History as Soporific: Steven Spielberg's Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis stars in Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's new Lincoln movie isn't going to help any teachers convince their students that American history is actually exciting or interesting. In fact, the movie is so stupefyingly dull that it will remind you – if you've been unlucky enough to have lousy history teachers (I had a few good ones, fortunately, which is one reason I like history) – of those tiresome hours whiled away in the classroom just waiting for the bell to ring, and thus end your misery, while the teacher droned on. Luckily, with Lincoln, you have the option of leaving the cinema anytime you want to and without getting into trouble for vacating the premises. I suspect many audience members will feel like doing just that.

Instead of trying to capture the sprawling and tumultuous life of one of America's greatest Presidents, Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner, utilizing a relatively small part of Doris Kearn Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, concentrate on the last few months of Lincoln's life, in early 1865, when the just re-elected Commander-in-Chief (Daniel Day-Lewis) sets out to ensure that the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, will finally pass, a daunting task as a significant number of Democrats would have to be convinced to jump aboard the anti-slavery bandwagon. The film's focus is on his mission, as he and various minions cajole, threaten, beg and even bribe their opponents to switch sides and do what is morally right.

Granted, it can be rather difficult to capture the to and fro of political deal making, which can be dry material and make it seem interesting and compelling, though TV's The West Wing did do it on a weekly basis. And at least Lincoln isn't as tedious as Ken Loach's turgid 1995 film Land and Freedom, which was overly invested in the dull minutiae of communist political debates and wrangling. Nevertheless, Spielberg's would-be opus is still a remarkably static affair, certainly for him, and a film that, ultimately, undermines and lessens the gripping nature and lasting impact of Lincoln's stupendous feat.

Lost in Translation (Part Two): Bernard Malamud's The Natural

Yesterday I wrote about how some terrific novels sometimes get lost in their translation into film, in particular, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and the subsequent botched effort of Milos Forman's film adaptation. If Ragtime was a case of the wrong man hired for the wrong job, however, The Natural (1984) was an example of smart and talented people dropping the ball. Bernard Malamud's first novel was a canny parable written with true American gusto in which the author digs into the spirit of one of Ted Williams' famous declarations. Looking back on his storied career with the Boston Red Sox, the baseball great once remarked, "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.'" Malamud asks the question: If you were the greatest ball player who ever lived, blessed with extraordinary athletic gifts, could you just as easily piss it all away?

Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural is a vivaciously entertaining story of a thirty-four-year-old rookie named Roy Hobbs who gets a second shot at becoming a baseball star – and then blows it. Fifteen years earlier, as a can't-miss-prospect, Hobbs is almost killed by Harriett Bird, a disturbed baseball groupie who seduces and shoots him. Years later, and recovered from his injuries, Hobbs gets a new contract and arrives at the dugout of New York Knights' manager Pop Fisher to join the team. Given Hobbs' age, Pop is initially reluctant to bring him on board. His corrupt partner, Judge Goodwill Banner, has also been dumping lousy players on him all year with the purpose of decimating the team; he figures if the team finishes last, Pop will give up and sell him his share of the franchise. Hobbs changes all that by leading the Knights to a league pennant. But he's also an unbridled hedonist. When he gets involved with Pop's niece, Memo, he's distracted from his quest to be the best, just as he was earlier by Harriett, once again betraying his natural gifts. He may be a natural, Malamud reminds us, but he's still human.

Lost in Translation (Part One): E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime

Ask anyone who loves to read books and they'll tell you that there is nothing worse than seeing a good book badly mangled on the screen. I'm not talking about the literary fetishists, either – the ones who want to see every little detail of the book translated faithfully. (Those folks are already predisposed to disparage movies as a lesser art. They're prepared to hate the adaptation because films, especially if they come from Hollywood, are already guaranteed to desecrate the source material.) Nevertheless, there are books that have indeed been ruined, if not rendered unrecognizable by filmmakers – those who appear either incapable of understanding the text, or are willfully misreading it.

