Other Voices: Passion Play and Strange Interlude

Passion Play, directed by David Leveaux

Peter Nichols’s 1981 Passion Play begins at the conclusion of a social evening at the home of James and Eleanor, a middle-aged couple with grown-up daughters. Both are connected to the arts: James restores paintings and Eleanor is a classical singer and teacher. They have been entertaining Kate, a photographer in her mid-twenties whose partner, Albert, a close friend of James, has recently died. The scenario is complicated – Albert’s relationship with Kate broke up his marriage to Agnes, who remained friends with Eleanor. It becomes more complicated when, in a moment alone (offstage) with Eleanor in the kitchen, Kate confides that she finds James attractive, and Eleanor repeats it to him. At first this is an academic matter for the couple, who discuss it with amusement on Eleanor’s side and an apparent lack of interest on James’s, though since the thought operates on him as a kind of aphrodisiac – he has an immediate desire to make love to his wife – he’s evidently more interested than he allows himself to believe. (Turning James on isn’t Eleanor’s intention; she’s both surprised and a little embarrassed by his sudden unrestrained ardor. When he tries to catch up with her on the stairs, she protests, “James! I’m a grandmother. You’re a grandfather. There’s a place for that kind of thing. It’s called the bedroom.”) And when Kate arranges lunch with him a few days later, ostensibly because she needs his help in pulling together a book of her work, she makes a direct sexual proposition. The immediate result, over coffee at her place, is nothing more serious than a kiss, but his guilt over it – and, clearly, over his impulse to carry it farther – twists him into knots and prompts him to lie to Eleanor about where he’s been.

State of the Union: Roland Emmerich's White House Down

When Barack Obama was elected as the first black President of the United States in November 2008, it was a momentous event in American history. And it ignited a fever of idealism not felt since 1960 when John Kennedy first declared the coming of a New Frontier. At that time, JFK's inaugural address provided a promise that the country would begin to live up to its most cherished dreams – the quest for equality that lay in its founding documents. Of course, Kennedy's murder in Dallas in 1963, to be followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, not only seemed to assure that the promise couldn't be kept, but also that the coming of Obama wouldn't be in anyone's rear view mirror. Obama's election victory, arriving after almost four decades of racial segregation, war, assassinations, government corruption and terrorism, was experienced as both euphoric and an impossibly earned reward after years of bitter struggle and loss. Given that climate, it seemed only natural to believe that the movies of the Obama era would be in large supply and perhaps be even richer in content and feeling than those in any other Presidential period before him. But those pictures just didn't materialize. And, in part, it was because Obama, the avatar of another New Frontier, couldn't be found.

If supporters have experienced his presidency since 2008 as cautious, ineffective, and lately, an act of betrayal after the revelations of the government's wire-tapping of its citizens, his enemies continue to exploit that rift by making him seem a non-entity (as Clint Eastwood did at the Republican Convention), a fraud (as Donald Trump implied by demanding his birth certificate), or America's greatest threat (as the Tea Party and people on the conspiracy fringe of the right and left have claimed). In this climate, Obama emerged not as a world leader, but a trapped and inert statesman because, despite what his presidency represented, racism clearly hadn't gone away. The tragic currency of assassinations, embroidered throughout American history, had not really changed either. We're all too keenly aware of what happens to those who become lightning rods for great social change. American idealists seek community, but they also draw out the isolated loner who feels neither a need for community or to be a part of history. He chooses instead to destroy those who offer it to him. Given the danger zone Obama operates in today, he understands fully that if anything were to happen to him due to any bold move he made in public policy, his family would not only lose a father, the country would dissolve in violence and chaos.

In Roland Emmerich's White House Down, about an assault on a black President by a right-wing paramilitary group staging a violent coup, there's no question about the mirror it holds up to the state of the union. The parallels with Obama and his political crucible are unmistakeable. (It could be titled Obama's Revenge.) But its allusions to the current president are all on the surface. With a pulpy plot by James Vanderbilt that borrows from Die Hard, White House Down creates a bogus surrogate for the nation's hopes and fears. In the story, President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) is getting plenty of heat over a proposed peace treaty between his allies which would lead to military forces pulling out of the Middle East. In particular, he draws the rage of the retiring Head of Presidential Detail Martin Walker (James Woods) who organizes his own detail to remove the President. Walker seeks revenge for the death of his son who was killed in a black ops mission approved by Sawyer. His conspiracy of mercenaries, also black ops types led by Emil Stenz (Jason Clarke), supposedly speak for the might of the military-industrial complex which sees the treaty as a threat to their control of the region. (How their control is manifested in the Middle East is never explained, or made sense of. And if they were that powerful, why would the President be so bold in blatantly threatening them?)

Not Quite: Pedro Almodóvar's I'm So Excited

Pedro Almodóvar's I'm So Excited

Pedro Almodóvar's latest movie I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros, which translates as The Passenger Lovers or The Fleeting Lovers) is being billed as a return to the glory days of his early comedies, such as Labyrinth of Passion (1982), What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1983) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). Those movies, made at the beginning of Almodóvar’s career, were delightfully anarchic and outrageous. At the time they were released, they pushed the envelope with their take on so-called alternative sexualities, and offered unique social and political commentaries on newly democratic post-Franco Spain. Thirty years later, when cable television and even network shows like Glee routinely explore these issues, Almodóvar’s movies merely come across as tame copies of what he did so memorably before and without any real scathing commentary behind them.

