Reeling Backward: A Fish in the Bathtub (1998)

A tidy little gem from Joan Micklin Silver in her last turn behind the camera of a theatrical film, with real-life couple Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara playing contentious old marrieds.

“A Fish in the Bathtub” is a lovely little film, another tidy gem from writer/director Joan Micklin Silver, whose oeuvre I’ve been gradually working my way through. Last column I took a look at a film directed by her husband, Raphael Silver, which she produced in a long your turn/my turn collaboration. Here they switched hats again, with him producing and also sharing screenwriting duties with John Silverstein and David Chudnovsky.

It was Micklin’s last theatrical feature film, as she had mostly spent her time with TV movies for the previous decade and did a few more before hanging it up. Her battles with the Hollywood studios were epic, and unpleasant. This story, about an old couple grown sick of each other after 40 years of marriage, might be a stand-in for her professional relations.

“Fish” stars Jerry Stiller, then at the height of his second run of fame as part of the “Seinfeld” cast, in a role that very much played off the persona of Frank Costanza: an ill-tempered, elderly Jewish man whose charms are buried deep, deep, deep beneath a scratchy exterior named Sam Kaplan.

His real-life wife, Anne Meara, plays his onscreen spouse, Molly. They were a comedy duo back in the day, and quite successful. According to Stiller’s Wikipedia page, “In 1970, they broke up the live act before it broke up their marriage.” Like Molly, Meara was a Catholic who converted to Judaism for marriage, and the Kaplans have a son and a daughter, just as Stiller and Meara did.

(You probably know who the boy is.)

My only real beef with “Fish” is that the fish is never sufficiently explained. Specifically, the large carp that Sam spontaneously brings home after being sent out by Molly one rainy day to pick up some sticky buns. He plops it into the tub in the spare bathroom and refuses all demands that it be removed.

My only sense is that the carp is the equivalent of the red herring in a thriller — a pointless plot piece that exists to set up the intrigue. Here, it’s a random whim by Sam as a way to declare his independence, and to her a symbol of his intractable nature. Even though the fish is barely referenced again in the movie, it’s the unseen representative of Sam and Molly’s long-building war.

“A Fish in the Bathtub” is now out in a terrific-looking Blu-ray issue from Cohen Media.

(As a former aquarium hobbyist, I was appalled at the conditions the poor fish is subjected to, brought home in a plastic trash bag with hardly enough liquid to breathe, then dumped into a bath filled with untreated tap water barely big enough for it to paddle out a figure-eight. In real life, this scaly pet wouldn’t have even lived till dinnertime.)

Sam is a real piece of work. A cigar-sucking, sawed-off bully, he ran a modestly successful ladies’ lingerie store — “the best,” he insists — for 42 years before selling out and retiring. Most of the storefronts have been taken over by Chinese immigrants, and Sam pops in now and then to check on things and compare them to the way they used to be.

The film’s setting is never overtly stated, though I’d guess somewhere in Jersey. Sam’s constant penny-pinching — he insists Molly never turn the stove burner above 6 because “I’m not subsidizing the gas company!” — and entrepreneurship were enough to rate them a nice little house in the suburbs.

Son Joel (Mark Ruffalo in one of his earliest big-screen roles) and daughter Ruthie (Jane Adams) are 30ish and well-situated in life, though they bear some of the neurotic symptoms of growing up with such contentious parents. Ruthie is happily playing the field as a single gal who runs her own travel agency, and Joel is a real estate agent with a wife, Sharon (Missy Yage), and adorable daughter of about 6.

Sam’s been a pill to Molly for a long time, more so since he stopped working, expecting her to have his meals ready whenever he wants them, following his various dictates on what belongs where and otherwise treating her more as a servant than partner. The fish is the next-to-last straw, the final one landing on the proverbial camel’s back when he loudly berates her during a get-together for cards with their other married friends, the boys and girls occupying separate tables, games and conversations.

Molly decamps to Joel’s house, inserting herself into another marriage with growing hostilities. Joel is getting macked on by a gorgeous blonde client (Pamela Gray), and his gradual trending toward temptation causes ripples of anxiety in the household, which his mother’s presence only amplifies.

Though billed as a uproarious romantic comedy, they are solid notes of realism and tragedy in “Fish,” which is as good a depiction of how marriage can wear people down as I’ve seen onscreen. Every little disagreement gets annotated and archived, to be brought up during the next brouhaha as people reach for another weapon in a terminal bout of one-upsmanship.

“You open your mouth and snakes come out!” Molly shrieks, accurately.

The picture has a rather sitcom-y feel, yuks and set-ups choreographed with exquisite pacing. But then we’ll get walloped by a scene, like when Sam suddenly bows down to his granddaughter with wet eyes and declares, “I don’t want you to forget me!”

There was a genuine stretch of the movie where I felt like Sam and Molly weren’t going to get back together — and maybe they shouldn’t have.

She begins dating a fellow driving school student, a chap named Lou (Bob Dishy) who’s nice enough but seems to have substituted an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia for a personality.

Sam’s too much of a brooder to attract romantic overtures, though the next-door neighbor, Sylvia (Phyllis Newman), invites him over for meals and conversations to keep the loneliness at bay. A widow for 10 years, she gets the best line in the movie, which also sums up its theme:

“Fighting with somebody is better than not having anybody to fight with at all.”

I loved the organic authenticity of “Fish,” from the sport coat Sam wears that went out of fashion decades ago to the low-end gray Ford station wagon he drives. He hangs out with his married buddies (Louis Zorich, Val Avery and Jonathan Hogan among them), gathering at the crummy local deli where the cook, Stubby (Joseph Ragno), slings insults along with scrambled eggs and salami.

They love Sam, but of course they give him the business mercilessly — their way of convincing him to give up his fit and go beg Molly to come back to him.

I was also struck by Milo, Sam’s best friend played by Paul Benedict. He’s an amiable goy who never married, and as such hovers just outside the circle of Sam’s other pals. Also retired, Milo wanders around town with a wash pail and squeegee, offering to clean storefront windows not because he needs the money but as something to do.

More directly than the other guys, Milo tries to explain to Sam that he’s a lucky man with a good home and a wonderful family, if only he’d wise up long enough to appreciate them a little more.

Things wind up about where you’d expect. Sam makes a big, public spectacle of himself to show how jealous he is that Molly doesn’t seem to need him anymore, which of course melts her heart. The fish gets released into the bay, Joel tells the masher to take a hike and things, we expect, will quickly get back to normal.

There will still be yelling and stupid disagreements, but the split was long enough for Sam and Molly to realize their souls are too intertwined to ever let go.

“A Fish in the Bathtub” is the sort of movie to watch and enjoy with friends and family, and then go buy the good roses for your special someone… just because.