E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime could well be a victim of both a misunderstanding and a willful misreading. Ragtime is a richly textured parable of American lore in which the author performs masterful tricks with the history we thought we knew. Some historical figures are disguised, others are merely alluded to, while a few others are used by name – popping up in the narrative in the most colourful way. In Ragtime, Doctorow captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the twentieth century and World War One. But rather than write a realistic account of the period, he creates a sumptuous pastiche, a flip-book chronicle that is, in many ways, already a movie. "[It was] an extravaganza about the cardboard cutouts in our minds – figures from the movies, newsreels, the popular press, dreams and history, all tossed together," wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. "Doctorow played virtuoso games with this mixture – games that depended on the reader's having roughly the same store of imagery in his head that the author did." In calling the novel an "elegant gagster's book," Kael underlined how Doctorow cleverly portrayed American history as a confidence game that tested our ability to separate fact from fiction. As Voltaire once remarked, "History is a game we play with the dead."

Abraham Lincoln: Myth and Man

Who was Abraham Lincoln? Americans have mined that question since the moment he died from an assassin’s bullet on Saturday, April 15, 1865 at 7:22am. They’d wondered about it long before that tragic day, in fact, ever since he stepped out from prairie obscurity onto the national political scene in the late 1850s. Proffering the answer has yielded prodigious results: the number of books written about Lincoln and the Civil War now equals the amount of days that have passed since Lee surrendered to Grant. A museum attached to Ford’s Theatre recently stacked a pile of Lincoln biographies into a 35-foot tower for display. Writers have spilled more ink about the sixteenth president than any historical figure save Jesus of Nazareth; he lays claim to a similar global appeal. No less than Leo Tolstoy ranked him as the greatest leader in history, dwarfing the Napoleons and Caesars. “His example is universal and will last thousands of years,” the novelist predicted. “He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together…and as a great character he will live as long as the world lives.”

But despite the insatiable digging, Lincoln still eludes our grasp. As with Christ, we can’t ever seem to exhaust the mystery of his being. When you read material about or even from him, you get the sense that the true man, unlike other historical figures, floats in a realm impossible to pierce. Albert Schweitzer famously characterized 19th-century theologians’ quest for the historical Jesus as akin to looking into a deep well and seeing their own reflection in the water. We’ve done the same with Lincoln, constantly remaking him in our own image. Indeed, from the beginning people have compared him to Christ, and it’s difficult to resist the temptation. After all, he bore the name of a biblical patriarch, liberated millions from slavery, and was shot on Good Friday. I mean, really.

Shakespeare by the Brits: Timon of Athens and Hamlet

Simon Russell Beale as Timon in Timon of Athens (Photo: Johan Persson)

Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare‘s most intriguing tragedies; he never wrote anything else quite like it. (Scholars believe that he may have collaborated with Thomas Middleton, the co-writer of The Changeling.) In the first half, the title character extends himself without limit to his friends, staging extravagant banquets, showering them with expensive gifts, bailing out one young man when he runs afoul of the law. But when his generosity bankrupts him and he’s forced to call on the same friends for loans, they make up excuses. At this juncture Timon’s kindness turns to acid; he invites them to one last feast to mock them and erupt in fury at their betrayal, then leaves Athens to live in a cave. Up to this point the play seems to share a dramatic trajectory with Coriolanus – in both the protagonists are provoked into turning their backs on their cities – but in the second half Timon is truly unorthodox. The action all but stops dead. Timon discovers gold in his cave, but it’s ceased to have any meaning for him (he observes sardonically that he can’t eat it). He’s visited by a series of men – his devoted steward Flavius (who’d tried unsuccessfully to warn him that he was blowing through his funds), Athenians on various self-interested missions, but most memorably the cynical philosopher Apemantus, an unwilling guest at Timon’s parties whose truth-telling now provides a kind of humanity for him in his reduced – and newly conscious – state. Their long interchange, which is undeniably the highlight of the second half of the play, is either, depending on how a director chooses to interpret it, a Beckettian encounter in the wilderness or a means of exploring Timon’s psychic journey into darkness.

Hope Versus Despair: The Uninhabitable House We Live In

The recent presidential campaign dredged up a barely-hidden reserve of bigotry in America. That doesn’t seem surprising, of course, but maybe it’s something to sing about. Two lefties, Abe Meeropol and Earl Robinson, composed “The House I Live In,” a 1943 tune about their progressive yet patriotic vision for a country mired in hatred. The lyrics convey faith in our better natures, sort of like the dialogue in Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and Neil Diamond each recorded the anthem for tolerance. Also Frank Sinatra, whose neutered version was delivered in a November 1945 short movie with the same title that denounced anti-Semitism. But he angered Meeropol – who had penned “Strange Fruit” to decry lynching almost a decade earlier – by deleting lines such as “my neighbors white and black.”

