3 Mulligans

One of my favorite parts of movies that are set in a single night (like After Hours or even Harold and Kumar go to White Castle) comes near the end when characters are at their most exhausted from a long string of misadventures; they are craving sleep and rest, but the sun is coming up on a new day for better or worse. Mikey and Nicky has this same nighttime setting and sense of exhaustion by the movie’s end (“Would you go to bed?” is even the movie’s last line), but unlike Griffin Dunne’s character in After Hours who has to face another identical, awful day, Nicky’s eyes are opened, just too late to change his fate.

Mikey and Nicky chronicles two friends, one under the threat of a mob hit, and the other who tries to help him escape and keep him out of harm’s way. I was predisposed to think of Mikey (played by Peter Falk, with his doughy, kindly Columbo face), as being the good friend and savior of Nicky, played by John Cassavetes. But as the movie unfolds, Mikey’s selfishness and violence is more startling than the paranoid and crazy (and in an odd sense predictable) Nicky. By the end of the movie, I almost felt more allegiance to Nicky, but both of them are so villainous, cowardly and cold that life in their world seems like a hostile, empty existence and I wanted little to do with either. The end for Nicky comes predictably, but for all that, is still shocking.

I loved the movie in all its violent, misogynist, 1970s grit. There are no heroes here, or even sympathetic roles. But we do get a human perspective when the characters express themselves over loss of family and being snubbed by the boss (Mikey) and the desire to see a newborn daughter one more time (Nicky). Even the hitman has a bad night and, if we’re not exactly supposed to feel bad for him, at least he shares the same kind of frustrations over traffic the rest of us face.