by Chris Feil
The week between Christmas and New Year’s can be a disorienting time - an inescapable amount of parties, reflections on the closing year, and hope for the one to come. For the more somber sort, it’s the feeling of being alone in a series of crowded rooms you can’t escape. New Year’s Eve is simply the worst holiday - like “Auld Lang Syne” it proposes joy and companionship, but always comes up feeling solemn.
Such is the emotional terrain of Billy Wilder’s classic romance The Apartment, a very best Best Picture winner. In its indifferent, wintery New York City, it’s easy to feel isolated and cast aside when everyone else goes on about their lives - but the very thing that sets you apart is what will make you feel less alone when you see it reflected in another person. The film is all the more romantic for being a love story for the melancholy, its soaring hope all the more hard won and transformative.
Jack Lemmon’s CC Baxter is one unimportant cog in the corporate wheel, the eternal “buddy boy” chasing value and promotion from the upper management. When they use his apartment for their extramarital trysts or dangle the boys-club camaraderie in front of his face, Baxter looks like even more of a loner for succumbing to their whims. But as Fran Kubelik, Shirley MacLaine is even more solitary. An even lower rung on the corporate totem pole, she’s in love with Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), an executive who can only give her so much, who never sees the real her.
It all sounds like a downer but The Apartment’s sharp humor creeps into its every corner, the absurdity of making spaghetti with a tennis racket as silly as the motivations behind horny toad executives. MacLaine’s depressive wit pushes back against the unfeeling city as much as Lemmon’s tense maneuvering dodges it, both to disparately funny effect. The film’s smartest tool is its light touch in finding the happy/sad balance.
Wilder hilariously populates the film with assholes, liking Baxter solely for what he provides for them or otherwise dismissing him. For such an accommodating guy, everyone sure does think he’s a pain in the ass. Fran is less passive but still equally mistreated and undervalued. When the two are together, the feeling of two real, full-fledged people communicating brings a relief like shrugging off a burden, of being fundamentally accepted.
One of the lingering things about The Apartment is that it is a love story of people who might always be a little bit sad. But the melancholy that pervades the film and its two protagonists is what draws them together. As much as Baxter is just another face in the crowd, Fran is equally alone when staring across the table at her fickle lover. It’s sadness that draws them together, the thing that they understand that no one else picks up on.
But here is what makes the film such an enduring romantic classic, the crucial piece it gets that so few contemporary romances do: we don’t want to be swept off our feet, we want to be understood. How meaningful for Wilder to set the film when some of us feel that the least, while promising us that we all can be understood. That final “shut up and deal” is more of a charge forward into the future and sign of togetherness than any overt romantic proclamation could be. It's a no bullshit brand of optimism without greeting card digestibility.
Consider me among those who hate the holiday. But I also remain convinced by The Apartment’s promise of a brighter future, the broken hearts at its center not so far off from our own. Despite any appearances, discord, isolations, or systems working against us, as we move forward, we are not alone. Here we go. Shut up and deal.
Happy New Year !!