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki offers a sharp focus on neighbors white and black with The House I Live In, a wrenching documentary that won the top prize at January’s Sundance festival and has been released theatrically in time for possible Oscar consideration. Robeson’s sonorous bass-baritone is heard over closing credits, after 108 minutes of searing cinematic testimony that points out how far we are from the song’s plea for “a land of wealth and beauty with enough for all to share.”

Comically Bleak/Bleakly Comic: Soulpepper Theatre Company's production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Joseph Ziegler and Diego Matamoros in Endgame (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”
– Angela Carter, Wise Children (1991)

Without even noticing it, a lot of our life consists of repetitious behaviour. The alarm is set at the same time and we run through the same procedures each morning. We get up and get ready for work. We get to work, start the computer, and gab with our colleagues who have become friends. We probably then all go to the cafeteria for a coffee and breakfast. We enjoy our coffee and breakfast while we gradually dither into our day. The day, for most people especially in an office, is the repeat, repeat, repeat of the mundane activity: creating Excel spreadsheets with the same sort of information day in and day out; obsessive photocopying because we don't trust computers to keep our records; filing those papers; have lunch; discuss how much we hate our job/boss/life. Repeat the next day. Regardless of how important we might think this “work” is, the truth of the matter is it is soul-destroying and, to an alien observing us from another planet, probably high comedy.

Neglected Gem #28: Days and Nights in the Forest (1970)

Days and Nights in the Forest

I first saw Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest in 1973, when it played a brief and almost entirely unheralded run in the U.S. (It came out in India in 1969.) I was twenty-two, it was my first exposure to Ray, and I didn’t get it. I think my initial bafflement and subsequent love for it – amounting nearly to worship – may get at why Ray sometimes eludes western viewers at first but often exerts a loyal, even obsessive hold on those of us who return to him.

The title Days and Nights in the Forest echoes the titles of Renoir’s A Day in the Country and Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, both movies in which characters venture into the country for a little harmless respite and find their lives are changed forever by what they discover (mostly about themselves). Days and Nights in the Forest works the same way. It’s a film about a journey: four pampered young men from Calcutta drive into the countryside for a few days’ freedom from the pressures and demands of their urban lives. They bring with them a lot of stupid prejudices, a lot of unattractive habits, and a lot of bad faith. They begin by intruding themselves upon a government-run rest house they didn’t bother to reserve, bribing the caretaker and imperilling his job thoughtlessly. (The caretaker’s wife is seriously ill, and Ray shows us what the Calcuttans don’t notice: that this man is poor but honest, and the temptation of the bribe tears him apart.) They abuse the locals; they get drunk and act like fools. And they meet two women, one a widow, also from Calcutta, who lift the men’s time in the forest onto an entirely other experiential plane than they could ever have anticipated.

Dance on the Edge: Toronto Dance Theatre's Rare Mix

Jarrett Siddall in Vena Cava (photo by Guntar Kravis)

The body beautiful and the body decidedly un-beautiful are both amply on display in the current program which Toronto Dance Theatre is presenting now through Sunday at Fleck Dance Theatre inside Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Consisting of four works – all revivals – Rare Mix shows the city’s pre-eminent modern dance troupe flexing its muscles in new and also tried-and-true ways.

The new belongs to a transplanted Frenchman, the Montreal-based choreographer Jean-Sébastien Lourdais, whose work, Etrange, presents the human body through a series of spastic, spit-drooling, limb distorting vignettes designed deliberately to be un-pretty, un-graceful, un-elevating – a dance that debases the human condition as opposed to dignifying it. His approach goes contrary to the initial tenets of modern dance as an art form meant to give divine expression to the human spirit, as described by its early 20th century creator, Isadora Duncan. And precisely for that reason his work, as disturbing as it is, comes across as fresh and exciting. Certainly it is one of the most riveting new dance works out there, as novel (if not as shocking) as Vaslav Nijinsky’s mongoloid movement experiments for Les Ballets Russes. Equally outstanding are the three performers who dance it – Mairi Greig, Yuichiro Inoue and Naishi Wang. You have to see them to experience this as dance on the edge.