Threshold and Trance: Two New Albums by a New Artist

Karine Polwart

I have two new CDs here by an artist named Karine Polwart, and I simply don’t know what to say about them. One is a compilation containing songs from a series of older CDs which were only available in the UK. The other is a new one, her first internationally released album, and both come from Borealis Records, Canada’s folk music label extraordinaire.

Camp Kinderland Then and Now: Commie Camp

Camp Kinderland kids folk dancing in the early 1950s

As a teenager, I spent three consecutive Julys and Augusts in rural New York State at Kinderland, which billed itself as an “interracial, inter-religious, progressive Jewish summer camp.” For me back then, raised in the red diaper baby tradition, the verbiage most often could be translated into one word: fun. Oh, sure, there were subversive activities in this bastion of leftists: Like the time we girl counselors-in-training tied the shoelaces of our male counterparts end-to-end from the back doorknob of their bunk all the way down to Sylvan Lake. That was in retaliation for short-sheeting our beds the previous day.

World War Zzzzz: More of the Same

Brad Pitt in World War Z

I've never been a big fan of zombies, whether in books or films. While they’re inherently scary, these ravenous creatures who lurch out of the shadows to feed on humanity, they also quickly become boring. (I always found vampires, the often elegant undead who can feel attracted to or alienated from humans, or The Frankenstein / Golem, a supposedly mindless creation that actually may contain a soul, to be far more compelling.) Nevertheless, I've liked a few zombie movies, such as George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) and his sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), Danny Boyle’s formulaic but well done and effective 28 Days Later (2002) and Dan O’Bannon’s witty underrated The Return of the Living Dead (1985). Others, such as Fido (2006), Zombieland (2009) and most of the sequels to Romero’s zombie movies, weren't so hot. But I've never bothered checking out most of the numerous novels on the subject, more of them than ever being published, it seems, because they appear to be too much of the same old, same old, though I really appreciated Jonathan Maberry’s moving short story "Family Business," from the anthology Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead (2012), It was a touching reminder that zombies were once human like us. On the other hand, I found Isaac Marion’s novel Warm Bodies (2010), wherein a zombie falls in live with a human girl and eventually changes to become well human, to be utterly far-fetched, even within the parameters of zombie stories, and silly, too. (For that reason, I never bothered checking out the film version of the book when it came out earlier this year.) And finally, I found AMC’s The Walking Dead, the hit de jour, to be a supremely dull TV show, bailing out on it after a season and a half.

One novel, however, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), stood out from all the other zombie apocalypse stories, filmed or written, because it went further in analyzing how a human – zombie war would change our society, solve, sometimes inadvertently, pressing political disputes and make heroes out of some of the most unlikely people. Brooks labelled World War Z an oral history, deliberately patterned on The Good War (1984), the late Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War Two, and it’s apt. World War Z possesses the wide ranging intellectual interests, smarts and empathy of Terkel’s best work. Not surprisingly, the new film version of World War Z does not.

House Party: Much Ado About Nothing

Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing evolved out of the parties Whedon used to throw for the casts of his television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel: he got his actors together for Shakespeare readings, which he would cast and direct. To make Much Ado About Nothing, Whedon reserved his week off – the twelve days in between wrapping his horror movie Cabin in the Woods and starting production on the Marvel Comics flick Avengers – and invited his company from past projects to rehearse and film the picture, using his house and grounds as the location. (He gives the play a modern day setting.) The product is a Joss Whedon home movie – two scenes were shot during real house parties – and it has the cheerful desperation of a lot of talented people winging it while trying to hide from one another what their gut tells them: that they’re not going to pull this thing off.

London Theatre High Points: Two New English Plays

Elizabeth Chan, Benedict Wong and David K.S. Tse in Chimerica

Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica, which just finished up a run at London’s Almeida Theatre and is relocating to the West End, is constructed as a political mystery in which, thirteen years after Tiananmen Square, an American photojournalist named Joe Schofield (Stephen Campbell Moore) tries to hunt down the unknown Chinese man with two shopping bags in his hands who faced off one of the tanks. The “Tank Man,” an iconic figure of the protest-turned-slaughter, was the real historical figure Kirkwood began with (just as John Logan began with an authentic literary-historic footnote, the meeting of the models for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan in a London bookshop, in Peter and Alice). In her otherwise fictional script, Joe, only eighteen at the time, is one of several people who immortalized him, in a photograph that he snapped from the balcony of his hotel room. So the play is also about the power of the photograph and the many ways in which it can be reinterpreted and manipulated. And it’s an exploration of life in a totalitarian state, of the frightening speed of China’s industrial progress, and of the bizarre relationship between China and the west, represented here by both the U.S. and Britain: the main female character, Tessa Kendrick (Claudie Blakley), who becomes Joe’s lover, is an English market researcher whose specialty is counseling western companies that seek to expand into China. (Kirkwood borrowed the title from Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money.) The play, which is set at the time of the 2012 presidential election but includes flashbacks to 1989, is also a study of heroism and compromise. It’s insanely ambitious, flawed and overlong. Yet it’s a true political drama, thoughtful and complex, and in Lyndsey Turner’s production one of the most exciting evenings I’ve spent at the theater in the last few years.

