The Last Five Years: Two-Handed Musical

Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick stars in The Last Five Years.

What could have been in writer-director Richard LaGravenese’s head when he came up with the cockeyed idea of adapting Jason Robert Brown’s through-sung two-character musical The Last Five Years to the screen? Did he believe that the two characters, Jamie (played in the film by Jeremy Jordan) and Cathy (Anna Kendrick), whose five-year relationship disintegrates in the opening minutes, were so compelling that an audience would ignore the inescapable staginess of the conceit? (They’re not.) Did he imagine that the baffling flashback/flash-forward structure would be somehow elucidated by editing? (It isn’t.)

Making the Myth True: The Fisher King on Criterion

Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King.

Around the turn of the millennium, the director Terry Gilliam struggled to bring an updated Don Quixote to the screen; the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002) chronicles the breakdown of the project after bad weather and the illness of his Quixote, the French actor Jean Rochefort, threw it into financing hell. When he finally released a version of it called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2018, he’d lost the momentum. Really, though, he’d already made his Don Quixote, back in 1991. In his best movie, The Fisher King, written by Richard LaGravenese, two men strangely bonded by a tragedy heal each other through a crackpot mission to locate the Holy Grail, devised by one of them, a schizophrenic (Robin Williams) who used to be a Hunter College English professor named Henry Sagan, and carried through by the other, a one-time radio talk host named Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) whose life has become meaningless. The tragedy is a mass shooting at a popular bar called Babbitt’s perpetrated by a lunatic who has received encouragement for his paranoia by Jack, whose favorite targets is the yuppies who frequent Babbitt’s. Jack’s spleen isn’t real; his diatribes are cynical inventions to entertain his listeners and fuel his career. Until the killer strikes, it never occurs to him that there might be consequences to his habit of revving them up. Afterwards, shattered by what he’s brought into being, Jack goes into retreat, drinking and hiding from the world while his girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) shelters him and lets him help her manage the video shop below her apartment.

Master Acting Classes: The Fisher King (1991)

Few would remember now, but the 1991 summer movie season was dominated by movies about thoughtless, self-absorbed yuppies who find redemption: Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, William Hurt in The Doctor. The only one of the these pictures that wasn’t fatuous, trite and infuriating was The Fisher King. In it, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a smug, cynical New York talk-radio host with a habit of mocking his callers. When he lectures one of his regulars (Christian Clemenson) on the worthlessness of the yuppie scum who frequent a watering hole called Babbitt’s – the name is an allusion to Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, a satirical portrait of a Yankee bourgeois – proclaiming that they deserve to be wiped out, the caller takes him at his word and unloads a rifle on the crowd at the bar before shooting himself. One of his victims is the wife of a Hunter College humanities prof named Henry Sagan (Robin Williams), who dies in his arms. The tragedy triggers a psychotic break in Sagan: after a year of catatonia, he holes up in a boiler room in his old apartment building, calling himself Parry and identifying himself as a knight in search of the Holy Grail (“Parry” for “Parsifal”). When Jack, whose role in the Babbitt’s slaughter shook him up so badly that he has been hiding out at his girl friend’s and mostly inside a bottle of Jack Daniels, is set upon by violent youths in Central Park on what used to be called a wilding spree, it’s Parry who rescues him. Jack finds out Parry’s history from the super in his building and decides that it can’t be a coincidence – that trying to help Parry is the only way he can get his own life back, “pay the fine and go home,” as he puts it to his girl friend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl). At first he thinks a few bucks will do the trick, but all Parry does with the money he proffers is to hand it off to another homeless man. Then, with Anne’s help, Jack arranges for Parry to have a date with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a publishing-company employee whom Parry worships from afar. Bizarrely, the evening is a triumph: Parry and Lydia, a peerlessly awkward waif who inhabits her own universe, turn out to be a match made in romantic-comedy heaven. But the thought that he might find love again stirs up Parry’s repressed memories of the night he lost his wife, and his old enemy, the Red Knight, a personification of all his demons of guilt and grief that only he can see, intervenes. Parry winds up in a psychiatric ward, once again imprisoned in a catatonic state – and Jack still hasn’t earned his own redemption. So he does the only thing remaining to him: dressing up in Parry’s ragtag-knight outfit, he carries out the task Parry set him earlier in their acquaintance. He scales the wall of the Medieval castle-like Fifth Avenue residence of a wealthy recluse, swings through the window like a parody of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, and lifts a trophy Parry saw in a photo that he’s convinced is the Holy Grail.

Water for Elephants: Big Top

Photo by Matthew Murphy.

