sounds of Matisse barking, desperately believing it to be the sounds of his own lost dog Keroauc. To infer that Jerry has a special way with dogs would be to ignore the sad truth that Keroauc willfully abandons him at the start of the film, having woken up one day and apparently decided to give up being a vagrant's dog and go with the first passer-by who offers him snacks. Nevertheless, it would be fair to suppose that Jerry hits it off with Matisse because he himself is so much like a dog. His hairy, disheveled appearance at the start of the film gives him a heavy canine aura, and he later reveals himself to be something of a pet food gourmet. At the end of the film, Dave uses a very dog-like metaphor to describe Jerry's own actions, assuring him that, "I gave you a hand and you bit it." Most tellingly, though, is the manner in which he challenges Dave's authority by urinating onto his flower bed (could there be a starker metaphor?)

In one of the film's most revealing scenes, Jerry is able to coax Matisse out of his self-inflicted famine by getting down on all fours and eating from his bowl of puppy chow. Jerry tells Barbara that Matisse's troubled behaviour stems from the delusion that he too is one of the humans: "There are no dogs around to teach it, so it's got no dog friends and no dog family, nothing to relate to." We end up sensing that this is really what's going on between Jerry and the Whitemans - that the Whitemans themselves are a pack of dogs who've been driven out of their wits by the daily pressures of having to pretend to be human, and while Dave may see it is his mission to teach Jerry to put on a suit and tie and be one of the people, what they really crave is the influence of another dog to teach them how to get back in touch with their underlying canine urges. It is tempting to view Matisse as a totem of Jerry himself - his early hostility toward Dave foreshadows Jerry's incoming insubordination, the dog is seldom far from Jerry's side, and in one of the film's more whimsical sight gags Matisse can be seen attempting to imitate Jerry's Tai chi exercises. Yet it seems all the more accurate to suggest that Matisse is an extension of his owners, his various messy neuroses providing an uncomfortable mirror image to their own quirks and eccentricities. Matisse's aggression toward Dave is a shorthand for Barbara's own repressed anger (or alternatively, Dave's self-loathing), while his refusal to eat recalls Dave's comments about Jenny's supposed anorexia (we might take issue with the fact that, Jenny's anorexia, if indeed she is anorexic, is treated as yet another mild eccentricity of the privileged, and not a debilitating illness that could potentially threaten her life). Later, when Jerry seduces Barbara, the dog observes and appears to share in Barbara's orgasm.

Before Jerry arrives, the Whitemans are drowning in their own phoniness. Throughout his stay, Jerry coaxes out many of their repressed feelings and urges, bringing Barbara out of her sexual drought, encouraging Max to talk to his father about his sexuality (this is never ruminated on explicitly, although Max does indirectly out himself to Dave by dressing up in androgynous fashion at his swanky Christmas party), and convincing Carmen to vent her feelings of anger toward her employers by delving into communist literature. All the same, Jerry is not liberating their inner dog so much as wheedling it to perform at his command, much as he does with Matisse in training him to do a "half-gainer" from the pool's diving board. He figures out what's at the core of each individual household member's canine nature so that he can manipulate it to his own advantage, his ultimate goal being to topple Dave's position as master of the house. And getting in touch with their inner mutt does little to shake the Whitmans' delusions of humanity. To the contrary, Jerry's sexual conquest of Barbara only sends her hurtling ever deeper down another avenue of fantasy. She tells Jerry that, "It's good to be back in the real world again," yet we are never led to believe that her sudden attraction to Jerry (who up until this point had only repulsed her) runs any deeper than Dave's. The highly theatrical manner with which she describes the experience would imply that Jerry is but a newly-discovered novelty for her to indulge in, every bit as frivolously as she does the assorted New Age programs she has used, up until now, to conceal her bitterness over her loveless marriage to Dave. At one point, The Divine Miss M regales Jerry with a rendition of the standard love ballad "You Belong To Me", which itself hints at the illusory nature of her bond with Jerry ("Remember when a dream appears, you belong to me").