Mimetic Desire: The Bling Ring

Emma Watson in The Bling Ring

Sofia Coppola’s first movie, The Virgin Suicides (1999), treated a cadre of teenage sisters and their relationship with the material and moral strictures surrounding them. With The Bling Ring she comes full circle in a way, but the detours she’s taken in the intermediary years bring her to a very different vantage point. Once again, a group of adolescent girls (plus one boy) are the main characters; once again, the effect of materiality and culture is the theme. But her take on this topic is informed now by her intervening films, Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), and Somewhere (2010). Without those reference points, you could slip and pass offThe Bling Ring as a pointless affair. So did the woman next to me in the theater when I saw it, who pronounced it the worst film she’d ever seen (did she forget the Baz Luhrmann movie playing next door?). But with Coppola’s oeuvre hanging as an illuminating backdrop, The Bling Ring reveals itself as perhaps her most biting, damning portrait of society yet.

The Boston Phoenix Remembered

The Boston Phoenix folded four and a half months ago, not quite half a century after it began as two separate publications, The Phoenix and Boston After Dark. (They merged in 1972.) It was one of the few remnants of the age into which it had been born, when arts criticism was completely separate from celebrity journalism – when most critics would have been insulted by the comparison – and young reviewers, working for meager paychecks, were struggling to find ways to talk about the exciting new developments in the arts, especially movies and the newest kid on the block, rock ‘n’ roll. Significantly, the Phoenix went into publication around the same time as Rolling Stone, and many of the early writers published simultaneously in both venues.

A Hovering Dream: The Mark Morris Dance Group in Toronto

Mark Morris Dance Group performing L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (Photo by Ken Friedman.)

Brooklyn’s Mark Morris Dance Group closed the 2013 edition of Toronto’s Luminato Festival last weekend with a bang. The 20-member company performed the Canadian debut of one its signature works, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, set to the eponymous George Frideric Handel oratorio. On this occasion, it was played live by Toronto’s baroque orchestra and chamber choir, Tafelmusik, and conducted by Jane Glover with soloists Karina Gauvin, Shannon Mercer, Thomas Cooley and Douglas Williams gorgeously singing the set of odes by English poet, John Milton.

Recognized as one of the greatest American choreographers of the late 20th century, Morris is inspired by music, first. To have at his disposal an orchestra of such a high calibre, every inch as committed to the music at hand as he is, produced fireworks. The audience at Toronto’s Sony Centre jumped to its feet following the first of three shows which commenced last Friday night. As the crowd dispersed into the night, people could be heard exclaiming how moved they were. (The words “beautiful” and “spectacular” hung in the air.) Morris, who took a curtain bow with his dancers, grinning from ear to bearded ear, dressed in sandals, a long scarf and flowing white shirt with pants, was likely not surprised. Since its debut in 1988 as a sprawling, epic-style work performed in bare feet which he created when he was a 32-year-old dance director of Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has risen to among the top of the heap of original dance creations. The work is a modern masterpiece.

Everybody's Talkin': We Steal Secrets

The prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has done his best work when—as with Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room—he’s had a morally uncomplicated story that moves in a straight line, and the sources, in the form of interview subjects, to supply fresh details about it. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, a torn-from-yesterday’s-headlines movie made newly relevant thanks to the adventures of Edward Snowden, is about how a few courageous truth-tellers and whistleblowers risked their own freedom, and maybe even their lives, to strike a much-needed blow against the security state. Or maybe it’s about how a vain, showboating egomaniac, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and a miserably alienated Army private with gender-confusion issues, Bradley Manning, upended the workings of government and possibly endangered lives, just to make themselves feel important and take a measure of revenge against a world that had never made them feel welcome.

The Pull of Family, The Duties of Faith: Fill the Void

Irit Sheleg, Hadas Yaron and Chaim Sharir in Fill the Void

Even though Israeli politics and society is increasingly being affected by the growing number of ultra Orthodox (Haredi) Jews in the country, its cinema has only recently begun to deal with the often contentious and contradictory aspects of Orthodox Judaism there in a complex, nuanced way. Ironically, the first Israeli film that called attention to Haredi realities in Israel was Amos Gitai’s Kadosh (1999), a portrait of two Orthodox Jewish women stifling in the patriarchal excesses of their religion. While it’s Gitai’s only good film, as his customary claustrophobic style fits the material to a T, it is highly critical of Orthodoxy and, more significantly, was lambasted for inaccuracies in its depiction of Orthodox Jewish life. (I’m a secular Jew so I can’t attest to that.)

