John and Mary

source: John and Mary

I saw this movie in the theater when first released. It so accurately captured that time, when the Sexual Revolution was in full swing, and couples woke up together knowing virtually nothing about each other. That's how this movie opens; they don't even know each other's first name. Through flashbacks to the night before, you see Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow trying so hard to be cool yet successful in the frenzied meat market of the Friday night Manhattan bar scene. The morning has the two of them waking together and trying to navigate conversation, while we also hear their thoughts as they agonize over how their last statement must have sounded. The awkwardness of getting acquainted, what to ask, what not to ask, how to say it, is so genuine and palpable. At that time, the West Side was not gentrified the way it is now, so Mia describes where she lives as "a very respectable neighborhood...it only has one or two stabbings a week". The ending is asking each other's name. Sex first, names last, it's 1969.

There are movies where people feel that they are underrated. Many of the comments that have been written suspect this for "John and Mary". Moreover, when a movie is built on dialectical experiments, thus focusing communicative structures, very easily the impression rises that the plot is thin or the story more or less absent. Neither of that is the case in "John and Mary". John and Mary meet one night in a New Yorker Bar. They are attracted to one another. The next scene shows them already in the morning in John's apartment. He is still lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, in reality watching Mary sniffling around his photos, drawers and other personal belongings. The director did without the usual "bridge"-scene, where He asks Her if she wants to come for a drink up to him, and so on. Why tell? We see it in all other movies where such scenes happen. Then the scene changes to breakfast. John is explaining to Mary that he buys organic farmer's eggs - it be worth the extra-trip. She thinks: Aha, a health-guru! The specialty is now that we hear what she thinks. She quietly comments everything he says and does. This goes so far that one time he really assumes that she sad something. She denies. How did he come to such an idea? Because he, too, is commenting what she is doing. However, he does it differently. She listens basically to what he is saying. He looks basically how she is behaving (according to a quip by Oscar Wilde). And so, what we see as voyeurs and not so much as audience (audire = "to hear, listen"), is an extremely complex network of flashbacks and flash-forwards, of what did happen in the past of John and Mary and of what may or may not happen in their common or not common future. Guessing a situation for the present means to extrapolate it into the future by using a strange mixture of logic and everyday's experience. The most amazing situations in the movies are there, where one person who makes a flash, is called back in "reality" by inference of the other person. One has the impression that the face of this person fits still to what she was thinking and not to the real situation on which she did not participate. So, there is an "imaginary rest" on the face of the called person, and this imaginary rest can influence enormously the whole ongoing situation by influencing the reaction of the calling person. This is, very broadly drawn, the content of this extraordinary movie, played by two of America's most gifted actors. In the end, we know: Only then, when real and imaginary dialog would coincide, one would be able to change the world by words. This means, John and Mary could reach by communication the desired status of relationship. But the two forms of communication never coincide, and so we use the imaginary dialog in order to govern the real dialog and make it controllable. However, communication is feedback, and strangely enough, from feedbacks alone new things can arise.

This is a low-key, easy going and wonderfully realistic movie, about how people react to one another when they are trying to begin a relationship out of nothing. John and Mary meet each other, have sex and wake up knowing next to nothing about each other. Mary has her history of relationships where she wasn't valued and John has history with feeling abandoned and used. We follow them throughout their day, hear and see their thoughts and begin to understand why they say and do, the things they do in regards to each other. Their cognitive distortions are apparent and made entertaining by the movies style and humor. This movie is under-rated and possibly misunderstood. If you are looking for a ridiculous, meaningless, romantic comedy, full of pop songs and cliched plot twists, you'll have to look elsewhere. But if you are looking for a laid-back, emotional piece of life, then this movie will be one to see. 9 out of 10.

