| Terry Serres |
Image: screenshot from Olive Signature DVD release of A New Leaf (2017)
A New Leaf plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, May 9th, through Sunday, May 11th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Elaine May’s first feature film, A New Leaf, is a production rich in lore. It was based on a short story, “The Green Heart,” written by Jack Ritchie and first appearing in the March 1963 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The story involves the well-heeled Henry Graham, whose free-living and free-spending ways have reduced him to penury. At the urging of his valet Harold, Henry decides his best option is to abandon his confirmed bachelorhood and find a suitable bride—suitable in this case meaning next-level rich and without any surviving family or other potential claimants to her wealth. After some distressing forays into the upper-crust dating scene, he encounters at a society tea Miss Henrietta Lowell, an awkward and unrefined heiress whose sole passion in life is botany—specifically the study and classification of ferns. Despite sabotage and other surprises, the guileless and gullible Henrietta accepts Henry’s hasty proposal. But Henry’s master plan is to remain a husband only briefly on the path from bachelor to widower. Supporting characters include the sybaritic uncle who floats Henry $50,000 to keep up appearances during his charade, Henrietta’s lovesick lawyer and unruly household staff, an unreliable Italian sports car, and a tropical tree fern.
The problems that plagued the filming of A New Leaf were legion and legend, as recounted in our companion Perisphere article by Courtney Kowalke. A handful of podcast episodes also travel this terrain entertainingly, and I recommend them to the reader in the endnote. Let us pause to marvel at the sleight of hand performed by Paramount Pictures, who dropped their offer from $200,000 for May to write the screenplay to $50,000 for writing and directing on account of her inexperience as a director. Then, when May balked at casting Carol Channing as her leading lady, she was more or less cornered into assuming the role herself. Again, for no bump in salary. At the end of the day, May’s vision—which verged on three hours’ runtime and included, like the source material, two actual murders (not just the fantasized one)—was trimmed to more palatable proportions by studio head Robert Evans. This is the version that played in theaters and the version you’ll see at the Trylon—there is, alas, no “director’s cut” lurking in the vaults. May fought bitterly to prevent the release of this mutilation or at least to have her name removed from the credits. She lost her day in court after the judge watched the studio’s version and pronounced it hilarious and a sure-fire hit. All this publicity loomed over the film’s initial release in 1971, with reviewers like Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) and Vincent Canby (The New York Times) siding with May in theory while offering little but praise for the fruits of Paramount’s underhandedness. Both critics describe the film’s comedy as gently “cock-eyed,” and Canby ends his write-up with this wry aperçu: “The only thing that gives me pause is the knowledge that [the film’s] success will probably be used in the future as an argument to ignore the intentions of other directors—but with far less happy results.”
A film with the history and merits of A New Leaf can sustain examination from any number of angles, with the feminist angle surely as compelling as it is obvious. All the same, sharing with May’s Henrietta Lowell the vocation of botanist, I propose to examine through this lens the plot beats and the fascinating character development of Henrietta’s love interest, Henry Graham. In Walter Matthau’s filmography, this stands out as one of his most brilliant portrayals—unusually subtle, I’d say, for a black screwball comedy.
To her credit, May was diligent in ensuring the authenticity of her heroine’s academic bona fides. She enlisted as technical consultant a Columbia professor and expert on ferns and mosses, one Dominick Basile. He even lent the professional equipment seen in the film, for example the plant press (for collecting and drying plant specimens) that accompanies Henrietta on her honeymoon. Dr. Basile’s expertise informed the jargon-laced dialogue (“vestigial indusium,” anyone?), and his office at Columbia inspired the design of Henrietta’s study. Perhaps the only accessory lacking that I might have expected was a hand-lens or loupe. No self-respecting botanist would be found without a loupe hanging from around her neck. Without it, after all, she could never distinguish a vestigial indusion from one that was merely absent. (An indusium, for the curious, is a translucent flap of tissue covering a cluster of reproductive spores or sorus on the underside of fern fronds; it may be shaped like an umbrella, a hood, or a taco shell.)
A major plot point is the new species of tree fern that Henrietta discovers while on honeymoon in the Caribbean with Henry, which in an effusion of gratitude she names after her spouse. The botanical name she chooses, Alsophila grahami, is more plausible than the name from the short story, Alsophilia grahamicus … but in actual practice the second part of the name would be grahamii. When she first conveys to Henry the news of the species’ verification and recognition, she even slips in a middle name—the sharp viewer will hear her call it Alsophila ignocardium grahami. This isn’t really true to botanical naming conventions, but the Latin word ignocardium (“unknowing heart”) is both poetic and slyly ambiguous. Does it refer to Henrietta’s ignorance of Henry’s devious intentions, or to Henry’s ignorance of his evolving sentiments?
While I don’t think that A New Leaf, even in its abbreviated form, ever abandons wholesale its dark or at least murky heart, Henry Graham achieves an approximation of redemption, and grudging appreciation of his wife, through the unwitting development of his inner nerd. Bear with me.
The mastery in Matthau’s performance is his ability to contain and convey his character’s contradictions. As an overgrown trust-fund brat, Matthau manages to suggest both fecklessness and urbanity with comic aplomb. Toward Henrietta he is devious and often driven to exasperation, yet when it matters he defaults unfailingly to a solicitude that could be mistaken for tenderness. It really is a marvel how Matthau pulls this off, and May is a generous director for giving her costar the space for such an elaborately convincing portrayal. May is right to rely on close-ups and reaction shots as the outlandish plot unfurls.
