PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

Former model Maria Wyeth, who comes from a Nevada town with a population of 28, is now a successful actress. Unhappily married to, and separated from, temperamental producer Carter Lang, she is also chronically depressed and institutionalized.

Reflecting back on what brought her to the asylum, Maria recalls driving around Los Angeles in her yellow Chevrolet Corvette and spending time with her closest friend, B.Z. Mendenhall, an unhappy man who is gay. Maria has a brain-damaged daughter, Kate, who is being kept in a sanitarium at the insistence of Carter, who resents Maria's visiting the girl so frequently. Maria's secret desire is to live somewhere with Kate and find some kind of joy in life together.

Maria has been having an affair with Les Goodwin, a screenwriter. When she tells Carter that she's pregnant with Goodwin's child, he demands that she get an abortion. Maria goes to Las Vegas and has a fling with a mob-connected lawyer, Larry Kulik. She later returns to L.A. and has a one-night stand with Johnny Waters, a television star who needs to watch his own show on TV in order to get in the mood for sex.

Bored and depressed, Maria steals Johnny's car and speeds off. When she is stopped by police, drugs are found in the car and she is placed under arrest. With her spirits at an all-time low, Maria returns to Las Vegas and finds that B.Z. is equally unhappy. When B.Z. swallows a handful of pills and washes them down with vodka, Maria, rather than calling for help, cradles him and watches him die.

Back at the asylum, a psychiatrist asks Maria why she keeps on playing when she knows what “nothing” (nihilism) really means. She replies, "Why not?"

Maria witnesses her friend B.Z. die by overdose and, back in the asylum, responds to her psychiatrist’s existential questioning with, 'Why not?'

The film closes on Maria’s resignation and acceptance of existential emptiness, encapsulated in her response to the psychiatrist. Rather than finding redemption or clarity, Maria embodies the film’s central themes of nihilism and detachment, leaving the viewer with an unsettling sense of unresolved despair. Her inaction in B.Z.'s final moments and her final words reinforce the film's bleak meditation on meaninglessness and psychological dislocation.