School Session: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Riz Ahmed (centre, in red) stars in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Whatever else I may say about director Mira Nair’s new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I have to give it credit for one fact: it is one of the few movies in recent years that attempts to take on some of the complex issues of the post-9/11 milieu. The past dozen years have witnessed some staggering events: terrorism in New York and Washington, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Yet for all that history, we have precious few films that capture the essence of the era. The best in my opinion all come from the same director, Britain’s Paul Greengrass. With United 93, the second two installments in the Jason Bourne franchise, and even Green Zone, Greengrass managed to keep his finger on the pulse of the times, mapping our moods and anxieties even as we lived through them (much the way the great directors did in the Vietnam era).

But Greengrass’s movies matched their seriousness of purpose with intelligent writing, which is where Nair’s fails. Even Green Zone, hampered by a clichéd script, was saved by Greengrass’s adrenaline-pumping, kinetic action directing. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by contrast, feels like a potted plant. The film comes from a novel of the same name by Moshin Hamid, and gets bogged down in the exposition of its source material. That material could work in the hands of the right adapters. But Nair and screenwriters Ami Boghani and Hamid haven’t figured out how to dramatize the various interchanges. The result is too much talk and too few thrills.

Lit Wit: Theresa Rebeck's Seminar

Hamish Linklater, Alan Rickman, Jerry O'Connell, Lily Rabe & Hettienne Park in Seminar. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, currently on Broadway, is a hard-boiled comedy about literary life that trades on our fantasies about writers in a highly entertaining fashion. Four aspiring twenty-something writers meet weekly in an Upper West Side apartment to show their work to a celebrated editor and get his response. Kate (Lily Rabe), a Bennington grad from a blue-chip background, is renting the luxurious venue, with its Hudson River view, from her father for an unheard-of low price. (One of her peers describes her lifestyle as “socialism for the rich.”) Douglas (Jerry O’Connell), an insufferable self-promoter with connections, has just returned from Yaddo, the artists’ colony, where he honed a story that’s under consideration at The New Yorker. Izzy (Hettienne Park) puts sex front and center in her work – she claims it’s the most important element in fiction – and flaunts her own sexuality, though the fact that she’s still living with her parents undercuts the daring of her forays into the adult world. The only member of the quartet without a whiff of privilege is Kate’s friend Martin (Hamish Linklater), who moves into her apartment early in the play because he’s being evicted from his own. Leonard (Alan Rickman), a rude, profanely sardonic, self-styled-hipster narcissist whom they’ve hired at an exorbitant fee, tears into their submissions, dismissing Kate’s after the first sentence as lethally boring and tempering his praise for Douglas’s accomplished style with a slam at his quickness to pander to his readers. (He calls him a whore and recommends he move to Hollywood.) And as he does so, he exposes their fragile egos, their terrors (week after week, Martin declines to pass over any of his own novel for Leonard’s inspection), their jealousies (Kate has a crush on Martin and resents the attention he pays to Izzy, who seduces him effortlessly), and the lengths to which their increasing desperation in this competitive literary hothouse atmosphere drives them.

I Could Go On Singing: Giant and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

Brian D’Arcy James and Kate Baldwin in Giant at the Public Theater in New York (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

Considering that Show Boat is one of the most phenomenally successful musicals in history, it’s surprising that it’s taken nearly a century for someone to get around to adapting another Edna Ferber novel to the musical stage. Like Show Boat, Giant, which she wrote in 1952, is a vivid soap opera that sprawls across two generations. Ferber has been out of fashion for a long time (though her books are still highly readable); most people who are familiar with the material would know it through the famous 1956 movie version, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and, in a posthumous performance, James Dean. The giant of the title is Texas, where Jordan “Bick” Benedict (Hudson) brings his Virginia bride Leslie (Taylor) to live on his enormous ranch, Reata: he has to get used to her independent-mindedness and her social conscience and she has to get used to the ways of Texas, which is crass, self-adoring, patriarchal and racist.