More recently, Israeli films on Haredim and orthodoxy have balanced criticism of Orthodox intolerance (Avanim, 2004) with serious examinations of deep faith and its moral challenges (My Father, My Lord, 2007). Other films, notably those by Joseph Cedar, an Orthodox Israeli film director, have tried to get at the way Orthodox Jewish actions can potentially, even dangerously impact upon outside secular Jewish society (Time of Favor, 2000), or have looked at how internal Orthodox Jewish life in the settlements (Campfire, 2004) affects those who actually choose to live there. And some satirical films,  like The Schwartz Dynasty (2005), cast a wide net over all of the disparate strands of Israeli Orthodox Jewish life, from how to determine if a deceased Jew is actually Jewish before he can be buried in a Jewish cemetery – many Russian Jews who have moved to Israel cannot prove their parentage – to the vigilantism some Orthodox Jews engage in when they object to butcher shops selling pork and other non-kosher meat. The latest Israeli film to deal with Orthodox Jews in Israel, Rama Burshtein's award winning and fascinating Fill the Void (2012), like 2004’s Ushpizin, comes from within the religious community, directed by an Orthodox Jewish woman and blessed by her rabbi, no less.

A Thing of Wonder: National Ballet of Canada Mixed Program

The National Ballet of Canada performing George Balanchine's Theme and Variations.

It’s not every day you get a news hook attached to your dance review. But here you go, and hot off the presses: National Ballet of Canada principal dancer Guillaume Côté has just been appointed to the newly created position of choreographic associate, the company announced Sunday following the final performance of his No. 24, an eight-minute pas de deux performed to a live accompaniment of Niccoló Paganini’s virtuosic violin solo, Caprice 24.

No. 24, which was performed by three separate casts over a five-day run, was one of three works on the Mixed Program which opened last week at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. The other works were Jorma Elo’s Pur Ti Miro, a revival of the work which the Finnish choreographer first created on the National Ballet dancers in 2010; James Kudelka’s decidedly unballetic but indisputably powerful The Man in Black, inspired by an unusual series of hurtin’ songs by the late Johnny Cash; and, for the glittering finalé (and that is meant literally given the the abundance of faux diamonds which lent sparkle to the ballerinas’ necks and ear lobes), George Balanchine’s 1947 neo-classical masterpiece, Theme and Variations.

Tragic Heroes: Othello and Hamlet

A scene from Nicholas Hytner’s Othello, (Photo: John Persson)

Starring Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago, Nicholas Hytner’s brilliant new Othello – his swan song as artistic director of the National Theatre – is set in a contemporary Middle East war zone. Shakespeare wrote the Moor as a general in the Venetian army who brings his bride, Desdemona, to Cyprus during wartime, but he routs the Turks at the top of the second act and we barely hear another word about the conflict. (He remains in Cyprus with his troops to maintain the peace.) It’s significant that Othello is a triumphant warrior; it explains the respect he has been accorded by the Venetian senate in spite of his race. And his friendships with Iago and Cassio (Jonathan Bailey) derive from their shared careers: Iago is Othello’s ensign, Cassio his newly appointed lieutenant – an appointment that rankles with Iago, who thinks he should have been awarded the post. In Hytner’s version we’re reminded constantly that we’re on a military outpost. Once we leave Venice, Vicki Mortimer’s ingenious set stays firmly within the barracks, with its concrete walls, its chain-link fence, its ugly, utilitarian, sparsely furnished offices and bedrooms, shifting from one locale to the next with militaristic precision. (She manages the remarkable feat of making the immense stage of the Olivier Theatre feel claustrophobic.)

Dead Man Talking: The Films of Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi Kitano

Over the last thirty years, Takeshi 'Beat' Kitano has had an illustrious career directing and starring in comically violent gangster melodramas, such as the international hits Sonatine (1993), Hana-Bi (1997) and Outrage (2010). With a sense of humour as stoic as that of a statue, Kitano carved out for himself a deadpan action figure who's bemused by the utterly chaotic world around him. He also packs into his characters plenty of that Clint Eastwood character armour while adding a pinch of Charles Bronson's rugged muscularity. (His inexpressiveness is so imposing that when he speaks it's as if those taut muscles have created logjam in his throat.) But Kitano's impersonal and non-communicative qualities aren't just part of the current chic of being cool and ironically detached. There's also something rather maudlin at work in this facade. Likewise, his brutality isn't an expression of latent, unexplored psychopathic tendencies; it supposedly comes from some deeper, nobler place. He might shoot, maim and kill – but that's okay, because he's acting for the love of a dying woman (Hana-Bi), or the honour of a good friend (Violent Cop). His 2000 comedy, Kikujiro, has been described as a departure from the earlier mold. Well, it is, and it isn't.

Frolicking: Frances Ha

Mickey Sumner and Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

Frances Ha, which opened yesterday in Toronto, is Noah Baumbach’s homage to the ebullient spirit of Truffaut, set among a circle of young, aspirational twenty-something artists in New York City. Frances (Greta Gerwig) is an apprentice with a dance company whose dream of a position as a full-time dancer thrives as her ambition flounders. Her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) works in publishing at Random House; they met at Vassar, but five years after graduation they are still as inseparable as college roommates. (“We’re the same person,” Frances explains.) When they fall out with each other, Frances spins her wheels to more and more self-destructive effect – she gets fired from the dance company’s Christmas show, her only source of income, and winds up back in Poughkeepsie working part-time student jobs at Vassar for minimum wage – as Sophie moves to Tokyo part-time with her boyfriend and gets engaged.

