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| Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in Adolescence. (Photo: Netflix.) |
It’s a confirmed truth that British actors can do just about anything, but the consistency and range of performances in the recent four-part English series Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) is so impressive that it may have set a new standard. The style of the limited series, created and written by Stephen Graham, who plays one of the principal roles, and the prolific playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, is documentary realism, and the characters are etched in such precise psychological detail that they register more as figures in an Impressionist group painting come to life than as actors at work. You carry them away with you; I watched the first half at the end of the evening and woke up early the next morning with them still crowded into my brain. (I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d finished the series.) My praise is meant to extend to the young performers, who give performances of unwavering authenticity on a par with the adults. Those of us who love watching English TV drama – and that includes almost everyone I know – have our favorite actors, but the only member of the cast of Adolescence I recognized was Graham, whom I’d admired as the captain of the whaling ship in The North Water and as Jamie Bell’s brother in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. I assume that my lack of familiarity with the others enhanced the freshness of the experience, but then British actors are chameleons anyway.
Graham gives a blistering emotional performance as Eddie Miller, a working-class bloke whose thirteen-year-old son Jamie (Owen Cooper) is charged with stabbing a female classmate named Katie to death. But it would be a mistake to call Graham the star because of the dramatic strategy of the series. It unfolds over thirteen months and reaches into almost every aspect of the case. The focus of the first two episodes is the investigation, so the main characters are the two cops handling it, DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay). In episode one they deal mostly with Jamie and Eddie, whom Jamie has chosen as his designated adult (North Americans would call him the boy’s advocate). Episode two takes the cops into namie’s school, where they interview his classmates; the standout characters are his two mates (Kaine Davis and Lewis Pemberton), the closest friend of the dead girl (Fatima Bojang), whose fury at her fate makes her defiant and even violent, and Luke’s son (Amari Bacchus), who attends the same school. Bojang is extraordinary, and Bacchus, a wiry Black kid with a wry, winning personality, has a wonderful scene – humorous and appalling in equal parts – with Walters where Adam, embarrassed by his dad’s fumbling attempt to penetrate the lives of these teenagers, takes him aside and wises him up on the iconography of social media that obsesses and directs their lives but is a foreign language to their parents’ generation. By the third episode Jamie has been in prison for several months awaiting his trial (he and his lawyer have submitted an innocent plea) and has been meeting regularly with Briony Aniston (Erin Doherty), a psychoanalyst whose job is to develop a profile of the boy that the judge can refer to in the matter of sentencing; the entire hour is devoted to a particularly volatile interaction between them. The final part, which takes place as the trial nears, is about the effects of the case on Jamie’s family, which includes his mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco), and his eighteen-year-old sister, Lisa (Amelie Pease). The only corner of the plot Adolescence doesn’t explore is the effect of Katie’s death on her family – a deliberate omission that identifies it as the story of the psychological and sociological forces that can drive a thirteen-year-old boy to kill a female classmate.
So Adolescence is clearly more than a policier. Whatever doubt we might have that Jamie is guilty, which arises from his sweetness and our affection not only for him but also for his family, is pretty much vanquished at the end of part one, when, with Jamie and Eddie, we watch CCTV footage of Katie’s killing. We may hang onto the possibility that somehow the evidence is misleading, but the fact that we don’t want to believe it’s accurate isn’t because the drama is operating as a murder mystery but because the interior lives of these kids are shocking, terrifying. Adolescence is a profound and withering indictment of the effect of poisonous assumptions about gender and sexuality in twenty-first-century society on the behavior of the children who are struggling to grow up in it. It doesn’t make judgments on the characters: Jamie is deeply angry but he isn’t a sociopath, and though both his parents – and especially Eddie – are finally horrified by the ways in which they might have contributed to his unhappiness, as far as we can see they’re kind, loving people who have done their best, and Eddie is also a product of his society. There’s a conclusion to the drama: Jamie switches his plea to guilty. But there’s no resolution and no hope of one coming down the pike.