Creepy film takes place in a vacuum. Though there are location shots of late 60s NYC, the atmosphere feels like the NYC of I Am Legend. Hot off of Rosemary's Baby and The Graduate, Mia Farrow and Dustin Hoffman play 2 characters who have nothing to offer each other or the audience and who seem to take forever to do whatever it is they do. Does anyone want these 2 to get together? Pete Yates directed this weird yawner complete with dull performances, zero pacing and pointless flashbacks and a script with less meat on its bones than the film's leading lady. Advertised as a love story, John and Mary with its endless, tedious, narcissistic self-analysis feels more like David and Lisa.

This is a simple, charming movie about two people with "baggage" from past relationships who happen to find each other (and in the process, the possibility of true love and contentment) amid the insanity of NY and a frenetic existence. Both lead actors are charming - particularly Mia Farrow - who has a waifish, far-away look in her eyes. My favorite part of the movie was when "Mary" left "John's" apartment and he realized she didn't leave a number, so frantically searched the city for her.

It had everything going for it, the hottest young stars of the late sixties, Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow, fresh from the successes of the Graduate and Rosemary's Baby. The director had just made the huge hit Bullit and the hopes were very high, the two stars were on the cover of Time magazine! It was set in swinging New York, nice photography, cool apartments and clothes, it had to be a hit, right? What went wrong?????? The script, I suppose. They hadn't considered that it had to say something. Instead we are treated to lots of meaningful looks from the leads. Though, they are good looking.... Is it a comedy? Hard to tell, funny it wasn't. In fact it's dullsville! Quite embarrassing at times. It seems under-rehearsed, as if the actors had only read the script once. Mia Farrow is too mannered doing her little-old-lady-in-a-girls-body routine. Surprisingly Dustin doesn't overact. This film disappeared from sight. Ms. Farrow hardly mentions it in her biography. Does anyone remember it?

This is an all but forgotten little gem by Peter (Bullit) Yates, who uses a sensitive and witty script by the excellent John Mortimer. The direction, acting, and general tone are near perfect. Alas it was probably super cool for a year or two after it's release and nothing dates like 1960s high fashion. You may catch it on a late night TV channel - if so, postpone your bedtime for 90 minutes or so and enjoy! Last thought - This film may have been the source for Woody Allen's famous and celebrated "subtitles" scene in Annie Hall, made several years later with Mia Farrow.

For most of the movie, quite frankly, I was so bored I dosed off about five times. Once the end of the movie neared, however, I started to like it. Of course, my DVR has a habit of only liking to record the first hour and twenty-five minutes of things, leaving me with the need to buy the movie just to skip everything and watch the last five minutes. A brief synopsis of the film would be that Dustin Hoffman, an emotionally challenged, furniture designer, and Mia Farrow, a worker at an art gallery, meet at a bar, then have sex, and spend the next day in his apartment, talking and thinking about themselves and their past-loves. Eventually, she leaves, never learning his name and him never learning hers and, they eventually meet again when he tries to find her, but discovers her in his own home instead, and they begin to date (thanks to my television, I'm guessing, so don't take my word for it). All together, the movie is strangely cohesive and an interesting view on the romance of two romantically blunt people. Buy the movie and WATCH it, I know I have to.

Dustin Hoffman was one role post his Oscar nominated Midnight Cowboy and Mia Farrow was one role away from her groundbreaking Rosemary's Baby when they were teamed for John And Mary. It's a film typical of the times, hook up first and then get to know each other. Mia's already got an involvement with a public official played by Michael Tolan who takes off on surreptitious rendezvous only to pack her off when word of the wife or any and all of his 6 kids are around. As for Hoffman he's got a cornucopia of issues most of them centering around his mother played here by Olympia Dukakis. John And Mary is chronicling the Sixties sexual revolution and at least what we see of Hoffman and Farrow's characters they would certainly be recognized by today's audience. Of course there weren't a lot of sexually transmitted diseases then, when they burst on the scene that made a lot of people act more prudently than John And Mary seem to. I never really got into the characters in this film. Still it's a good time snapshot of New York on the cusp of the Seventies.