See Me: Tommy

Robert Markus as Tommy

Tommy is a rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind kid, but Des McAnuff has made it a feast of the senses. A multiple Tony award winner and recent Order of Canada recipient who at one point in his storied career played guitar as a Toronto-area rock musician, McAnuff is a high energy director known for plucking from the history of pop music old gems (read Jersey Boys and Jesus Christ Superstar) and making them sparkle anew. His Tommy, at Stratford’s Avon Theatre until the end of September, is no exception. A new, updated version of the celebrated 1993 Broadway production created in collaboration with Pete Townshend of The Who fame, Tommy is a thrilling theatrical experience. The mute sings again.

Bigger, Louder and Messier: Man of Steel

Zack Snyder’s new blockbuster Man of Steel is the second attempt to reboot Superman as the hero of his own movie franchise since the Christopher Reeve series went off the rails with Superman III and the embarrassing, Golan-Globus-funded fourth installment. (After that, the character was downsized and farmed out to television in the series' Superboy, Lois & Clark, and Smallville.) The first try, Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006), didn’t exactly bankrupt the studio, but it’s generally remembered as a disappointment. It took the material very seriously, and many reviewers pointed out that the images of Superman hovering above the Earth, his cape billowing and his head hanging down as if to express his disappointment in us, suggested a zero-gravity Christ. Man of Steel, written by David S. Goyer, takes the material at least as seriously, and it has none of the leavening of humor that Singer provided; as superhero devotionals go, it’s practically The Greatest Story Ever Told to Superman Returns’ Life of Brian.

Dangerous Collaborations: An Interview with John Malkovich

John Malkovich in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons

In the late eighties, Critics at Large’s David Churchill (1959 – 2013) appeared alongside Kevin Courrier on the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM (now JAZZ 91-FM) in Toronto, where they reviewed current cinema. Among the movies they discussed was Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988), an adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel about the sexual conquests and cunning erotic games of two French aristocrats, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, who mercilessly destroy the lives of those around them for their own gratification. As daring and devious as the novel it was based on, Dangerous Liaisons pulled the rug out from under British period drama conventions by using an all-American cast headed by Glenn Close as Merteuil and John Malkovich as Valmont.

Gallows Humor: The Internship

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Shawn Levy's The Internship

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn notched a hit eight years ago with The Wedding Crashers, by far the best of the so-called “Frat Pack” movies. It was 2005 and the American economy was still riding its illusory seat atop the housing and investment banking bubble. Wilson and Vaughn’s characters lead, accordingly, a similar carefree, fast-lane lifestyle – hot-shot Washington divorce lawyers by day, clubbing playboys by night. Life is one big party for John Beckwith (Wilson) and Jeremy Grey (Vaughn), who have never needed to learn about romantic love and commitment because they can score with women so easily. The movie’s setup cleverly symbolizes this conflict – they are near-professional crashers of random wedding receptions. While bride and groom consummate their nuptial love, Jeremy and John are off bedding bridesmaids for another one-night stand. Their growth into men ready for weddings of their own makes for the narrative arc.

America in London

Seth Numrich and Kim Cattrall in Sweet Bird of Youth (Photo: Alastair Muir)

Marianne Elliott is a gifted director (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) but in her latest production, a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic, she seems utterly at sea. She tries to render it as straight realism for the first half, and that doesn’t work: her staging feels constricted and has the effect of flattening out the lyrical weave in the dialogue. You get a little respite when expressionistic shadows dance behind the upstage curtains between the first and second scenes (Rae Smith designed both set and lights) but it isn’t until act two that the show breaks out of its naturalistic corset. And then it goes nuts. The actors start to chew the scenery, and a speech by a southern demagogue named Boss Finley (Owen Rae) is televised in a hotel lounge on four TV sets as if it were a scene out of The Manchurian Candidate (although only three or four people are seated in the room), while a heckler who tries to derail Finley’s big moment is dragged inside and beaten savagely by his thugs. The shift in style shakes things up but it doesn’t salvage the show, though it does give you the weird impression that the company has switched plays in mid-performance.

The Sublime and the Grotesque: Stephen Fry’s Wagner & Me

Stephen Fry in front of Festspeilhaus in Bayreuth, in Wagner & Me

                                     "Wagner’s music is better and greater than Hitler ever imagined."    

                                                –Wagner & Me

Full disclosure: I have an abiding passion for the art of Richard Wagner. It was not always so. Like many others, I believed that his personal anti-Semitism and the Nazi appropriation of his art had sullied his work. That preconception collapsed as I researched and wrote a substantial chapter on Wagner in That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden. Perhaps more important was my privilege of attending performances over four nights of the complete sixteen hour Ring Cycle on four occasions, experiences that I can only describe as transportive, even transcendental. It is easy to see why I eagerly anticipated director Patrick McGrady’s documentary Wagner & Me, with the actor (Wilde, 1997), writer (Making History, 1996, an alternative history novel about the Third Reich), and television host Stephen Fry serving as our genial guide. Except for a few blemishes, it was not a disappointment. I was in fact thrilled by it.

