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Based on Jules Feiffer’s stage play, and marking Alan Arkin’s first feature film as director, “Little Murders,” currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, takes place in a New York City that no doubt exemplifies and amplifies the crime and decay of the 1970s but that also might feel to a modern viewer like a sardonic manifestation of the urban hellscapes imagined by every modern-day conservative and F*x News commentator, filled with incessant gunfire and muggings. Indeed, Patsy Newquist (Marcia Robb) wakes one morning not to birds chirping outside her window but to the sounds of a man being beaten up on the sidewalk just below. She calls the police, but they put her on hold and disconnect the call. So, she goes down there herself and intervenes, only for the beaten, Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould), to wander away in a daze, not even acknowledging her. Once she manages to extricate herself from the same attackers, she confronts him over his cowardice, not that he's interested, telling her off and trying to flee in a hilarious long shot where she chases after him, hollering, “Are you really so down on people or are you just being fashionable?!” It’s a Meet Cute by force, triggering something like a dystopian Neil Simon rom com.
Alfred is a self-described “apathist,” lived in Gould’s hilarious checked-out countenance, and in the character’s occupation. A photographer, he sees the world through his camera lens, and what he photographs is literally excrement, one of merely many examples of satire that goes to the extreme. (“I’ve been shooting s*** for over a year,” he says, “and I’ve already won half a dozen awards,” suggesting how art can’t defeat a dystopia or perhaps suggesting how a dystopia deliberately has no art. Hmmmmmm.) Patsy, on the other hand, is an interior decorator, maintaining fastidious control over her own world as the one outside her door has gone to pieces. Then again, the constant phone calls she gets from stalker breathing on the other end of the line go to show such control is a mirage. Listen to the way she speaks, a comical cacophony at a high register impeccably playing off Alfred’s quieter decibels; she sounds like someone screaming on the inside but screaming on the inside on the outside.
Seeking to instill the same sort of desperate convention in Alfred’s life, she brings him home to meet her family and convinces him to get married. The wedding sequence is a riotous interlude, officiated by the pastor of First Existential (Donald Sutherland, momentarily commandeering the movie just as he famously commandeered “JFK”) not so much mocking the ritual of marriage as deconstructing it as a UC Berkeley Professor might, triggering a brawl that ends with him on the floor but still with a smile on his face, the inverse of Alfred, acceptance rather than apathy. True to his prognostication, their union brings no salvation, undone in the one moment when the movie’s brutal comedy gives way to sheer brutality. This leads to Alfred riding the subway in a bloodstained shirt, bringing to mind Tom Cruise in “Collateral” telling the story of the guy who dies on the MTA that “nobody notices.” That 2004 thriller portrayed violence as the logical outgrowth of humanity’s disconnection, but “Little Murders” concludes on an appropriately, explosively droll note portraying violence as perhaps the only thing that brings humanity together.