Superlative as the acting is overall, Owen Cooper deserves a few sentences of his own. When a young performer exhibits a sort of emotional intelligence that seems so far beyond his years (he was fourteen when he shot the series) it’s difficult to know how to write about him. Obviously he has amazing instincts, but where did he learn how to work through a character who is so good at hiding and denying his own impulses? (I don’t want to shortchange Barantini, whose coaching and shaping of all the junior actors is admirable from start to finish.) Cooper’s portrayal made me think about young actors – like Robert Lynen in Julien Duvivier’s 1932 Poil de carotte and Margaret O’Brien in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis – who have taken us to private places in children that are like alien landscapes. If Cooper continues to act I wish him the career he deserves. If he doesn’t, he’s already created something indelible.
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| Glenn Fleshler and George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.) |
No one who saw the recent Broadway transcription of George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck – it played a two-month sold-out run at astronomical ticket prices but CNN broadcast the penultimate performance on June 7 – needs to be informed that it was a response to the bottomless indignities of Donald Trump’s still-young second presidency. The film, which Clooney directed, is about Edward R. Murrow’s exposure, on his weekly CBS television show, See It Now, of Senator Joe McCarthy’s tactics under the rigged banner of patriotism – intimidation and undocumented accusations fanning the flames of anti-Communist hysteria – during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. (Clooney and Heslov’s provocation for the 2005 movie was the U.S. attack on Iraq.) Of course the stage version is on the nose. I’d say it’s an especially effective form of political protest because it’s such an intelligent and compelling play. In the film Clooney created a kind of collage using newsreel clips of McCarthy and, inevitably, of the speech by disgusted Army counsel Joseph Welch that ultimately shamed McCarthy and incited the Senate’s censure of him that toppled his career, as well as the iconography of the 1950s television studio. On stage director David Cromer replicates the effect with a combination of live theatre and film that harks back to the Living Newspaper experiments conducted under the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s, except that they were Brechtian in style and Cromer sticks to realism. That is, except for the period-setting interpolation of nightclub renditions by a jazz vocalist played by Georgia Heer, in the part originated by Dianne Reeves in the movie – and, at the end, an added montage that telescopes the distance between McCarthy’s era and our own. The montage sticks to history and resists the temptation to make the point that in his youth Trump was mentored by McCarthy’s lawyer, Roy Cohn. When the facts are already glittering with irony, to insert ironic commentary would be gilding the lily. (The best reason to see The Apprentice, last year’s movie about Trump’s early career, is Jeremy Strong’s portrait of Cohn.)
The 2005 film had a remarkable cast headed by David Strathairn as Murrow, with Clooney as his producer Fred Friendly, Frank Langella as CBS president Bill Paley, Robert Downey, Patricia Clarkson, Jeff Daniels, and Ray Wise – Leland Palmer on Twin Peaks – in the pivotal role of Don Hollenbeck, a newscaster on some of CBS’s stations who is undergoing the ad hominem baiting of Hearst columnist Jack O’Brien while McCarthy is aiming for members of the Armed Forces against whom he has manufactured bogus cases of political disloyalty. The starting point of Murrow’s assault on McCarthy is that he has bullied the Armed Forces into blackballing Milo Ridulovich, a young lieutenant in the Air Force Reserves, on the grounds that members of his family allegedly have unsavory foreign connections. Murrow’s coverage gets Ridulovich reinstated, but he and Friendly can’t fight O’Brien at the same time as McCarthy, and Hollenbeck winds up a suicide. Clooney takes over from Strathairn in the stage version; Strathairn is the definitive Murrow but Clooney is a fine second choice, and of course he’s charismatic. The supporting cast this time around features Paul Gross, Carter Hudson, Ilana Glazer, Fran Kranz, and Clark Gregg as Hollenbeck, whose performance is as affecting as Wise’s. Hollenbeck’s demise has the punch of the suicide of a stage director sidelined by the East German government in The Lives of Others, which turns his friend, a celebrity playwright played by Sebastian Koch, into an activist. That was fiction; Hollenbeck’s story, of course, is true, but Clooney and Heslov shape it dramatically: the celebratory mood at See It Now occasioned by the news that the Senate has begun to investigate Joe McCarthy is broken by a phone call to Murrow informing him that Hollenbeck, whom he was unable to rescue, has killed himself.