A Mother of Invention: The Pensive Enfant Terribles

Pensive is a word I would use to describe the superb music found on Enfant Terribles (Half Note, 2012) with Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Gary Peacock and Joey Baron. Recorded in performance at the Blue Note club in New York, this release offers music that is free of formality, yet full of musical alliteration and thoughtfulness. The music is played with such spontaneous abandon that there is little thought for what comes next. Enfant Terribles is an ironic title because there’s nothing contrary about it; although in the history of jazz, the musicians on this record would probably considered the so-called “bad boys” of the form. But that was years ago. The experience of challenging an audience, for its own sake, no longer matters to these artists. They play with the utmost simplicity and beauty as an ensemble.

Recorded in performance over two nights in June 2011, the single disc offers us a glimpse into what those gigs were like. Six tracks, all standards, adorn the album. But instead of preparing a list of tunes in advance, rehearsing them and simply tightening up the presentation, the group decided to improvise on the spot and use their perceptive ears to figure out what tune was in play. This is particularly good on “Body & Soul.”
Drummer Joey Baron starts the song as a solo, hitting the drums to phrase the first verse. Guitarist Bill Frisell is then able to identify the song and join in at the bridge, thus allowing everyone to know that what they’re playing is “Body & Soul” and not “Besame Mucho.” The humour of the moment is beautifully captured on this excellent recording.

The Rabbi’s Cat: Conjuring Joann Sfar’s Imagined Memories of Algeria

A scene from The Rabbi's Cat

With over a hundred separate titles since he first began publishing nearly 20 years ago, Joann Sfar is one of France’s most prolific graphic novelists. His topics range from the historical to the fantastic, but his most compelling comics remain those that draw on his Jewish heritage, and his mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazic background. Many of those titles have been translated into English: all 5 volumes of The Rabbi’s Cat, as well as Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East (the first of a three-part series), and Vampire Loves. A recent documentary currently making the festival circuit, Joann Sfar Draws from Memory, offers a glimpse into the mind and personality of a remarkable artist, and an extremely charismatic individual. Still most famous for his comics, Sfar has more recently turned to filmmaking. In 2010, he wrote and directed a uniquely imagined biopic of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, which mixes fact and fantasy to paint a complex and compelling portrait of one of the most controversial figures of French popular music. Although the movie was not an adaptation of a graphic novel, its production coincided with the publication of Sfar’s sprawling 450-page comic homage to the singer/songwriter, and Sfar’s surrealist-inspired visual eye is evident in almost every frame of the film. In 2011, The Rabbi’s Cat (Le chat du rabbin), Sfar’s film adaptation of his extremely popular series (published in France from 2002-2006, and currently translated into eight languages), was released. It was his second feature film, and it marked the first time he’d attempted to directly translate one of his illustrated narratives onto the big screen.

Despite premiering at Cannes in 2011, and winning the César (France’s equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Animated Film back in February, The Rabbi’s Cat simply hasn’t yet received the distribution it deserves in the English-speaking world. An accident, perhaps, of it coming on the scene in the same year as another much better publicized 3-D animated film also set in colonial Africa and based on a French-language comic, also with preternaturally intelligent animals in tow: Tintin, with the full might of Hollywood and Steven Spielberg behind it, certainly guaranteed that it would get most of our attention in 2011, but The Rabbi’s Cat is as different from Tintin, as, well, cats are to dogs.

Revivals, Part II: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Heiress

Tracy Letts, Carrie Coon, Amy Morton & Madison Dirks in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Photo: Michael Brosilow)

It’s unlikely that anyone will mount a better production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than the one Pam McKinnon has staged for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which is now playing at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. It’s splendidly acted – especially by Tracy Letts in the role of George – and beautifully paced. I think, though, that you can get only so far with Edward Albee’s play before invention runs out and you’re stuck with those self-conscious dramatic arias and the symbolism that’s strewn across the text like boulders you can neither heave out of the way nor leap over. In the half-century since its original Broadway appearance, Virginia Woolf has been considered a classic American play – a withering depiction of a marriage rendered in a modified absurdist style by a satirist whose specialty is the marital habits of middle-aged American WASPs. Albee’s language is often clever and sometimes hilarious, and he’s provided a major workout for the two leading actors. But I’ve never bought this sniping, game-playing, co-dependent couple, the history prof George and Martha, the college president’s daughter, as real partners. I’ve never bought their desperate fiction about the son they could never really have, or the fact that Nick and Honey, the young faculty newcomer and his wife Martha invites for drinks in the wee hours of the morning – after a party her father has thrown breaks up – don’t get up and leave as soon as the insults start flying.