At the end of the film, following the climactic confrontation in which Dave attempts to banish Jerry back down into the depths of the pool, Jerry admits that he too has been playing a role all along, and confesses that his stories about Linda Evans, his failed acting career and his deceased sister, among others, were all fabrications. When challenged on this, he asks Dave what he actually wanted to hear: "Real sorrow, real heartbreak? It's boring." It is this revelation that left such a sour taste in Benson's mouth; she stated that, "Mazursky undercuts everything we've come to believe about the man; we're left feeling cheated, as though Jerry had been neutered into a family pet." There remains, however, some ambiguity on this point. Following his re-cleansing in the chlorinated waters, it seems that Jerry is once again discarding one identity and assuming another, although which, if either, is the "real" Jerry? The film has certainly done enough to infer that Jerry isn't bluffing when he reflects on his past accomplishments, even if, like Dave, we are occasionally inclined to question his credibility. When he arrives at the Whitemans' property, he is already a full-fledged pianist and masseur, and he certainly knows his Shakespeare, casually reciting Hamlet's "What a piece of work is man" monologue in the midst of a conversation with Dave (that he named his dog after the writer Jack Keroauc likewise hints at his educated background). When he admits to having made everything we know about him up, however, all we have to go on is his word. Is Jerry only now, in fact, telling the Whitemans what he thinks they want to hear, just so that he can be excused from the bridge he figures he's burning? Perhaps Jerry, who is accustomed to drifting from one place to another without ties, has a similar outlook on identity - ultimately, all identities are constructs that can be regularly disassociated and discarded at will, much as Keroauc opted, quite out of the blue, to give up on being Jerry's dog.
 
In the end, I have to disagree with Dowd about the conclusion being excessively sentimental. I think whatever sentiment is there is off-set by the oddness of it all; whichever way you slice it, it is a troubling resolution. As Jerry makes his unceremonious departure from the Whiteman grounds, he promises Matisse the world: "There's lots of places we can go: 'Frisco, Santa Fe, Ensenada...I'll show you the best parks to sleep in, beaches where the coconuts flop into the palms of your hands." His enticing sales pitch is immediately undermined when he proceeds to root through the neighbours' garbage for "only the best gourmet chow in town", and pulls out a tin of pate; once again, he gets down on all fours and invites his canine friend to join him, but on this occasion Matisse isn't biting. He's too distracted by the reappearance of the Whitemans, who have now all gathered together in the street to watch their old companion's attempted dinner date. There are a couple of ways to interpret this final sequence. We might see this closing display of unity among the Whitemans as a sign that their mutual attachment to Jerry has, in fact, brought them together, and that all of them, in congregating out on the streets among the garbage cans, are entering the real world for the first time. That no further words are spoken between Jerry and his audience might be taken as an expression of sincerity, the suggestion that a genuine human (or canine) connection has been forged. The more cynical interpretation would be that Jerry, on realising that there is an audience gathered around and watching him eat garbage, suddenly feels incredibly self-conscious, and is shamed into getting back on two feet and accepting Carmen's more palatable offer of a cappuccino. In either case, as Jerry heads back toward the Whitemans he visibly attempts to tidy his hair with his hand, indicating that he does intend to clean himself up in order to fit in with his adopted family. Is Jerry, then, a person who has lived like a dog but has finally learned, under the influence of his high-class hosts, how to be a person? I would argue that Mazursky and Capetanos' script is, in all other respects, too sly and subversive to ultimately succumb to the very condescension it has spent so much time, up until now, ruthlessly satirising. I prefer the reverse interpretation - that Jerry is a dog who has spent enough time in the company of other dogs who like to play at being human that he's grown accustomed to their game of play-pretend. Jerry decides that his place is right here among these phonies. And his domestication leaves us feeling melancholic. We get a small hint that some of his animal nature remains intact, in the seductive smile he flashes at Jenny, but Matisse's absence from the final arrangement is bothersome, as it suggests that the dog, literal and figurative, must be surrendered at the gate. To return to the Whiteman grounds is, it's inferred, to retreat back into that world of falseness and self-delusion, and in the closing moments we see Dave waver on whether or not to reaffirm his own commitment to the status quo. Now that the newcomer has been formally assimilated into the household, a man who could even have been himself under a different set of circumstances, he potentially has the opportunity to slip away then and there, discarding his identity as Dave the hanger mogul and insensitive husband and going in search of those fabled coconut beaches, confident that his place within the Whiteman household has been filled.

Ultimately, Dave returns to the falsities of his family home, but we remain outside, among the garbage of the real world. We are not alone for long, for we are joined shortly by the unfamiliar vagrant who comes pushing his own loaded cart along the street as the credits roll, wandering, seemingly, to no place in particular. Now that Jerry has left the outside world, it appears that another individual has already arrived to assume the vacant gap. This unknown vagrant is symbolic of the wider world that continues to pass the Whitemans by, and of the "real sorrow" to which Jerry had accused them of being willfully oblivious, and which which shows no signs of slowing down. He remains a mystery, a blank figure waiting to bestowed with an identity. For now, his main purpose seems to lie in simply haunting the streets, a reminder of the possible path that Dave did not pursue, and which will forever be lingering in the world outside his door, stirring in its omnipresence.

* The TV spin-off aired on the Fox network in 1987 but was cancelled after eight episodes, leaving five episodes unaired. Mike and Evans Richards were the only cast members from the movie to return.