So this is a Mike Nichols movie from 1971 that’s basically a think-piece on gender relations and (as it was then styled) “male chauvinism,” as examined through a couple of basically shitty guys (a young Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, who I didn’t even know had ever acted).

As the story begins, they’re in college, and Art ends up dating a young Candice Bergen. She thinks he’s a nice guy, but doesn’t seem to be particularly attracted to him; but she engages in a pity makeout, and ends up pity dating him. And then Jack, who is Art’s roommate and best friend, tracks her down and seduces her — yes, she knows that he’s Art’s friend, but she sleeps with him anyway. And then she ends up sleeping with Art basically out of guilt for cheating on him, and now he’s even more locked-in on her.

And so Jack and Candice continue their affair, and Jack tells Art all about what they get up to, giving her a pseudonym in his stories so that Art doesn’t suspect they’re stories about his own girlfriend. Yadda yadda, Jack gives her an ultimatum, and they angrily break up.

Now we cut to years later. Art is married to Candice, but we only know that because he tells us so, while explaining that he’s dating/having an affair with this new girl (who he’s just brought to Jack’s apartment) because their sex life is terrible. Meanwhile, Jack is dating Ann-Margret, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship — she wants to get married, he doesn’t even seem to really like her that much.

Art proposes a partner swap to Jack, who is happy to go along with it (he seems to have the hots for Art’s girls pretty consistently); Art’s girlfriend rebuffs him… but suggests that if he comes by her place alone later, she’d be up for it. Meanwhile, when Art goes in to try persuading Ann-Margret, he finds that she’s swallowed a bunch of pills in a suicide attempt and is unconscious, so he calls the hospital.

Now we cut to years later again. Art seems to still be married, but he’s got a new, teenaged girlfriend (Carol Kane!). They’ve gone together to visit Jack, who is now divorced from Ann-Margret (so her recovery and their entire marriage basically happened offscreen), and has curdled into super-hating women — which he demonstrates by showing Art and his woman a slideshow called “Ball-Busters on Parade,” of all the women he’s slept with over the years, explaining why each of them is terrible. This gets a little awkward when the slide of Candice Bergen comes up; he skips past it very quickly, but Art notices. Carol Kane eventually gets upset about this parade of misogyny and storms off.

The last scene of the movie is Jack going to visit Rita Moreno, a prostitute with whom he apparently is a regular. She’s got a whole script that he needs her to go through verbatim — when she deviates once, he’s furious at her — because apparently that’s the only way ol’ Jack can get it up anymore. The end.

This is not a very pleasant movie; there are parts of the early college bits that are fun (and this is the biggest part of the movie), but the later parts are just super bitter.

And okay, it doesn’t need to be fun — after all, it should be a dramatic actors’ showcase with all the talent that’s in it; but it ends up feeling flat, because the characters are all so thinly drawn. Jack kinda just hates women and hides it behind aggression; Art just kinda hates women and hides it behind passivity. Neither of them changes much throughout the film, so they’re doing the same shit in their forties that they were doing as teenagers, only crankier and more bitter. None of the women are on-screen long enough to develop their characters very far.

Ultimately, this feels like one of those very seventies movies, the kind of thing that thought it was saying something really novel and interesting about relationships, but which today reads as a portrait of a Type of Guy that was apparently common back then, but isn’t often seen in as pure a form now. It’s not a bad movie — there’s too much talent involved for that — but it’s not an especially good one, either.