Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice Reviews

The late 60s were a confusing, unmooring time for everyone, especially those expositing the virtues of total honesty and “free love.” Enter Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy not so much about wife-swapping as it is about the confusion of the era of its making. “Free love” was never truly free and requiring everyone to get over their sexual hang-ups requires intense psychological scrutiny and self-knowledge and not platitudes from a woo-woo retreat for the monied liberal set. This film comes armed with sage, crystals, and a “Don’t worry, be happy” bumper sticker.

Is it a satire? Possibly, it certainly doesn’t play everything entirely straight as much of Natalie Wood and Robert Culp’s performances seem done with invisible quotes lurking around them. They’re so earnest and eager to impart their idealized self-actualization that they don’t seem to know that spouting off blunt truths is not always the best policy. They’re more concerned with virtue signaling and twisting their close friends into their newly created images that they seem to have missed that they’re still just as confused and hung-up as they were before, but they’ve got New Age-y platitudes now!

Wood and Culp go away to one of those Southern Californian retreats that’s all about “finding the light within” or “returning to love” or some other feel good nonsense that asks us to express an aggressive vulnerability and honesty that just makes everyone else uncomfortable. You know the types; they speak of dark and light forces at play and how if we manifest love hard enough everything will suddenly untwist itself into peace and harmony. Lovely bit of fairy tale logic there, but it takes more hard work than that to get proactive change in society.    

Anyway, they return from the retreat demanding complete honesty with their best friends, Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon. Gould and Cannon give the best performances in the film. Gould’s shaggy personality type, always hilarious especially when harried, provides a nice counterpoint to Culp’s handsome, aging wannabe swinger. Wood’s wide eyes contain hidden depths (don’t they always?) that contradict the words she’s often speaking or highlight them depending on the mood. Cannon’s flinty, conservative character is often the voice of reason, and she’s marvelous in the role. Her best scene is not the oft-mentioned climatic bluff calling, but an early therapy session where her defensiveness and sexual hang-ups commingle.