I don’t have any trouble believing that, in Albee’s one-act The Zoo Story, the force of Jerry’s personality could pin the retiring bookworm Peter to the Central Park bench where Jerry ends up impaling himself on the knife he’s stuck in Peter’s hand. That play strikes me as a brilliantly accomplished piece of American absurdism, like LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman (where the battleground is a Manhattan subway car and the warriors are a young black intellectual and a white seductress). But Albee’s ambitions are broader and deeper in Virginia Woolf and they’re beyond his – possibly anyone’s – scope . He wants us to believe that George and Martha’s is an authentic marriage, played out against a realist environment (a household on the outskirts of a small New England college), yet those long, embroidered speeches obviously don’t operate on any sort of realist plane, so whenever one of the characters launches into one, we’re meant to read it purely on the level of symbolism and forget that no one talks in this way. It’s the same problem I have with Sam Mendes’ movie American Beauty, another hate letter to the Yankee bourgeoisie, in which the characters’ behavior makes absolutely no sense but we’re supposed to accept it as code for what’s wrong with the American suburbs. The film doesn’t take place in any suburb that accords with my experience, and I don’t know any academic marriages, or any other marriages either, that are like George and Martha’s (or, for that matter, Nick and Honey’s). And I can’t make that leap to the symbolic level when the realist level that Albee makes a point of establishing isn’t remotely convincing. 

The Kid Did Alright: Arlo Guthrie, Live at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre (Oct. 26, 2012)

Arlo Guthrie (Photo by Jon C. Hancock)

Arlo Guthrie is the 65-year-old son of legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie. Sixty-five years old! He was just a kid in 1967 when he hit the ground running with his 20-minute classic tale of taking the garbage out one Thanksgiving, “Alice’s Restaurant.” But now he’s 65. Woody was only 55 years old when he passed away the same year Arlo hit it big. Huntington’s chorea was the cause, and Arlo spent a few years wondering if he’d inherited that curse. He looks pretty good, still fairly hippie-like with his long white hair and droopy moustache, but he walks straight, and plays guitar with confidence and skill. And he is one heck of a storyteller.

The week before, Jackie, his wife of 43 years, passed away. Inoperable cancer they said. Arlo was in the middle of a Canadian tour, and while he announced that he would be cancelling some shows and rescheduling others he promised to complete this Canadian tour. He was booked for Brampton, and St. Catharines, as well as Burlington’s new theatre all within a few days, and I wondered what he might be like. Would grief cause him to fail? Absolutely not. He mentioned Jackie only once in a charming story about his first trip from his Coney Island home to California. He was 18 and his mother told him he’d have to stay with family or friends. “We don’t have any family or friends in California!” he reminded her. “Well,” she replied, “You can stay with Jack.” Jack was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (Woody was a major influence on Ramblin’ Jack), and what 18-year-old kid wouldn’t want to stay with Ramblin’ Jack? He took Arlo to a rodeo, where Arlo saw the most beautiful girl in the world riding a pony at the head of the parade. A couple years later he married that girl, and they stayed together for 43 years, through thick and thin. Then he sang a song that wasn’t on his set-list for the night: “Highway in the Wind” from that first album. It was a moving moment.

Cowardly Bravery: Robert Zemeckis' Flight

I have very mixed feelings about Robert Zemeckis' (Back to the Future, Cast Away) return to live-action film-making after 12 years away making his trilogy of motion-capture (mo-cap) films – The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009). Mixed feelings – not because I miss the fact he abandoned it for so long (although frankly, I never understood his obsession with mo-cap even though I'm one of the few people I know who actually likes his dead-eyed “village of the damned” movie The Polar Express) – because his return to live-action film-making is such a mixed bag.

In the first few seconds of his new movie, Flight, Zemeckis makes sure we understand that he's abandoning “cartoons,” and PG ratings of any sort. Denzel Washington plays “Whip” Whitacker, an airline pilot of many years and our first shot of him is as he awakens with a hangover. A buck-naked airline attendant rolls out of bed beside him and she heads to the washroom (you can hear her peeing in the background). His cell phone rings. He picks up and immediately begins an argument with his ex-wife. During the conversation, he drinks the remnants of a bottle of beer, and he liberally drops F-bombs left, right and centre. The airline attendant, Katerina (Nadine Velazquez), returns from the loo, smokes the remainder of a joint and lets him know they are due at the airport within the hour to work on a flight from Orlando to Atlanta. He mumbles assent, does a line of cocaine and, with the soundtrack playing Joe Cocker’s cover of Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright,” he dresses and heads to the airport: The confident cock of the walk.