Back to High School: The Great Gatsby

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby bears little resemblance to the slender masterpiece on which it is based – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now iconic 1925 novel – but that probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed this director’s career. While his critics see him as a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber of movies whose histrionic period pieces (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet) put one in mind, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, of “a dog with the broken bones of a cat sticking out,” few of Luhrmann’s fans would likely contest that characterization. To them, Luhrmann’s movies are carnival sensations, romances to excess that celebrate the hysterical pace of the modern age in brazen, trashy style (and anyone who doesn’t like their cats grafted messily onto dogs is just a purist, patrician snob). There’s a faint odor of schoolyard allegiance that clings to the debate around Baz Luhrmann, and it never fails to make me feel like the teenager who chooses to stay home with a book while all her friends go out to a rave.

Flamboyant Disguise: Behind the Candelabra

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra

Last Sunday night I saw Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in a position I never imagined I would see. They were in the throes of passion, with each other! These two action film heroes portrayed Liberace and his chauffeur lover Scott Thorson in Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Behind the Candelabra. Based on Thorson’s memoirs of the same name, this made for HBO film was a brilliant evocation of a more innocent era, when people just didn’t believe what was staring them in the face. In one of the first scenes, Matt Damon (as Thorson) attends a Liberace show in Vegas and comments to his date, “It’s all so gay!” and his friend says, “The ladies don’t think so.” As Thorson looks around, sure enough, it’s confirmed, the ladies are in love with this flamboyant piano player.

Quest for Pryor: No Pryor Restraint and Omit the Logic

Richard Pryor in Omit the Logic

For about ten years—basically, the 1970s—Richard Pryor was the funniest man in the world. That might sound subjective, but it’s more accurate than calling him a comedian. When Pryor was flying high, he didn’t tell jokes. He told the truth. And because he was funny at it, he got people who might have seemed to have little in common with him to see the world through the eyes of someone who had grown up in a whorehouse run by his grandmother, developing (in the words of his friend Paul Mooney) “a pimp’s mentality” that co-existed alongside the needy romanticism of someone who was abandoned by his mother as a child and never outgrew his need to be accepted and cuddled.

Wankfest: The Giacomo Variations

Ingeborga Dapkünaitë and John Malkovitch in The Giacomo Variations (Photo by Nathalie Bauer)

At one point in The Giacomo Variations, a character waves around a rubber and asks for its meaning. This being a work based on the life of Casanova – the Giacomo in the title – the question is perhaps apt because the famous Venetian-born seducer popularized the use of prophylactics when gallivanting through most of the 18th century. But this also being a work in which nuance or subtleties of text are almost entirely missing, and where the actors themselves appear to be sleepwalking through their lines, only the obvious fact that it is a condom, used to prevent the spreading of disease and offspring, is offered.

Setting the Template: The Original Star Trek

The crew of the original Star Trek.

It’s too bad the makers of Star Trek Into Darkness didn’t actually pay attention to the TV series the new movie is based on. If they had they might have recognized that what made the original Star Trek so special was its originality. So why on earth did they decide to not only revisit the premise of the terrific season one episode “Space Seed” that introduced Khan (Ricardo Montalbán), a genetically altered super-solider, from the Starship Enterprise’s past, but also to crib so much of the excellent second movie in the Star Trek film franchise, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which brought Khan back to face Captain Kirk and his crew anew? The result: a pale film, one that failed to do justice to the show and even the first new re-boot of Star Trek (2009).

What made the original TV series so lasting, I think, is that it really was like no science fiction series that came before. Prior to Star Trek’s debut in 1966 (it ran for three seasons until 1969), the few glimmers of intelligent science fiction on TV were manifest in the original Twilight Zone (1959-64) anthology show and little else. Thus when Gene Roddenberry conceived of the series, which he initially pitched to NBC as “a Wagon Train to the stars,” figuring the suits would respond better to the western TV show reference, he made sure it was an intelligent, complex show that spoke, in disguised futuristic science fiction terms, to the issues of its time, like racism, war and gender differences. So lasting was the show’s groundbreaking impact, in fact, including in its depiction of American television's first interracial (albeit tame) kiss, that when Nichelle Nichols, the African-American actress who played Lt. Uhura on the show, and whom I once had the great pleasure of meeting, mused about leaving it, none other than the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. urged her to stay with Star Trek, citing Uhura’s value as a role model for young African-Americans.