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| From left: Pom Klementieff, Greg Tarzan Davis, Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, and Hayley Atwell in Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning. (Photo: Paramount Pictures.) |
The original Misson: Impossible movie, released in the summer of 1996, is an ideal entertainment turned out by a master, Brian De Palma, and it has an undercurrent of feeling: in the opening few minutes, the hero, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), sees his entire team killed off after they’ve been betrayed by one of their own. The picture was a one-off for De Palma (though I think that, among his output, it’s always been underrated), but because the movie was a hit, it generated a franchise. After two misbegotten sequels, one by John Woo and one by J.J. Abrams, Pixar’s Brad Bird took over for the 2011 Ghost Protocol, the first of the series with its own title. Bird turned out to have a gift for devising extravagant nail-biting set pieces, and he infused this fourth M:I outing with the wit and humor he’d shown on The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The tone was semi-parodic, especially in the use of Cruise. He’s been a movie star since the early eighties but only rarely has a director (like De Palma) managed to coach any genuine acting out of him; Ghost Protocol resurrected him as an action-movie superstar whose awareness of the improbability of his athletic prowess – especially, of course, his running, and especially as he’s aged (he turns sixty-three this month) – is the ticklish element that puts the movie over the top. He’s like a live-action cartoon. When Christopher McQuarrie replaced Bird on Misson: Impossible: Rogue Nation, the style and tone were set and he stuck to them.
But McQuarrie’s fourth and presumably final entry, Final Reckoning (the second part of Dead Reckoning, Part One, which came out in 2023), isn’t playful; it’s solemn and maudlin. There are expensive-looking action sequences, but none of them stands alone, and they’re not visually interesting. All of them are linked to the dull plot about Ethan’s attempt to save the world by adding a coveted key to another key in the possession of the villain (Esai Morales as Gabriel, possibly the least engaging bad guy in the history of action spectaculars) and inserting it into a gizmo that will cause an evil computer called the Entity to self-destruct. I can’t be the only movie lover in the world whose mind goes blank when the climax of a picture is about defeating a computer: what the hell is there for us to look at? (I stopped watching the TV show Person of Interest, which I’d loved for a couple of seasons, when it descended into a protracted battle between two computers.) And since McQuarrie shoots almost the entire picture in close-up, the images feel compressed and the movie can’t breathe. It has almost no beauty, no poetry. There’s one lovely aerial shot of a dog sled crossing an Arctic landscape dotted with geodesic domes – radar arrays – that look like they’re gift-wrapped in balloons, and when Ethan and Gabriel get into a helicopter chase you’re grateful for the depths of the sky. But that’s about it.
Dead Reckoning, Part One set all this up, I realize, but it still had the comic energy of the previous M:I films, and the fate of the world didn’t feel quite so much like a cloud hanging over the picture and spoiling the fun. Final Reckoning falls straight into the trap of so many of the Marvel movies, especially the Avengers series, in which the consequences of not defeating the forces of evil are ratcheted up each time so that the plot becomes a kind of grim, gray mass – while the movies themselves get longer and longer. (Final Reckoning is nearly three hours.) The theme of the movie is the IMF motto about acting on behalf of those we love and hold close as well as those we will never meet. You can’t miss it, since the characters repeat it about every fifteen minutes. Ving Rhames and even Simon Pegg, who have been delightful mainstays of the series, are stuck playing embodiments of this principle, though Hayley Atwell succeeds in giving a performance, and Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk are touching as an ex-CIA coding genius and his Inuit wife. Saxon’s reappearance as a character who had a memorable scene in De Palma’s Mission: Impossible is the film’s best surprise. It’s one time when McQuarrie and his co-screenwriter, Erik Jendresen, remember that their job is to give pleasure to the audience.
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| Composer Charles Strouse. |
The composer Charles Strouse, who died in mid-May at the age of ninety-six, sailed into the Broadway mainstream in 1960 when he and the lyricist Lee Adams penned the score for Bye Bye Birdie. Strouse’s memoir, Put on a Happy Face, a reference to the show’s hit tune, details the two-year struggle he and Adams had in getting Birdie on the boards; it was rewritten several times by different book writers, until Michael Stewart, whom they’d worked with at the Green Mansions adult camp in the Adirondacks, came up with a plot that worked, built around a teen rock ‘n’ roll idol who, like Elvis Presley, devastates his fans by getting drafted. The musical has had such a long life as a summer-camp and community-theatre perennial (I acted in one production when I was twelve and another when I was fifteen) that, like Once Upon a Mattress, over the years it’s lost its appeal. One assumes that last season’s charming Broadway revival of Mattress has restored its reputation, but the only versions of Birdie we have to look at are the unfortunate 1963 movie, which films only the first act of the story, and a clumsy 1995 TV broadcast. That’s a pity, because though the comic routines in the book haven’t aged well, it has a very bright score (much of which didn’t make it into the film).