The movie, which runs on for three hours and twenty minutes, is uneven in every conceivable way: visually, in the storytelling and in the acting. Stevens was past his prime when he made it; he’d begun to equate length and subject matter with prestige, in that distinctly Hollywood way. (Giant has approximately the same running time as a double bill of his two best pictures, Alice Adams and the Astaire-Rogers classic Swing Time, both of which he made in the mid-thirties.) Still, like the book on which it’s based, Giant is very absorbing, and even though it’s a mammoth Oscar-boosting extravaganza, it doesn’t try very hard to convince you that it’s an important drama. By contrast, the musical, which began at the Dallas Theater Center and made it to New York’s Public Theater last month, is more inflated than the loudest-crowing, most self-righteous Texan in its cast of characters. Moreover, it’s something that you could never call a single one of those Texans: it’s a twenty-four-carat phony.

Music Men: Almost Famous and The Music Man

 Casey Likes and Solea Pfeiffer in Almost Famous. (Photo: Neal Preston)

Affable and well-acted and entertaining as it is, I’ve always thought that Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, from 2000, was something of a crock. Crowe’s first career was as a rock journalist; at fifteen he got to travel with The Allman Brothers. So the picture, about a San Diego teenager named William Miller whose writing impresses Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres sufficiently to persuade Fong-Torres to let him go on the road with a band called Stillwater and write a profile on them, is autobiographical. And it must be the most romanticized coming-of-age memoir any writer has ever shaped. Crowe’s baby-faced protagonist (appealingly played by Patrick Fugit) never really falls from innocence. William’s possessive mother – his only surviving parent – drops her son off at the stadium for the Stillwater show she cries after him, “Don’t take drugs!,” and she repeats her warning when she takes him to the tour bus and in every one of her hysterical phone calls. It’s a culture joke: she’s meant to represent every parent in 1973 who ever feared losing her child to the rock ‘n’ roll vampires. But William takes her seriously. He travels all over the country with Stillwater, hangs out with them between shows and with the ebullient groupies known as the BandAids, and he never even smokes a joint. Crowe seems to be looking at his own adolescence through a haze. William eventually loses his virginity, but it doesn’t seem to alter him in any way. He counsels both his hero, the band’s guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), and the leader of the BandAids, Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), Russell’s girlfriend on the road and the object of William’s first serious crush, liberating her and making him into a better human being. And in the end the kid’s story gets on the cover of Rolling Stone. William is a juvenile version of the knight whose purity of heart is rewarded at last.

Fashion Down Under (Why It’s On Top)

“The assumption that Australia is a season behind is no longer relevant,” says Dion Lee,
one of several Australian designers taking the country's fashion global.

Australia is known for many things, most of them rooted in the natural world – koalas, kangaroos, kookaburras and Crocodile Dundee types strutting across the Outback when not surfing the waves of the country’s incredible beaches. Fashion has never been one.

But that perception is changing thanks to a growing number of Aussie designers turning Down Under into a top player in the global apparel industry. The past year has seen a greater number of Australian fashion brands leap from relative obscurity to international cachet, led by such trailblazers as Zimmermann. The flirty swim and ready-to-wear label has 25 boutiques across Australia and another eight internationally, including a first in London’s prestigious Mayfair district and East Hampton in Long Island. In Canada, the brand is sold through Holt Renfrew.

“We’re not trying to be like anyone else,” says Simone Zimmermann, who founded the namesake brand with her designer sister Nicky Zimmermann in Sydney in 1991. “We are always trying to be the best at what we do, and that’s made us different.”

Christmas Musicals: Into the Woods and Annie

Meryl Streep and Mackenzie Mauzy in Into the Woods

Rob Marshall’s new movie of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine Into the Woods has an insurmountable problem: the show it’s based on. The appeal of this musical, which mixes several fairy tales, has always eluded me. It contains an ingenious opening number in which Sondheim sets all the narratives in motion, and a couple of other songs (Cinderella’s interior monologue, “On the Steps of the Palace,” and “Agony,” a duet between Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes) are OK if somewhat overworked. But the  whole thing is too damn clever by half, with lyrics that tend to make the characters sound as if they’ve been reading self-help manuals.  And by the time the show picks up again after intermission and the characters go back into the woods because their happy endings have begun to fray, the same fate has befallen Sondheim’s inventiveness. The very concept is stupid: if taking to the woods is a metaphor for coming of age, then no one gets to do it twice. And you don’t have to darken a fairy tale dark in order to modernize it; the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen originals are plenty dark enough. Moreover, Sondheim’s idea of “dark” is, to my ears, merely homiletic: “Children Will Listen,” “No One Is Alone.” If I have to pick a revisionist fairy-tale musical, I’ll take Once Upon a Mattress. Revue-sketch comedy trumps pop psychology any day of my week.

