Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude, directed by Hal Ashby, is a grim yet mildly humorous black comedy about a suicidal young man, Harold (Bud Cort) who seems to suffer the ill effects of a schizoid personality disorder. Harold's flat, lifeless, emotionless demeanor is offset by his dark obsession with death, his bizarre, faked "suicides" (it is never quite explained how he manages to do this, but we must assume since he continually "kills himself" in front of his mother, who maintains a blase attitude about it, that he is either daydreaming or using some special effects props), and the fact that he attends funerals for pleasure. Outwardly, he's an attractive cyborg.

His mother (Vivian Pickles), a cartoon caricature of a rich widow, lives with Harold in a huge, cold, empty, and very upscale house, obviously swimming in wealth. She affects a high society accent and is smothering her son under the security blanket of her desperation and expectations, her disappointment, and her lack of understanding. She's as petty, demanding, and intrusive as Harold is emotionally distant, cold, and detached. "After dinner," she tells him because he hoarsely whispers that he has a sore throat, "You make sure you go right to bed!" She wants to push Harold, whom she still perceives as a man-boy, into the spotlight of life; to that end, she goes to a computer dating service to find for him a mate. (That is after, SHE has "decided it's time for you to get married.")

Harold's world is full of caricatures: from his military uncle (Charles Tyner) who salutes with his stump, to his psychiatrist (G. Wood), whose demeanor is embarrassed if tolerant, and whose office is as cold and empty and dead as the space in Harold's soul seems to be. The only "living" person Harold encounters is Maude (the inestimable Ruth Gordon, Minnie Castevet of Rosemary's Baby (1968) fame), and Harold, who still looks as if he is only a child, becomes the lover of Maude, who is just turning eighty years old.

Maude is a radical eccentric, a free spirit, an artist, a model, an inventor, and a woman who steals cars. For joyrides, mind you.

At first, Harold is reticent, but Maude, in a strange sense, weeps him off of his feet, her infectious, freewheeling lifestyle and impulsivity a counterbalance to the dreary, zombie-like young man who has seemingly decided to give up on a life that has yet to have even begun.

Attempts to see him reborn (his mother brings a variety of women from the computer dating service to meet the black-clad young man with the disposition and look of an undertaker, and he manages by mutilating and setting himself on fire, to drive them all away) are all failures; an attempt by his mother and uncle to force him into the Army is met by a ruse or con of some sort wherein Maude plays the role of a peacenik, and Harold her angry counter-protestor. This leads to him pushing her off a cliff, but we are never sure what is real in this film, and what may be only an outgrowth of a disturbed young man's fantasies. The film has that kind of feeling.

We aren't certain about Maude, either. All we know about her is her eccentricities, her larger-than-life character her seeming criminal impulsivity. She steals a potted tree in a stolen car, yet she always manages to stay out of the clutches of the law. Again, more fantasy.

The movie itself is toned with a sense of high creep, to put it mildly. Death, suicide, age, and sex between generations, all of these themes bloom like a wretched undergrowth beneath a drama of a young man who fixes his love on a woman old enough to be his grandmother. But is any of it true? Are we expected to take it seriously? That is for the viewer to decide.

"I took the pills an hour ago," Maude tells him. "I should be gone by midnight." She had previously said that eighty was a "good time to say goodbye." (Not an exact quote.) The realization that Maude is planning to leave him is too much for Harold; we see his only outburst of raw emotion, and it demonstrates to the viewer how much this May-December romance has altered the previously uncaring boy, transforming him (especially after he has just told his mother he plans to marry Maude)

The last few minutes of the film seem disconnected, an ending that somewhat shambles to a close with no real closure. At this point, Harold has become a banjo-strumming lover of life, presumably. But he's still alone.

Earlier, Maude had cast his engraved locket, which was engraved with "Harold Loves Maude," into the ocean (After assuring him romantically that "Maude loves Harold"). "I'll always know where it is," she says. Another illogical action, as mystifying as the suicides. Are we to take any of this film seriously? Above their heads, fireworks burst as if they were two young lovers just starting in life.

This film is clearly about the transformation and spiritual awakening of a young man who was, formerly, soulless, dead; living out a life of quiet despair. And all because of the love between himself and the unlikeliest of partners. Yet, like the "black roses" that Maude complains no one should send to a funeral, such a film, while outwardly beautiful in visual appeal and thematic content, is as dark, unsettling, and unpleasant as they come. Yet, like Harold's stream of suicide deaths and miraculous resurrections, it is hard to pinpoint the mechanism behind this unsettling feeling it projects. At the end of it, THIS author was left feeling anxious, and slightly ill.

And I still don't know exactly WHY.