Celebrities

John Logan's Peter and Alice, designed by Christopher Oram (Photo by Johan Persson)

John Logan’s Peter and Alice, which just concluded a run in London’s West End, spins out of a fact he gleaned from a biography of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In 1932, Hargreaves was invited to open a centenary celebration of Carroll at the Bumpus Bookshop in London, where she was accompanied by Peter Llewelyn Davies, the model for James Barrie’s Peter Pan. “I wondered what they said to each other,” Logan writes in the epigraph to the published script. What he’s come up to answer his own question is a sort of fantasia – part biography, part imagination; part surrealist, part absurdist. The bookstore back room where Alice (Dame Judi Dench) and Peter (Ben Whishaw) are waiting to be introduced out front flies up to reveal a series of two-dimensional drops (beautifully designed by Christopher Oram) that emulate the famous John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham illustrations for the original stories. Here Peter and Alice interact with their fictional counterparts (Olly Alexander and Ruby Bentall) as well as with Carroll (a.k.a. Reverend Charles Dodgson (Nicholas Farrell) and Barrie (Derek Riddell).

A Winter's Tale: Before Midnight

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight (2013)

The warm breezes, poetic ruins and pure, sun-soaked hues of the southern Peloponnese at summer’s end is the setting for Before Midnight, the third in a series of films made by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as the Franco-American lovers Jesse and Celine. (It opened in Toronto on Friday.) As far as I can tell, there are no fans of these movies, only devotees. Distinctly American in their frank, colloquial style, but inspired by the intimacy and spontaneous, kinetic realism of the French and Italian New Wave, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) quietly invited their audience to listen in on an unfolding conversation between two lovers that explored the substance of romantic connection. They meet (in Before Sunrise) on a train and get off together in Vienna to fall in love during a sleepless night before Jesse has to catch his next train, and meet again (in Before Sunset) in Paris, where Celine lives, on the last leg of Jesse’s book tour for a novel about their one-night love affair, having lost track of each other for nine years. In Before Sunset, Jesse was married with a two year-old son, Hank, back in New York, but the implication at the end of the film, which was set in real time in the ninety minutes before Jesse had to catch his plane back to the States, was that having found one another again, Jesse and Celine would stay together.

Re-Discovering Excitement in the Movies: Sleeping Car to Trieste

What’s happened to excitement in the movies? By that I don’t just mean the obvious, where you’re on the edge of your seat wondering what’s going to happen next. I am talking about that undercurrent in a movie when a director is trying something new or making something old seem new and you don’t know where the film is going or where it will end up. That’s pretty rare these days at the cinema. In fact, I’ve only seen a handful of films in the last year that actually evoked that feeling in me, and two of them were almost 40 and 65 years old, respectively.

The only recent thrilling movies for me have been Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012), a French movie that I called deliriously inventive in my review for Critics at Large, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire) (2012), which deserved the rave review it received from Critics at Large’s Steve Vineberg. The former was a tale of a man riding through the streets of Paris as he carries out mysterious assignments that zig-zagged in an unpredictable and never contrived fashion; the latter contained strong undercurrents of drama and tension in its tale of prisoners staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I actually didn’t want either of them to end. Otherwise, it was only last year’s stunning digital re-release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), only the wunderkind’s second feature, and the 1948 British movie Sleeping Car to Trieste, that were genuinely and viscerally exciting.

A New Canon: Joshua Redman's Walking Shadows

In 1949, bebop legend Charlie Parker wanted a change. After years of intensive one-nighters playing jazz, Parker wanted to record an album of ballads but support it with a string section. It was a creative risk to take at the time, but Parker did have the support of producer Norman Granz who recorded most of Bird’s best sides for the Verve label. His choice wasn't as revolutionary as the music he and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk were playing, but it was unexpected. Could a hard bopping jazz player merge the discipline of his music with "legit" string arrangements? What would his audience think? The result was Bird with Strings (Verve), six standards recorded by Norman Granz and released in 1950. It was a hit, so a second volume followed it up later in the year.

Since that day, major jazz musicians have made records with an orchestra or string section supporting their performance. Clifford Brown, Wynton Marsalis and Stan Getz, to name three, have all taken up the challenge with mixed results. In many ways Parker broke down the stigma and chauvinism of the so-called legit players who looked down on jazz as a poor man's game with no artistic value. Fortunately, the public knew better and easily accepted the notion that a hard-bopping innovator such as Charlie Parker could play ballads with an orchestra and not sound corny or wimpy in the process. Charlie Parker with Strings on CD continues to be one of the most popular and best selling albums in jazz.

Which brings us to a new release by Joshua Redman called Walking Shadows (Nonesuch), released May 7, and produced by long-time associate Brad Mehldau who also plays piano on the record along with Brian Blade, drums and Larry Grenadier, bass. Now willing to take a calculated risk, Redman has wisely surrounded himself with musicians he first booked in his quartet over twenty years ago.

No Hands: Her Master's Voice

In Christopher Guest’s HBO series Family Tree, the British ventriloquist Nina Conti plays the hero’s sister who began using a hand puppet as a therapeutic tool after experiencing a childhood trauma. She is now an adult who still has a piece of monkey-shaped felt draped over her hand, using it to express her forbidden and transgressive thoughts. If there’s a popular attitude toward ventriloquism that places it at the bottom of the show business barrel, lumping it in with card tricks and pretending to be trapped inside an imaginary box, there’s a corresponding attitude that sees it as a black art disguised as children’s entertainment, a way for timid people to uncork their inner demons. 