Strouse’s usual writing partner was Adams, though in later years he worked with a variety of other lyricists that included Alan Jay Lerner. (Only once, though, on a 1983 musical called Dance a Little Closer that closed in one night.) Bye Bye Birdie was certainly the most famous of the Strouse-Adams collaborations, but It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman (1966), short-lived as it was, is tuneful and amusing, and it contains one of their best songs, “You’ve Got Possibilities.” David Newman and Robert Benton, a year away from writing the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde, wrote the book – and that connection resulted in Strouse’s composing the score for Bonnie and Clyde.
And the Strouse and Adams Golden Boy, which opened on Broadway in 1964, is, I believe, one of the great forgotten scores. Its source was the 1937 Clifford Odets play, the Group Theatre’s major commercial success, about a poor Italian-American kid who chooses a boxing career over the violin and winds up the tragic victim of his own drive for money and fame. Odets worked on the book of the musical but he died while the show was on its pre-Broadway tryout tour. (He was replaced by William Gibson, the author of The Miracle Worker.) The material was rethought as a vehicle for Sammy Davis, Jr., with Joe Bonaparte, Odets’s protagonist, transformed into a young Black man from contemporary Harlem named Joe Wellington – and the shift works brilliantly. The Strouse-Adams score has tremendous variety as well as both heart and soul, and though working with Davis was challenging and sometimes infuriating, his renditions of the many marvelous songs they wrote for him – “Night Song,” “Stick Around,” “Colorful,” “Can’t You See It?” and “No More,” as well as the duets “I Want to Be with You” (with Paula Wayne, as Joe’s white lover) and “This Is the Life” (with Billy Daniels as the slick tempter who takes over as his manager in the second half) and the crowd-pleasing ensemble number “Don’t Forget 127th Street” – are sensational. A tip for show-music and especially Sammy Davis fans: if you can find a copy of the original vinyl pressing, grab it up. Davis complained that his voice was ragged and insisted on a second recording session, but his initial vocal performance is more powerful, and there are small changes – and one big one, in the finale – that are not improvements. Both versions showcase a magnificent score. (Encores! has produced creditable revivals of both Golden Boy and Superman.)
Strouse’s most lucrative project was certainly Annie, which he wrote with Martin Charnin, though I have yet to see the production that will convince me it deserves the love it received in its original 1977 Broadway production, which ran for six years. (Alas, I didn’t catch that one.) It does have some good songs, like “It’s a Hard-Knock Life,” and there are other Strouse gems scattered through his career, such as “Once Upon a Time” from All-American (lyrics by Adams), “Look Who’s Alone Now” from Nick and Nora (lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr.) and the ballads in I and Albert, the Strouse-Adams show about Queen Victoria that played in London in 1972 but never made it to New York. (Fortunately there’s a recording.)
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| Teresa Stratas as Rebecca, Josh Blake as David, and Terrance Mann as Saul in Charles Strouse's Rags. (Photo: Martha Swope.) |
There exists one more treasure in the Charles Strouse oeuvre, Rags, about Jewish immigrants in New York before the First World War, which contains some of the most sublime dramatic music ever heard on a Broadway stage, setting a very fine set of lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. The trouble is that almost no one did hear it: Rags opened in New York in 1986 after a Boston tryout and closed after four performances and eighteen previews. (The great opera diva Teresa Stratas played the lead opposite Larry Kert, but she wasn’t used to the rigors of eight performances a week and didn’t always appear; Julia Migenes-Johnson replaced her on the original cast album.) Joseph Stein’s book has generally been blamed for the show’s failure, and its rare revivals have tampered with it; that’s what happened when the Goodspeed Opera House mounted it eight years ago. But I’ve heard a backstage recording of one of the New York performances, and the book is superb; Stein wrote Fiddler on the Roof, and Rags is really a sequel to Fiddler. The Goodspeed rewrite was a travesty. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to see the version Stein wrote, but at least we can hear the Strouse music. It’s thrilling.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
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