Like his later "California Suite", which was also made into a film, Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite" is what might be called a "portmanteau play", containing several separate stories. Whereas the four stories in "California Suite", however, are linked together by little more than the fact that they all take place in the same hotel, the three acts of "Plaza Suite", all set in Suite 719 of New York's famous Plaza Hotel, are also linked by a common theme of marriage or adultery.
In Act I a middle-aged couple, Sam and Karen Nash, are revisiting the suite where they spent their honeymoon. Karen believes that this will put the romance back into their marriage, but Sam, who appears to be an obsessive workaholic, seems more interested in attending to the needs of his business. Eventually, however, it appears that there may be more deep-seated faults in their marriage, that Karen suspects Sam of having an affair with his secretary Jean and that there might be something suspicious about his many late evenings at the office.
In Act II, Jesse Kiplinger, a successful Hollywood movie producer, meets his old girlfriend Muriel Tate, now a suburban housewife 1971. We learn that Jesse has been married three times and that all his marriages have ended in an acrimonious divorce. Although he claims to admire what he sees as Muriel's uncomplicated suburban life, it becomes all too obvious that he is trying to seduce her and thereby putting her supposedly happy marriage in danger. (We never see Muriel's husband Larry and, indeed, do not learn much about him).
In Act III a young woman named Mimsey Hubley locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out, despite all the threats and entreaties of her parents Roy and Norma. Until near the end of the story we never actually learn why Mimsey is behaving in this manner, and no, it's not resentment against her parents for having inflicted the name "Mimsey" on her. Simon is normally thought of as a writer of comedies, but here Act III, in fact, is the only really comic part of the film, the other two Acts, especially Act I, being more serious in tone. In "California Suite", by contrast, three of the four segments are essentially comic.
Although Simon himself wrote the screenplay, he was not entirely satisfied with the finished film. He admitted that he would have to accept some of the blame himself, acknowledging that he had been wrong to confine all the action to a single room. He also, however, disliked the casting of Walter Matthau in all three leading male roles (Sam, Jesse and Roy), even though when the play was originally produced on Broadway the same three roles were played by a single actor, in that case George C Scott. Indeed, in that production the three main female roles, Karen, Muriel and Norma, were all played by the same actress, Maureen Stapleton. Stapleton is cast as Karen here, but Muriel is played by Barbara Harris and Norma by Lee Grant.
I would only partly agree with Simon's criticism of Matthau. Admittedly, Matthau is not very convincing as the smooth, lecherous Hollywood lounge-lizard Jesse in Act II, probably the weakest of the three acts. I liked him, however, in both the other two segments in which he gets to play two men who are in some ways similar and at the same time very different. Sam Nash and Roy Hubley are both prosperous middle-aged American businessmen, and both would appear to be less-than-happily married. In personality, however, they are quite distinct. Sam is self- controlled, reserved and introverted whereas Roy is a loud, brash extrovert, something of a bully and a blusterer. Much of the comedy in Act III arises from Roy's blustering attempts to bully his daughter into coming out of the bathroom and going ahead with the wedding; his concern is not with her happiness but rather with the loss of face (and money) that he himself will suffer should the wedding be cancelled at the last minute. Norma, meanwhile, is proving too self-obsessed to be of any help, more worried by a hole in her stockings than by the drama unfolding in front of her. In Act I there is another good contribution from Stapleton. Karen is, nominally, the "wronged woman" with whom we should sympathise, but Stapleton manages to suggest, subtly, that she is the sort of person with whom Sam, and most other men as well, would find it very difficult to live.
I would, however, agree more with Simon's self-criticism. He was right to feel that the finished film is "stagey" and claustrophobic, and it would certainly have benefited if he had made use of the greater freedom offered by the cinematic medium to "open it up" with a greater range of locations. Nevertheless his writing and his psychological insights, together with some of the acting contributions, make it a film which still holds some interest today. 7/10