Mystery and Melancholia: The Wallander Television Adaptations

Krister Henriksson in Henning Mankell's Wallander

The international acclaim for Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander mystery novels invariably led to television adaptions. The first television series, which adapted the first nine Wallander novels, was produced between 1994 and 2007 with Swedish actor Rolf Lassgard in the title role. Apart from selections found on YouTube, these episodes are not readily available. The one exception that can be seen in its entirety is "Pyramid," which is loosely based on the fifth and longest story from the book of the same name which features a younger Wallander over a twenty-year period before the debut of the novels in 1991. This film has the distinction of being the only dramatization of "Pyramid." I like that the filmmakers have used flashbacks to provide insight into the challenges faced by the newly minted idealistic graduate of the police academy, a device that helps us to understand the disillusioned senior investigator he would later become. We first notice that the young Wallander is fit and lean before drink, malnourishment and diabetes transformed him into a shambling, unhealthy middle-aged homicide detective. As the older Wallander, Lassgard’s natural rotundity helps him to look the part. In "Pyramid," we are reminded that from his earliest experiences, Wallander took every case personally and deeply-etched memories of them still burn within him several years later. Wallander was willing to put his principles above expediency, a quality that he demonstrates over the course of the novels and stories. Finally, the young Wallander’s reluctance to fire his gun is sustained throughout the novels and film adaptations. Over the course of his career, he rarely shoots anyone. When he does, it is a memorable moment for either the guilt that ensues or, at least in one instance, for the relief that it brings.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Part V

Late last year, I included a few samplings from my Facebook page, which I've been treating as an ongoing dialogue with friends about social and cultural matters. (Some have described it as a salon.) Here is even more of the same. As before, it includes borrowings of songs and photos that others have posted and that I've commented on:

On "Let's Get Together For Awhile," Brian Wilson tries his hand at pleasingly relaxed and cool instrumental music for the pad. Think Burt Bacharach on happy chemicals.

The Whips and Walt

James Graham’s This House, screened last month in the NT Live series at the end of its run at London’s National Theatre, focuses on the English Parliament of 1974-1979, when the Labour Party found itself thrust unexpectedly into power in a minority government for a brief interval before Margaret Thatcher took the reins. Graham’s idea is that government is drama and that within the larger theatre of Parliament is a smaller one, the interaction of the whips on both sides who make the deals and fight the battle to retain – or win back – control of the House of Commons. This House takes place mainly in the offices of the majority and minority whips, beginning with the switch-over, when Labour whip Bob Mellish (Phil Daniels) and his chief deputy, Walter Harrison (Philip Glenister), usurp the offices that formerly belonged to Tory whip Humphrey Atkins (Julian Wadham) and his deputy, Jack Weatherill (Charles Edwards). The Labour contingent – which includes one woman in her mid-twenties, Ann Taylor (Lauren O’Neil), who is conscious that she’s crashing a men’s club – greet each other with cheerful surprise and glad-handing jocularity, rough-and-ready working-class battlers who act like they’ve just put one over and managed to sneak into a fancy reception in spite of the fact that their names aren’t on the list at the front gate. The Tories play it cool (noblesse oblige) but among themselves they bitch about the cut-rate furniture in their new digs.

Shell Shocked: A Tortoise and Hare Story

A turtle. It was the most harmless pet you could get, and your mother would probably fall for it… once. It didn’t do much, snapped at some lettuce, rolled over a bit, maybe, sunned itself on a rock. Kinda boring. So why would a cool bunch of rock’n’rollers name themselves after these dull critters? Maybe because The Turtles weren’t that exciting either. They had a fat guy with crazy curly hair and glasses who, together with a slightly slimmer guy sang all the songs, and some other guys whose names I never really knew. And I had a whole pile of their records. 

The Turtles

One of them was even produced by Ray Davies of The Kinks. That was cool… but it didn’t make The Turtles cool for some reason. Maybe they sang too pretty. “Elenore, gee I think you’re swell!” Goofy, but gorgeous. “Happy Together!” Instantly memorable. They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and a whole lot of other TV shows like The Smothers Brothers, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, these adult-oriented talk shows were the only place a teenager could get a glimpse of rock’n’roll back in the day. You’d watch dancing bears, jugglers, maybe an interview with Talullah Bankhead or a song by Sophie Tucker and then The Turtles would sing “She’d Rather Be With Me”. Still, these guys didn’t look very cool… they looked more like… ME!

Their songs were written, at the beginning at least, by the songwriting partnership of Alan Gordon and Garry Bonner. “Happy Together “ knocked The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” out of the #1 slot on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart and was named one of the Top 50 songs of the 20th Century by BMI after generating over 5,000,000 performances on American radio. And still The Turtles were not cool. They had more hits, some written by Kaylan and Volman, some by other writers. Then The Turtles broke up, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (the two hefty singers) were on their own. They were forbidden from using The Turtles as a group name, and in fact they couldn’t even use their own legal names due to a law suit. They chose the nicknames The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie and sang backup for any number of top recording stars. Frank Zappa invited them to add vocals in The Mothers. All of a sudden they were cool.