Henrietta is a confirmed and unabashed nerd. Her life centers around teaching, research, field work, and the writing of monographs. Her ambition is to discover, describe, and name a new species of fern. Publishing conventions of the day would have demanded that the description be written in Latin! Now, Henry’s character arc is that in his single-minded pursuit of this cerebral yet graceless creature, he himself becomes a nerd despite himself. The process is multilayered, steady, and perhaps irreversible. When he identifies Henrietta as the target of his schemes, he recognizes he must act quickly. He instructs his valet Harold to find college syllabi on botany. He proves a quick study, soon graduating to Gregor Mendel’s groundbreaking work on plant genetics, which used garden peas to study dominant and recessive traits. Soon Henry is arguing with Henrietta about whether Mendel’s reputation as a solitary pioneer is deserved or should be shared with two later geneticists, Morgan and Muller.
The nerd’s progress continues apace. Deciding early on that poison is likely the least distasteful method of dispatching his bride, Henry spends much of the honeymoon perusing dense tomes on toxicology. One of the film’s most delicious sight gags shows Henry in the foreground, reading one such manual while oblivious to Henrietta who has suspended herself over a cliff with a precarious-looking rope to retrieve a fern specimen. More nerdery ensues when, upon their return from the Caribbean, Henry is confronted by the chaotic state of Henrietta’s household. He is alarmed to learn that the housekeeper Mrs. Traggert is in cahoots with the lawyer McPherson to pad accounts for the benefit of themselves and a score of household staff whose various functions are vague. Seeing his meal ticket drying up before his very eyes, Henry acts swiftly: he fires and replaces them all, taking over all management of Henrietta’s affairs, even immersing himself in the minutiae of tax code. He undertakes this fiscal reform with an alacrity and industry that would surely have preserved his own wealth if learned twenty years earlier. Meanwhile, the fastidious Henry continues ever so patiently to attend to his wife, who must be de-crumbed after every meal and whose clothes must be inspected daily for dangling price tags and other infelicities.
Before we know it, Henry is planning to accompany his wife on her annual summer research trip—in the short story, it’s to Minnesota’s canoe country (where I did my own graduate research), but May transposes the action to similar scenery in the Adirondacks. On this trip, the couple’s canoe capsizes, tossing them both over a rapids. Henry makes it to shore but Henrietta, as clumsy in water as on dry land, is bobbing up and down in the current out of reach. His plan to be rid of his wife unfolding with unexpected ease, Henry spots on shore a silvery apparition: the fabled Alsophila grahami, right there in the north woods! Whether out of ego or sentiment or contagious geekery, he must retrieve Henrietta from the drink and share his discovery. Holding close his shuddering wife to warm her, the couple enjoy their most physically intimate moments in the entire film while pondering, in the film’s final moments, a future where Henry takes up the open professorship in history at the school where Henrietta teaches.
By dint of all the steps required to carry out his dire and elaborate scheme, Henry Graham finds himself acquiring skills and competencies that he would have scorned previously, and little by little he becomes less self-involved. His valet Harold remarks as much, in an insightful bit of dialogue as he helps Henry to pack for the field trip: “You have shown a most surprising talent, sir. And although Mrs. Graham’s helplessness is a little bit irritating at times, this very helplessness has been the stimulus of your own amazing new competence. Very often what we dislike most in others is a reflection of our own inadequacies.” It’s an extreme example of faking it ’til you make it. It’s Matthau’s tonal precision from moment to moment that reconciles his character’s maddening contradictions. Elaine May brings her own comedic talents to bear, of course, and offers a beguiling depiction of a sharp intellect combined with childlike qualities of wonder not to mention trust in her husband … a trust that in the end he must reluctantly live up to.
Pondering the botanical byways of A New Leaf, I conceived an alternative ending that would be more realistic scientifically while deepening the moral ambiguity. Few ferns to my knowledge, apart from the common bracken, enjoy a latitudinal distribution ranging from the Caribbean islands to the Canadian border, from tropical to boreal. To wax pedantic, the genus Alsophila is confined to tropical and subtropical regions, showing up only in Puerto Rico on the U.S. map. The more likely ending to A New Leaf would have Henry rescuing Henrietta to share his excitement at coming across his botanical namesake … only to have her pull out her hand-lens and explain that some obscure morphological feature proves it to be merely a lookalike species. The sunset glow enveloping the couple walking away hand in hand now takes on more shadowy tones.
Podcast episodes of interest:
- Blank Check with Griffin & David, hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims (The Atlantic). Episode of April 3, 2021.
- A Century in Cinema, hosted by Arthur Veenema and Andrew Slaughter. Episode of November 16, 2021
- Filmspotting, hosted by Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen. Episode #572 of February 6, 2016: “May Marathon #1 – A New Leaf / Top 5 Comedies About the Rich”
- Flashback, hosted by Dana Stevens (Slate) and K. Austin Collins (Vanity Fair)
Print appraisals:
- “The Rapturous Romance and Desperate Tragedy of Elaine May’s ‘A New Leaf’,” by Richard Brody. The New Yorker, June 2, 2023.
- “The Marvelous Ms Elaine May,” by Manohla Dargis. The New York Times, January 21, 2019.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon