Down and out in Beverly Hills

Down and out in Beverly Hills (1986)

 
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Updated December 15, 2024
Down and out in Beverly Hills

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Movie Overview | Down and out in Beverly Hills (1986)

Unlucky and homeless, Dave (Nick Nolte) decides to call it quits, and so sneaks into a stranger's backyard and tries to drown himself in the pool. However, Jerry's plans are stopped by the pool's owner, white-collar businessman Dave (Richard Dreyfuss), who pulls the tramp out of the water and into his home. But Dave's hospitality and his status-obsessed wife, Barbara (Bette Midler), don't impress Jerry, who ignores them and instead pursues the family's maid, Carmen (Elizabeth Peña).

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2 reviews
Overall rating
 
4.7
Entertainment Factor
 
5.0(2)
Story
 
5.0(2)
Actors Performance
 
5.0(2)
Cinematography
 
4.0(2)
Sound Track
 
4.5(2)
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Great Fun
(Updated: January 04, 2025)
Overall rating
 
5.0
Entertainment Factor
 
5.0
Story
 
5.0
Actors Performance
 
5.0
Cinematography
 
5.0
Sound Track
 
5.0
Every actor is perfectly cast in this hysterical story which depicts the clash of different classes. Nick Nolte was never better and Richard Dreyfuss does his best performance ever
Even the dog is funny!!
I did not stop laughing and it holds up in repeat viewings
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Hilarious!
(Updated: January 04, 2025)
Overall rating
 
4.4
Entertainment Factor
 
5.0
Story
 
5.0
Actors Performance
 
5.0
Cinematography
 
3.0
Sound Track
 
4.0
Down and Out in Beverly Hills tells the story of a rich family that lives in the timeless comfort of a Beverly Hills mansion - in the kind of house where they use Architectural Digest for pornography. One day a bum wanders down the alley and into their backyard and tries to drown himself in their swimming pool. After he is saved, he changes their lives forever.

The director makes his whole film depend on the very close observation of his characters. With great attention and affection, he shows us the lives that are disrupted by the arrival of the derelict - this seedy failure whose whole life is an affront to the consumer society.

The film's heroes are the Whitemans, Dave (played by Richard Dreyfus) and Barbara, (played by Bette Midler) and the bum, Jerry Baskin (played by Nick Nolte).  It is Jerry's dogs' disappearance that inspires Nolte's suicide attempt, and it will be the Whitemans' own amazing dog, named Matisse, that gets some of the loudest laughs in the movie. Maybe the director is trying to tell us something about the quality of human relationships in Beverly Hills.

The Dreyfuss character is a coat-hanger manufacturer. He didn't set out in life to be rich (one of his favorite conversational gambits involves his own good luck and assurances that it could have happened to you as easily as to him - nice if you are him, but not if you are you). Here he is, living in a manicured mansion, exploiting wetback labor, sleeping with the Mexican maid, driving a Rolls convertible, selling 900 million coat hangers to the Chinese, and yet, somehow, something is missing. And almost from the first moment he sets eyes on the Nolte character, he realizes what it is: the authenticity of poverty.

The movie has a quiet, offhand way of introducing us to the rich man's milieu. We meet his wife, whose life involves long sessions with masseurs, yogis and shrinks (even her dog has a doggie psychiatrist).

We meet his daughter, a sunny-faced, milk-fed child of prosperity. We meet the Whiteman's neighbor, played by Little Richard, with an incongruous mixture of anger and affluence (he complains that he doesn't get full service from the police; when he reports prowlers, they don't send helicopters and attack dogs).

We meet Carmen the maid, who greets her employer lustily in her servant's quarters but who grows, during the movie, from a soap opera addict into a political radical. We also meet the extended family and friends of the Whitemans, each one a perfectly written vignette, right down to the dog's analyst.

"Down and Out in Beverly Hills" revolves around the fascination that Dreyfuss feels for Nolte's life of dissipation and idleness. He is drawn to the shiftless sloth like a moth to a flame. A bum's life seems to have more authenticity than his own pampered existence.

And, indeed, perhaps the last unreachable frontier of the very rich, the one last thing they cannot buy, is poverty. Dreyfuss spends a night down on the beach with Nolte and his bum friends, and there is a breathtaking moment at sundown when Nolte (who claims to be a failed actor) recites Shakespeare's lines beginning "What a piece of work is a man!" Certain predictable things happen. Nolte not only becomes Dreyfuss' good buddy, but is enlisted by all of the women in the household - the wife, the daughter and the maid - as a sex therapist.

Dreyfuss will put up with almost anything, because he really likes this guy, and Nolte's best hold on them is the threat to leave. Mazursky makes the most of that paradox, and gradually we see the buried theme of the movie emerging, and it is the power of friendship. What these people all really lacked, rich and poor, sane and crazy alike, was the power to really like other people.

The movie should get some kind of award for its casting. Dreyfuss, who has been so good in the past as a hyperactive overachiever, succeeds here in slightly deflecting that energy. He has the success, but is bedazzled by it, as if not quite trusting why great wealth should come to him for doing so little. He channels his energy, not into work, but into enthusiasms - and Nolte becomes his greatest enthusiasm.

For Bette Midler, Barbara Whiteman is the perfect character, all filled with the distractions of living up to her level of consumption.

Nolte in some ways has the subtlest role to play, although when we first see it, it seems the broadest. His shiftless drifter has to metamorphize into a man who understands his hosts so deeply that he can play them like a piano.

The supporting roles are so well filled, one after another, that we almost feel we recognize the characters before they're introduced.

And Mike, the dog, should get an honorary walk-on at the Oscars.

Perhaps I have made the movie sound too serious. So let me just say that "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" made me laugh longer and louder than any film I've seen in a long time. 

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