Fifty-five years after its release, “A New Leaf” still stands alone. Its director, multihyphenate Elaine May, brought her experiences as a Method actor and an improvisational comedian to her filmmaking style, which would have been recognized for its singular brilliance had May been born a man. Instead, her insistence on tight scripts and loose, improvisational performances earned her a reputation for being “difficult.”
Elaine May’s directorial debut is not the first film about lovers plotting to murder one another: The concept drives Preston Sturges’ “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948), for example, as well as 1965’s “How to Murder Your Wife.” Still, May’s unique voice and style give “A New Leaf” unmatched poignancy and depth, which sneak into the film unnoticed while the audience is busy laughing at the characters and their screwball antics. As critic Richard Brody wrote in 2024, “the core of May’s work is the horror of romantic relationships as experienced by women”—a theme that’s treated here first as farce, then as something that’s harder to define.
Henry Graham (Walter Matthau) is the film’s main character, a heartless Manhattan playboy for whom money is an abstract concept. It never occurred to him that he could run out of money, and he’s confused when his lawyer explains that his trust fund has been depleted. Selling his art collection—which, to be fair, does include some pretty striking modern pieces that would be worth millions in 2026—is out of the question. And so, in a murderous reversal of the “gold digger” stereotype, he sets out to find a wealthy single woman to marry, and then kill, in order to maintain his lifestyle. (Staying married to his unlucky bride is also out of the question.)
Henry could be a sinister figure, but May refuses to take him too seriously. A deadpan montage early in the film shows the shallow Henry bidding an absurd farewell to the trappings of his wealth, while his beloved Ferrari, which breaks down every time he drives it, symbolizes the futility of his existence. May lampoons Harry so thoroughly, in fact, that it comes as a surprise when he’s actually good at something besides telling a bound seam from a French one.
Henry has a great bullshit detector, as it turns out. The audience knows that he’s only helping his new wife, Henrietta (May), with her finances so he can maximize his return after her death, but she doesn’t. She thinks he’s protecting her. The tension between what the audience knows and what the characters know is one of the film’s most cynical jokes: “Can you believe that this idiot thinks that she finally found someone who loves her for her?” May seems to be saying. “He’s actually trying to kill her!”
It’s tempting to read into the fact that May cast herself as the guileless Henrietta, a woman whose brilliance goes unnoticed because everyone’s focused on the crumbs on the front of her dress. (She’s the model for Tina Fey on “30 Rock,” down to the glasses.) May is notoriously reluctant to discuss her life—she refused to cooperate with the 2024 biography “Miss May Does Not Exist,” for example—which means that this speculation will have to remain just that. However, Henrietta’s naiveté has a note of tragedy to it that feels vulnerable, even personal, for the director.
Henrietta’s clumsiness and lack of refinement are both played for laughs in “A New Leaf.” Although she primarily made her living with words, May shows an incredible aptitude for physical performance in the role. Besides being hilarious, even the awkward way she holds her hands when she sits—May dangles her appendages in front of her, as if her wrists are broken—tells us a lot about her character. Henrietta is self-conscious and uncomfortable in her body, and only relaxes when she’s talking about her favorite subject: ferns.
Here is where “A New Leaf” begins to mature into something more nuanced. Initially framed as predator and victim, both Henry and Henrietta turn out to be more complicated than their comically exaggerated personas suggest. Henrietta doesn’t care about material things, but she isn’t entirely selfless, either: Her dream of having a new plant species named after her is motivated by her desire for scientific immortality. Henry relates to the ego underlying this need, and briefly softens on his mark/bride. It’s another dark joke from May: A man only recognizes a woman as human when she acts as he does.
But what really changes their dynamic is when sweet, delusional Henrietta names the fern she discovered on their honeymoon after her new husband rather than herself. (He didn’t notice at the time; he was too busy reading a book called “Beginner’s Guide to Toxicology.”) Appropriately flattered, Henry begins to wonder if having a wife—this wife, specifically—might not be so bad after all. He’s not a terrible husband, either, if you can get past the whole “homicidal intentions” thing. The charred-black joke can be summed up into a single image: At its core, “A New Leaf” is a woman saying, “Yeah, he tried to kill me, but other than that he’s a nice guy.”
Based on the story “The Green Heart” by Jack Ritchie, May’s script for “A New Leaf” is full of sublime phrasing and absurd bon mots. (“Sooty blot” is a good one, as is “your erotic obsession with your carpet.”) As absurd as some of it can be, every element in the film is tightly controlled. On set, May insisted on perfection and repeated scenes until they were right, but while such control-freak tendencies were forgivable from, say, Stanley Kubrick, the same was not true of Elaine May.
“A New Leaf” went over budget and over schedule, and when May emerged after ten months in the editing room with a three-and-a-half-hour rough cut, Paramount’s Robert Evans decided to ignore May’s contract (which gave her final cut) and edited the movie down to 102 minutes. (Matthau, who turned out to be something of a Henry himself, took the studio’s side.) Outraged that control over her film had been taken from her in such a public, humiliating way, May sued the studio to have her name removed from its credits; she lost after a judge ruled that the final cut was still funny.
“A New Leaf” made money and led to May helming another comedy classic, 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid.” But for this self-taught genius, it was the beginning of a slow-motion heartbreak, as the drama over “A New Leaf” would repeat itself throughout May’s regrettably brief tenure as a director. Talked over, dismissed, and never given the benefit of the doubt, May struggled to maintain control over all four films she directed between 1971 and 1987; eventually, preemptive criticism of her film “Ishtar” would kill her directorial career.
Now 93 years old, she never gives interviews and appears in public only rarely. And why would she? The movie industry, a suitor she never really wanted in the first place, tried to kill her. She’s no hapless Henrietta, but every time someone discovers “A New Leaf,” her immortality is assured.
