Coming to Terms With Harold and Maude

 

Iconoclastic director Hal Ashby’s playfully dour comedy Harold and Maude tends to split opinion fairly starkly. Either it inspires fanatic devotion and you watch it over and over or you find it overly self-interested, sophomoric and unnecessarily morose. I can see the relevance of both views and also how the vehemence of the opposing view points would only strengthen the reaction of the other side until the people who love it love it more than they actually love it and vice versa due to how dogmatic the other side is in their respective estimation.

I had never seen the film until watching last year at the age of 32. Partially because the people who recommended it to me did so at a volume and with a frequency I did not quite trust. Very few movies have ever “changed my life” and the ones that did, did so when I was pretty young. Once I got past about 18 that kind of stopped happening on that hushed and awed “oh my gawd” level. Not that I don’t mourn the loss of that possibly happening when I sit down to watch a film. But I've found that the kinds of life lessons that overwhelm teenagers eventually become a little less profound.
 
But if you can divorce it from its baggage (the breathless recommendations and equally vehement denunciations) it is at least charming, and at most inspiring. Because even though Ruth Gordon’s Maude does become grating at times, tripping just over the line from free spirit to public nuisance, and while the death-obsession set pieces wear a little thin, the parts narrowly hang together and the entertainment value is very real.

The film’s credentials as Dark Comedy are impeccable. It is complete and saturated in its interest in death as ever present. It presents us two lead characters who never let death out of their sight. One treats it as a sort of fetishistic observance, hoping that life (represented by his mother) will notice him for it, and the other uses it as her prime motivator, unwilling to let a second pass that is not some sort of virile and vivacious rebuke to the concept of death.

Through its treatment of death and inversion of sexual norms (genuine love and desire between the elderly and close to death and the young) it seems to throw light on human existence as absurd. Though this places it firmly again in the dark comedy ledger, Harold and Maude has more than a passing similarity with screwball comedy. Its strong female lead, taking the [almost literally] infantilized man through the paces of self discovery and ultimately love she plays out the role of the familiar screwball heroine.

If seen beside Katherine Hepburn’s character in Bringing up Baby or Barbara Stanwyk in The Lady Eve, Ruth Gordon as Maude almost seems like a logical extrapolation of this type in old age. What if life had taken these characters along instead of stopping after the credits rolled? They might have ended up old, alone, but living an eventful high-strung life living out of an old train car.