We are barely four minutes into the film.

The Sessions & Midnight’s Children: Intimate Drama Surpasses Epic Tale

Helen Hunt and John Hawkes in The Sessions

Hollywood has always liked the inspirational saga, usually involving perpetually losing sports teams coming from behind to capture a championship or a teacher turning things around at a troubled, dysfunctional school. Ben Lewin’s The Sessions is a little different. It’s the true story of a man, afflicted by polio when he was young, who decides to lose his virginity as an adult, by hiring a sex surrogate no less. Fortunately what sounds like a potentially tasteless sex farce or would be in certain hands is actually a touching drama about two people whose intimate interactions change each other’s lives for the better. And for once the kudos about the skilled acting on tap in a movie is true.

The film, an American independent production but one tailor-made for Hollywood which picked it up for distribution, begins with Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes, Deadwood, Winter’s Bone), who is featured as the subject of a news report that shows him receiving his journalism degree despite his handicap. It then picks his life up in 1989 Berkeley, California, as he's being wheeled around in an iron lung, which is his home for most of the day. But Mark, who is also a poet, is determined to experience sex, first falling in love with one of his nurses, who flees when he tells of his feelings. He then decides to ask advice of Father Brendan (William H. Macy), his friendly local priest, who gives him the go-ahead for pursuing carnal pleasures. Mark then reaches out to sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt, Mad About You, A Good Woman) who offers him six sessions in order so he may both consummate the act and, more importantly, learn to be good at pleasing a woman. Most of the film centers on their sessions and how they get to know each other both in and outside the bedroom.

Post-Halloween Neglected Gem #27: Parents (1989)

Bob Balaban moved from character actor to director with this little-seen 1989 movie, which shares a DVD with a 1990 thriller called Fear. Parents is post-David Lynch, with visual references to Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and soundtrack references to Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. It’s sensationally funny and creepy. The movie is a black-comic nightmare of growing up in middle America in the 1950s. The talented young actor Bryan Madorsky, who has enormous brown eyes, a serpentine neck, and a gaunt face that bulges above his ears, plays Michael Laemle, a Massachusetts kid who hates the Indiana suburb his family has moved to. He feels alienated in his new class (his weary teacher, wittily played by Kathryn Grody, barely submerges her disdain and condescension in pseudo-sweet commonplaces) and frightened by his sprawling split-level home, with its stucco fireplace, its deck, its barbecue, its unfamiliar “dark places.” (The art director, Andris Hausmanis, has given Balaban a real fifties special: the wall hangings – Eisenhower-era exotica – brought back my own childhood as powerfully as the recordings on the soundtrack, which include “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” “Purple People Eater,” and Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.”) Michael’s dad, Nick (Randy Quaid), tells him that the only dark place he has to be careful of is his head. Beefy Nick, who looks Brobdingnagian next to Michael, doesn’t dig this skinny, meek kid, who always seems to be watching him with a mixture of curiosity and dread, and who has begun to shy away from eating the juicy red meat Nick broils on his barbecue and his wife Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) fries up on her stove. Nick can’t figure out how he and Lily could have produced this weirdo.

Phoenix Descending: The Young and the Restless and the Doomed

River Phoenix (1970-1993)

As a starstruck little girl, I experienced a broken heart when 24-year-old James Dean died in an automobile accident on September 30, 1955. From that day on, I began each entry in my diary with “Dear Jimmy.” A somewhat similar sadness took hold when drugs claimed the life of 23-year-old River Phoenix on Halloween 1993. But in starstruck adulthood, I no longer kept a diary with which to deny the untimely deaths of sensitive young actors.

