Glib in Manhattan

Ariel Levy's profile of screenwriter-director Nora Ephron in the current New Yorker (you need to be a subscriber to move beyond the firewall) shows a woman thoroughly comfortable with her intelligence and taste. She's got all the right connections: box office bombs like Lucky Numbers and Bewitched haven't hurt her ability to get financed, even when her godson is head of production; she's adored by a certain female demographic; she can get Meryl Streep in any of her films; she loves Ernst Lubitsch. Which only proves that all the taste that money and nature can provide still produces Sleepless in Seattle and You Got Mail.

The key is this excerpt from her autobiography provided by Levy, in which Ephron describes the aftershocks of her insane father's death:

"And when that happened, I don't know how to say this except...it was a moment of almost comic relief. It seemed entirely possible, in character, understandable, and I think we all filed it under Will I Ever Be Able to Use This in Anything?"

This is a family coping mechanism that was explicitly instilled. "Everything is copy," their mother used to say, which was related to her expectation that all suffering be reconfigured into a funny story be ore it was brought to her attention. "Take notes," she directed Nora, from her deathbed.

The list of writers who've drawn from the well of family tragedy is longer than those solely reliant on the fictive muse; but in Ephron's movies pain has a clammy aftertaste. Grief is mined for sitcom punchlines. Lubitsch's movies exist in a tinker-toy world of his own making, but The Shop Around the Corner (the inspiration for You've Got Mail) draws finely shaded regret beneath the verbal foreplay (Frank Morgan's offstage suicide attempt hints at the consequences of drawing too often on decorum). The new Julia and Julia sounds promising, although the presence of RoboStreep makes me wonder whether we'll get this instead.