The war of opinions between those who “love” L.A. and those who hate it has been raging arguably since the film industry perhaps wisely decided to transfer itself from Brooklyn (New York already has enough shit going on without having to deal with even more sound stages added to its already packed with extras streets). In the adapted version of Neil Simon’s successful play (he would also write the film script, naturally), California Suite, we are immediately given the viewpoint of the latter sect of people, as British theater actress Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith, who has helped keep the film relevant for her Academy Award win for Best Supporting Actress) balks at the movie she’s starring in being played on the plane as she flies specifically to L.A. for the Oscars to potentially receive the coveted award. She sighs to her husband, Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine), “Eight years with the national theatre, two Pinter plays, nine Shakespeare, three Shaw, and I finally get nominated for a nauseating little comedy.” Sidney, not much for husbandly consolations, returns, “That’s why they call it Hollywood.” He then adds to her distress by looking out the window and commenting, “Oh! Gorgeous color. The smog. I wonder if they sell it in bottles.” Ah yes, the old smog critique, arguably one of the first of its cinematic kind, for California Suite came out long before L.A. Story (though 1977’s Annie Hall did have its fair share of L.A. smog jokes). It’s an ironic phenomenon for a town that bills itself as the most healthcentric in America. Nay, the world. In any case the “Visitors From London” aren’t nearly as judgmental of the city as the ultimate beacons of discrimination, New Yorkers. Hence in the “Visitors From New York” segment, Jane Fonda as Hannah Warren, a hardened and jaded intellectual workaholic through and through, is one of the most ferociously condemning characters of a place she calls, “like paradise but with a lobotomy.”
Her sole reason for coming to this part of the U.S. and reuniting with her ex-husband, Bill (Alan Alda)–who now goes by “Billy” since he’s become a fun-loving Californian–is to collect her only daughter, compelled to run all the way across the country to escape from the oppressive wall-to-wall concrete of New York. In short, she’s becoming the exact opposite of her mother. Disgusted with the superficial, no frills nature of L.A. that she’s always latently despised from afar, Hannah seethes about how she would never want her daughter’s mind to be formed here–or rather, unformed. Billy argues, “She’s not happy in New York, Hannah.” Hannah snaps, “Nobody’s happy in New York, but they’re alive.” Looking heavenward, he remarks, “What a snob you are.” She proudly returns, “Thank god there’s a few of us left.” She’d be right about that, but those snobs are not apparent in the “Visitors From Philadelphia” portion, during which a mild-mannered businessman named Marvin Michaels (Walter Matthau) flies into town to meet his brother, Harry (Herb Edelman), for a bar mitzvah. To Marvin’s chagrin, Harry has purchased him an “early birthday present” in the form of a prostitute. At first hesitant, perhaps Marvin figures, “When in L.A….” The consequences of letting loose, however, are immediately evident the next morning when the prostitute remains firmly unconscious from her consumption of too much tequila. Not dead, just firmly unconscious. This presents an imminent problem as Mille (Elaine May, re-teaming as Matthau’s love interest post-A New Leaf) is due to show up at any moment to join him for the bar mitzvah. Will L.A.’s temptations and influence of debauchery know no end once you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole? It’s more Vegas than Vegas, often times.
This sense of being trapped in a looped episode of Candid Camera is also present in the “Visitors From Chicago” vignette, easily the most random and throwaway part of the script–and not just because it’s a white man who has written black men in the form of Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor as competitive and spiteful doctors on vacation with their wives. There’s even one cringeworthy moment when, so consumed in their bickering that they briefly remember both of their wives have been injured after a strange bout of slapstick injuries throughout the hotel room, Chauncey (Pryor) assures Willis (Cosby), “The ladies are unconscious. They can’t hear us.” It’s a little too ominous and unsettling when considering Cosby’s grotesque history, one that is neck and neck with Harvey Weinstein’s on the sexual assault front.
With each narrative in the quartet offering a slew of very L.A.-specific problems, it leaves the viewer to question: Is the City of Angels really the promised land it is so frequently promised to be? Hannah, of course, would tell you that it’s better to feel miserable and alive than pleasant and numb. And when Bill demands, “What is there so beautiful about your life that makes it so important to put down everyone else’s? New York is not the center of the goddamn universe. I grant you, it’s an exciting, vibrant, stimulating, fabulous city, but it is not mecca. It just smells like it,” Hannah can only say, “What the hell is [Jenny] gonna learn in a community whose greatest literary achievement is the map of the movie stars’ homes?” In essence, despite hipster transplant reports to the contrary, Los Angeles is not, nor has it ever been the place for a thinking mind. That’s partly why Maria (remember, pronounced Mariah) in Play It As It Lays goes batshit crazy from driving in endless loops on the freeways as a means of mental stimulation. Maybe she and Neil Simon should have gotten together and written the ultimate dystopian manifesto–though that kind of already exists in Alex Cox’s Repo Man. In any event, what California Suite wants its viewer to take away, obviously, is laughs. For it’s very laughable how much people covet that L.A. shit when you might just as well take a brain chiseling in lieu of a trip there.