Like Dean, Phoenix projected vulnerability, intensity and an edgy sense of potential self-destruction in his films. These qualities, which graced them both with a charisma lacking in most of their otherwise talented Hollywood peers, almost made tragedy seem inevitable. From a troubled adolescent in Stand by Me (1986) to the anguished son of fugitive parents in Running on Empty (1988), Phoenix brought that special something to the screen. In director Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), he portrays a character with narcolepsy. Never very lively while awake, he abruptly falls asleep anywhere, anytime – much like a junkie nodding out. It’s an uncanny performance in a strange movie based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

We Created a Monster: James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

It’s been over 80 years since Frankenstein (1931) was unleashed upon the world and I have sad news for you: James Whale’s film isn't scary. I'm sure it was frightening at some point in time but that ship has sailed and we’re left with a once-feared monster that we now embrace with open arms. Frankenstein would not have survived in its popularity were it just a great horror movie. What sets this film (and its immediate sequel 1935’s Bride Of Frankenstein) apart from the rest is the care Whale attached to the details of every frame. This was and always will be a work of art. Stories, such as that of a crazed doctor creating life from death, just aren't shared like this anymore.

With great skill and humour, Whale treated the film stock as if it were his canvas; his own laboratory. The monster’s make-up by Jack Pierce is iconic in its simplicity, sketching stitches and brushing bolts to craft a beautiful monstrosity played by the then-unknown Boris Karloff. The sets are meticulously detailed with matchstick forests, laboratories of smoke and mirrors, castles and graveyards filled with twisted architecture; all warmed by harsh shadows and painted backdrops that appear like moving expressionist paintings.

Revivals, Part I: Cyrano de Bergerac & An Enemy of the People

 Douglas Hodge and Clémence Poésy star in Cyrano de Bergerac

Many famous actors have had their fling at playing Edmond Rostand’s hero Cyrano de Bergerac, but the best one I’ve ever seen, hands down, is Christopher Plummer in the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano. In his second go-round with the role – he’d sampled it as a young actor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, the same season he played Hamlet – he was mesmerizing, and hilarious. (Runner-up would be a tie between José Ferrer in the 1950 film version and Steve Martin in the updated 1987 movie Roxanne, which is my favorite version of the material.) The most recent Broadway Cyranos have been disappointments: first Kevin Kline in 2007 and now the British actor Douglas Hodge, in the new production at the Roundabout. Kline made the bizarre choice to underplay the role of the seventeenth-century wit, poet and soldier, who, feeling he can’t court the girl he adores, his cousin Roxane, because of the size of his nose, provides her handsome suitor Christian with the words to win her heart. The flamboyant Cyrano is surely one part you should never underplay. Hodge doesn’t make that mistake, and physically, at least, he meets the challenges of the character’s celebrated panache, especially in the first-act scene where he engages in swordplay with the disdainful Valvert (Samuel Roukin) while he composes a poem. (He completes the last line as he deals his opponent the triumphal thrust.) It’s Hodges’s vocal work that comes considerably short of the mark. He does well with the famous speech to the dullard Valvert, anticipating the swordfight, in which he demonstrates a dozen ways in which a man of imagination might approach the matter of insulting his nose. Hodge has a voice like scraped stone, and he knows how to use it cleverly. But this Cyrano is rendered in verse, yet Hodge insists on playing against the meter. Worse, he has a fondness for delivering his lines in a sentimental tremolo that cuts Cyrano’s romantic stoicism. He doesn’t appear to have understood the character – or else (as I suspect) he’s simply indulging himself.

Celebrating 20 Years: In Conversation With George Randolph, Founder of Toronto's Randolph Academy For the Performing Arts

George Randolph with David Mirvish

Chances are, if you’ve gone to the theatre anywhere in North America lately, you’ve witnessed something of the Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts in action. Since its founding in a Toronto church basement 20 years ago, the performing arts school has produced two generations of theatre professionals modeled after the old Hollywood tradition of the Triple Threat – that is, a performer who, in equal measure, can sing, dance and act. First coined by the likes of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney when they were kids performing in musicals some 70-years ago, the Triple Threat was a relatively unused term in Canada until George Randolph, an American-born hoofer, came to Toronto to literally shake things up. Trained at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the former dancer with Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal arrived in Toronto in the 1980s at time when the city was being transformed into Broadway North. The big shows of the Great White Way were then crossing the border in record numbers, lured by local theatre impresarios like Garth Drabinsky and Ed Mirvish. Audiences were hungry for them, but the country didn’t have the manpower to sustain them. Theatre professionals here were either dancers or singer or actors. Rarely were they all three at once. They hadn’t had the training. Spying an opportunity, Randolph threw himself headlong into the void, eventually creating a signature Triple Threat program that is today the envy of much of the theatre world as he explained recently in conversation with Deirdre Kelly. Read on to find out how the Randolph Academy started and where it’s going next.