The Broadway circus musical Water for Elephants, culled from Sara Gruen’s 2007 bestseller, assembles a cast of thirty singers, dancers, acrobats and puppeteers, some of whom have performed with legitimate circuses, some with the Cirque du Soleil, some with the Montreal artist collective The 7 Fingers (known in Canada by its full-length French title, Les 7 doigts de la main). I’ve never had such a good time reading the cast bios in a playbill. The smart, snappy book of Water for Elephants is by Rick Elice, who wrote Peter and the Starcatcher; the songs, the best of which are roisterous and infectious and have a folky twang, are by Pigpen Theatre Company, which created the delightful offbeat fairy tale The Old Man and the Old Moon. Jessica Stone’s production is simultaneously expansive and intimate; Takeshi Kata’s set is a series of scaffolds backed by a cyclorama with projections by David Bengali. The show is mixed-media in the truest sense – the choreography of the musical numbers by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll (who is also credited with the circus design) always incorporates gymnastics and puppetry.

Mickey and Joey: Sabbath’s Theater and Pal Joey

Elizabeth Marvel and John Turturro in Sabbath's Theater. (Photo: Jeenah Moon)

Devoted as I am to Philip Roth’s novels, I had trouble with his National Book Award winner Sabbath’s Theater, which he released in 1995. Its stylistic excesses in the service of underlining the sexual indulgences of its sixty-four-year-old protagonist, the one-time puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, whose career was sidelined by arthritis, defeated me; I put it down after a couple of hundred pages. It’s the only one of Roth’s many books I couldn’t finish. But maybe I should give it another try. Ariel Levy and John Turturro’s stage adaptation, produced by The New Group at the Signature Theatre with Turturro as Sabbath, is a majestic piece of theatre, notwithstanding the modesty of Jo Bonney’s production: three actors, two of whom, Elizabeth Marvel and Jason Kravits, play several parts; a small space containing a few props and an upstage screen for projecting a handful of evocative images (and in one scene Kravits’s silhouette); Roth’s 451 pages trimmed down to an hour and forty minutes of text without intermission.

Limbo: Rectify and The Divide

Aden Young stars in Rectify, on the Sundance Channel

There’s a consensus opinion that we’re currently well into a Golden Age of creatively ambitious TV comparable to the movie renaissance of the 1960s and ‘70s, and maybe there’s evidence for that in the success and acclaim enjoyed by some of the most pretentious recent new series. Pretentious TV is nothing new, but in previous decades, “experimental” gobblers like Larry Gelbart’s United States (1980) and Jay Tarses’ The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (1987-1991) were seen as network tax write-offs, indulgences bestowed upon successful veteran TV creators who wanted the chance to sound like auteurs in interviews with The New York Times. After a brief spell, these shows were cancelled or, in the case of Molly Dodd, shuffled off to die a lingering death on cable.

Nowadays, cable is where the action is, and viewers and critics are so eager to show that they’re up to the demands of this challenging medium that when a flawed show that’s clearly straining to join the pantheon arrives, they’ll give it a leg up and even fall over themselves concocting helpful theories explaining why what appear to be its biggest problems are actually the proof that it’s a masterpiece. If, for example, you got a little weary of the overcooked philosophical-hogwash that Matthew McConaughey was obliged to spout throughout True Detective, you may find it reassuring that some reviewers heard the same stuff and reached the thrilling conclusion that McConaughey’s character is not just full of shit but, as Isaac Chotiner insists in The New Republic, “borderline insane.” If this is right, then, when you combine it with the fact that McConaughey’s character is also a master detective whose view of the world seems to be that of the show’s itself, then what we seem to have here is a shiny new TV series modeled on all those dusty old counterculture movies, from Morgan! and King of Hearts to Werner Herzog’s films with Bruno S., in which the insane person is the only one who can clearly see what’s in front of him—unless what’s in front of him is the tall, scar-faced man he’s searching for, if the man happens sitting down in a flattering light. I’m not convinced that the bloviating hero of True Detective really is meant to be cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but the basic point remains: this could be a great time for people looking to build strong artistic reputations by spinning TV shows out of ideas that were done to death in movies and books and the theater decades ago.

This “what the emperor was wearing when today’s smart cultural gatekeepers weren’t born yet” theory may be the best explanation for the otherwise inexplicable success of Rectify, which has just completed its second season on SundanceTV and has a third one already lined up. SundanceTV started out, back in the late ‘90s, as the Sundance Channel, a broadcast arm of the Sundance Film Festival; it used to show wall-to-wall independent movies, including some real obscure winners that had failed to achieve theatrical distribution or even a DVD release, such as The Target Shoots First, Christopher Wilcha’s funny, eye-opening documentary about his experiences working for the Columbia House mail-order club during the rise of alternative rock. Nowadays, SundanceTV plays pretty much the same roster of well-known “indie” movies as the similarly gelded Independent Film Channel, with commercial interruptions, while aiming to impress with such original TV programming as Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and the excellent French series The Returned. Rectify was created by Ray McKinnon, a Georgia-born actor familiar for his roles in such movies as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Take Shelter, and Mud, and as the gently unstable minister who Al Swearengen put out of his misery on the HBO series Deadwood; in indie-movie/art-TV circles, he, as Holly Hunter’s daughters said of his character in O Brother, is bona fide.