Remarkable Polymath: The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom

Director Michael Winterbottom

It may be because he’s so prolific, putting out at least one film most years and sometimes more; or maybe because he has no discernable visual style (Bringing Up Baby’s director Howard Hawks didn't either); or simply because he rarely makes a film in the same genre twice in a row; but for whatever reason, British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom may be the most unheralded director around. He’s also one of the most interesting ones, too, which makes his below-the-radar state somewhat unjust.

Since he began making TV films in 1989 through to his recently completed film Trishna, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles, but set in India, which will be released next year, Winterbottom has amassed 25 credits in just 22 years, most of those being feature films. He’s also tackled virtually every genre under the sun (except for horror) from domestic dramas (Family, 1994; Wonderland, 1999) to literary adaptations (Jude, 1996; A Cock and Bull Story, 2006), from westerns (The Claim, 2003) to science fiction movies (Code 46, 2006), film noir (I Want You,1998), to comedy/dramas (24 Hour Party People, 2002), even a unique love story interspersed with hardcore, genuine sex scenes and live concert scenes (9 Songs, 2004). That wide-ranging interest in disparate subject matter and characters might, in a minor filmmaker, result in a lot of diverse movies that didn’t necessarily succeed as art/entertainment. But except for a few duds (the overwrought psychological thriller Butterfly Kiss, 1995; his simplistic fact-based post 9/11 drama The Road to Guatanamo, 2006), most of his output stands out, particularly his very fine topical dramas which centre on war (Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997) and displaced peoples (In This World, 2003), and his more offbeat offerings (Code 46, 24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs). The other fact you need to know about his movies is that many of them don’t often play commercially in North America or in limited release at best. (I wouldn’t have seen some of his earliest films, such as I Want You and With or Without You, 1999, if they hadn't been featured at a now-defunct British film festival in Toronto which showcased Winterbottom’s movies as its centrepiece.) More likely they’ll pop up at various film festivals before heading straight to pay-TV and DVD.  The Killer Inside Me (which had a limited theatrical release in the U.S. but never played in Canada) was released on DVD last year and recently premiered on The Movie Network in Canada, as did A Summer in Genoa. Both premiered on TV at almost the same time as one of Winterbtottom's rarer commercial releases in Canada, The Trip. Remarkably, The Trip has hung on since it opened earlier this summer. The trio offers a chance for film-goers to gain a perspective on the director and his strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker.

A Conversation with Photographer Albert Watson

Jack Nicholson, from Albert Watson's Icons series, 1998 (All photos courtesy of the IZZY Gallery)

New York City-based celebrity photographer Albert Watson is a master of his profession. His images have appeared on more than a hundred Vogue covers and countless other publications from Rolling Stone to Time Magazine, many of them featuring now iconic portraits of rock stars, including David Bowie and Eric Clapton, in addition to Hollywood actors like jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood and other notable high-profile personalities, including Steve Jobs, Mike Tyson, Kate Moss, Sade and Christy Turlington. Exhibited in art galleries and museums around the world, among them the Museum of Modern Art in Milan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, Watson recently made his Canadian debut at Toronto’s IZZY Gallery (106 Yorkville Ave; izzygallery.com) with a retrospective show called ARCHIVE, which closes on December 27. Aged 70 and with a career spanning 40 years, Watson is one of the few internationally acclaimed photographers still working exclusively in film, processing it himself in his dark room. All of his hand-processed images now hanging in Izzy Sulejmani’s gallery are for sale, enabling collectors as well as fans of Watson’s work to own something by one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time, according to Photo District News. “Photography is quick communication,” he told critic Deirdre Kelly during a recent visit to his New York City office lined with some of the images for which Watson is celebrated. “People easily get it.” 

Here’s more of their conversation.

 

Photographer Albert Watson (Photo by Gloria Ro)

dk: These are wonderful digs you’ve got here in TriBeCa, close to the Hudson River and flooded with natural light. I am assuming this is where you work?

aw: We don’t shoot here, no. I no longer have a studio of my own. We had a huge one in the West Village from 1987 to 2008, about 26,000 square feet. But I sold it to a hedge fund guy. Now, we don’t actually have a studio. We don’t need one. About 25 or 30 years ago, light in a space was fairly important. But nowadays you can replicate the light in a studio with technology. The business has changed, which is why we moved here. We’re now much more focused on supplying work for galleries and museums – fine art work and producing prints and making platinum prints. We make all our prints in the office and rent studios when we need them. Everyone told me that I would miss having my own studio. But I’ve spent my whole life working in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Milan and other centres, including Toronto, and I’ve become quite used to photographing in other people’s studios. Where I work doesn’t have to be my own space. 

In Passing

Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton and Viggo Mortensen in Thirteen Lives.

This piece includes reviews of Thirteen Lives,The Good Nurse,Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and The Pale Blue Eye.

At the outset of Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s dramatization of the 2018 Tham Luang Cave rescue in northern Thailand, we see the twelve pre-teen and teenage football players and their coach enter the cave and then the monsoon begin to batter it. But then Howard and the screenwriter, William Nicholson, make an unconventional choice: they don’t show us the trapped souls again until, about halfway through the picture, the British divers, Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), come upon them near the mouth of the cave twelve days into the ordeal, when many participating in the story or following it on the news fear they must be dead. Naturally the filmmakers understand that presenting the facts of the narrative from the point of view of those outside the cave is dramatically effective, but I think there’s an ethical dimension to their showing us what Stanton and Volanthen discover as they discover it. Howard and Nicholson strive to avoid melodrama; they don’t want to rev up the audience by cutting back and forth between the deprivations the footballers are suffering and the efforts of the crew – a wide, disparate combination of divers, Thai Navy SEALS and other military, police officers, volunteers of every stripe and the representatives of about a hundred government agencies – to track them down. They are resolute about draining Thirteen Lives of sentimentality; I wouldn’t say there’s none at all, but given the nature of the material there’s remarkably little. It’s a film of great integrity as well as tremendous skill. And the subject matter is so gripping that you’re grateful for the foreknowledge that the coach and all the kids got out alive. (One of the SEALS, Saman Kunan, played by a charismatic young actor named Sukollowat Kanarat, did not survive the operation, and another died a year and a half later of a blood infection he contracted during it.) 

All That Jazz: Paradise Blue and The Wild Party

Kristolyn Lloyd and Blair Underwood in Paradise Blue. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Paradise Blue, a new play by Dominique Morisseau at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is set in the African-American community of Blackbottom in Detroit in 1949, during the heyday of bop. Its protagonist, Blue (Blair Underwood), is a jazz trumpeter who owns a club, the Paradise, and headlines the combo that plays there. He’s struggling to attain the zenith of his creative powers while battling the ghosts of his childhood: he saw his father murder his mother. Morisseau intends Blue to embody the musicians in the bop movement, gifted and intellectually self-challenging, restless and haunted. It’s a great subject, but she’s also working with black archetypes that limit the play imaginatively. The quintet of hard-working actors in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s production strive to bring a vibrancy to the play but they’re stuck playing caricatures.

Never, Never: Finding Neverland

Under Diane Paulus’ leadership, Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater – once a bastion of the avant-garde – has become a clearing house for Broadway-bound shows. In the two years since she took over as artistic director, Paulus has sent five plays on to New York: her own revivals of Porgy and Bess and Pippin; Once (which began as a workshop at A.R.T.); the latest revival of The Glass Menagerie, starring Cherry Jones; and the first part of Robert Schenkkan’s LBJ biography, All the Way (which began its journey across the country at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival). I saw all of them in their A.R.T. incarnations except for Once, and they were all sell-outs; Boston is evidently thrilled to be a tryout town once again, as it was for most of the last century. But even though I didn’t care for most of the productions I saw at A.R.T. in its old form, Paulus’ blatant commercialism is a little unsettling, especially since two of the shows bore her name as director.

Her latest is Finding Neverland, a musical adaptation of the 2004 movie that covers the period during which J.M. Barrie conceived his 1904 stage play Peter Pan. If you watched the Tony Awards this year you already know about the show, because – in that benighted telecast’s most bizarre moment – we were treated to a preview of the musical, which opens on Broadway next season: Jennifer Hudson sang one of the tunes to four little boys standing in for the Llewelyn-Davies brothers for whom Barrie becomes a surrogate father. Appearances notwithstanding, Hudson is not expected to take over the role of James Barrie, which is being played by Newsies star Jeremy Jordan.

Reset, Reborn, Renewed: Toronto Fashion 2017

Sid Neigum (centre right) and models, on stage at Re\Set Fashion in Toronto, February 6.

If fashion is about reinvention then Toronto is right on trend. Over the past few months several new initiatives – five and counting – have risen from the ashes of Toronto Fashion Week, which died a sudden death when its New York owner, sports and entertainment marketing conglomerate IMG, abruptly pulled the plug last July, citing a loss of local sponsorship necessary for keeping the biennial event alive. One door closes and another one opens.

Enter Re\Set Fashion, an installation-style fashion event which unfolded in the recently renovated Great Hall on Queen Street West in Toronto in early February. A designer-focused alternative to the frenetic runway show, the concept was developed by Dwayne Kennedy, co-founder and fashion director of The Collections among other local fashion events, in collaboration with Toronto Fashion Week founder Robin Kay. Taking place on Feb. 6 and 7, the two-day experiential fashion event took the form of Instagram-friendly static presentations which, besides being a more flexible and intimate model than the traditional catwalk show, is also more cost-effective to produce. Models looking like human mannequins simply walked out onto a dais and posed under strategically placed lights, a refreshing and dynamic alternative to the usual hype and freneticism. Tapping into the see-now-buy-now, Re\Set also offered up a pop-up retail component aimed at encouraging members of the paying public to get up close and personal with the latest in Canadian style. The strategy worked. Re\Set packed them in, leaving everyone feeling they were part of something new. Designer participants ranged from newcomers like Elle AyoubZadeh, creator of fledgling Toronto-based fashion footwear brand, Zvelle, to rising stars like the award-winning Alberta-born womenswear designer Sid Neigum, who soon after showed his monochromatic 3-D silhouettes at London Fashion Week, garnering a rave review in Vogue and a multi-million dollar deal with the international luxury online retailer, Net-a-Porter. Canadian fashion lives!

Sentimental Journeys: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Burn This, Doris Day

Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. (Photo: Deen van Meer)

I’ve been skipping productions of Terrence McNally’s two-hander Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune for decades – I didn’t see Kathy Bates with F. Murray Abraham or with Kenneth Welsh in the off-Broadway version in 1987, or Edie Falco with Stanley Tucci in the last revival, in 2002 – but I opted to see the latest one, on Broadway, with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon. It’s a lousy play, an American variation on an English kitchen-sink drama that begins with a pair of lovers in bed naked, having sex, and then takes a couple of hours to show them opening up to each other in other ways. The (stock) idea is that they’re both desperately lonely but he’s willing to acknowledge it and she isn’t, and, attempting to persuade her that she should see him as more than a one-night stand, he’s got his work cut out for him because emotionally she’s closed down. It’s an unconventional courtship drama with the same basic structure as Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly (1980), which takes a far more inventive approach to the man’s effort to win over the cautious, distanced woman – and which has far more interesting characters. Talley’s Folly is a comedy with serious undertones; Frankie and Johnny tries for loopy romanticism but ends up glum and monochromatic, though with a sentimental ending.

Musical Soap: ABC Television's Nashville

The ABC series Nashville – no relation to the great Robert Altman movie – weds melodrama to the best music to be heard consistently on TV since the HBO show Treme completed its tenure. Treme, set in New Orleans following Katrina, was something special: a wide, layered, variegated exploration of a society dealing with the aftermath of a geographical disaster that was also inescapably a political one. The show’s writers threaded half a dozen stories that exposed not only the challenges for New Orleans residents of putting their lives back together but also the ways in which the catastrophe knocked up against corruption in the government and police department both during and after the storm. And as a bonus that reflected the high content of music in the blood of the city of New Orleans, each week the audience got to hear extraordinary musicians perform – some famous, some known mostly to local aficionados, playing themselves, as well as actors playing musicians.

Nashville, which begins its third season this fall, is set in another American city that is defined by its music, but the series isn’t a serious examination of its milieu, nor does it share Treme’s documentary-realist style. It’s a glossy nighttime soap with exaggerated characters and a tortuous, often preposterous plot line. But it’s as entertaining as anything on TV: energetic, engrossing, with characters you keep in your head from week to week and songs you can’t wait to listen to over again. (Each season has produced two CDs; I’ve played all four soundtrack albums so often in my car that I know every tune by heart.) Nashville is the Grand Hotel of television, except that its pop-culture secret – the element that makes it addictive – isn’t star power as much as the power of its music.