Blogcritics Author: Alan Dale

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Movie Review: Patrick Marber's Closer - Farce Served Cold

Alan Dale — Mon, 28 May 2007 17:52:20 EDT

Larry (to Dan): "Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Go fuck yourself! You writer! You liar!"The movie version of Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer opens with two beauties walking towards each other down a mobbed London sidewalk, the rhythm set by the Irishman Damien Rice's plaintive song "The Blower's Daughter". They move in the most languorous slow motion and so, like the pair — Dan (Jude Law), an obituary writer and aspiring novelist, and Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper — we readily slip into an erotic trance, almost by habit, and shut out the unidealized ambient realities. But reality won't be ignored: the American Alice looks to her left when crossing the street and is knocked down by a cab. When she comes to, however, her amorous instinct has not been sleeping: she looks up at Dan and says coyly, "Hello, stranger."Marber and the director Mike Nichols transplant this meeting out of fairy tale (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) and romanticized saga (Wagner's Siegfried) into the world we know. Dan takes Alice to the ER, where they continue flirting; she accompanies him to his office building where he admits that he already has a girlfriend. This won't stop him from pursuing Alice, however, and as moviegoers we hope that he and Alice will get together because they're so good-looking and we haven't even seen the GF anyway, so she's not really a person to us. In any event, our moviegoer's "romantic" urge is gratified, and, as the movie shows in scenes spread over the following four years, all of the major characters live out the consequences.When we next see Dan, he's being photographed for the cover of his soon-to-be-published novel, and though he's still with Alice, he presses himself on Anna (Julia Roberts), the photographer, who tells him "No," by which she means both, "Grow up!" and "Maybe." Peeved, Dan goes into a cybersex chat room pretending to be Anna and arranges for a hook-up at the London Aquarium where he knows she likes to photograph strangers. Larry (Clive Owen), the randy dermatologist at the other end, shows up and is amazed to find that the nasty girl from the Internet is not an "old trout." On the other hand, the comely Anna is not aware that she was meeting anyone and so Larry has to push for a response. Despite the awkward situation, Larry fares better than Dan did — he's charming, albeit in a rougher way, but he's available.As a couple, Anna and Larry laugh about Dan's Internet mischief, dubbing him "Cupid," but they haven't seen the last of him. He shows up at Anna's one-woman exhibit and throws himself at her again, while from across the gallery Alice and Larry comment snidely on their partners who are engaged in an "intense" conversation. Alice, with a lover's ESP, has been dismayed by Anna since the day Dan was photographed. The photo Anna snapped of Alice in tears that day is in the exhibit, which Alice finds no better than artfully mendacious. Larry is turned on by Alice but pulls back; commitment is a moral rather than hormonal imperative with him, but an imperative nonetheless.A year later, it is revealed that Dan finally succeeded with Anna the night of the exhibit and both couples blow apart. They continue to cross paths, however. In one sequence, Larry turns up unshaven and miserable at a strip club where Alice has gone back to work. In a subsequent sequence, Anna joins Dan late for a performance of Così fan tutte because she had to meet Larry to get the divorce papers signed, an encounter we see in flashback. In both instances, we later learn, Larry takes the seemingly fraying plot in hand and maneuvers everyone in the direction of his or her weakness, to Larry's own advantage, but also, he thinks, to everyone else's, except Dan's.That's it. The plot is intricate — a lot of maneuvering in ten scenes and an epilogue that jump ahead in time without titles to keep us oriented — but not insistent. At the end, one couple has "survived" and the other hasn't. The script evinces a frankness about what people in love will do to each other that borders on rawness, but it doesn't feel like pure naturalism, that is, a study for its own sake of what these individual characters do in this particular situation.Rather, Marber emphasizes the different ways in which men and women play the game of love and how their ill-matched sensitivities work against them. The key premise is that what we mean by civilization requires that women possess the sexual power of saying yes or no (as Larry points out to Dan in their end-stage confrontation). A concomitant is that it's generally up to men to pursue women, which makes men emotionally vulnerable to women's power, as firmly as they may accept that it's right for women to possess it.For their part, women are physically and sexually vulnerable to men, and may be economically dependent as well, and are, for these good reasons, more cautious. The paradoxically accompanying result is that women may take the tense trickiness of love in stride, as differently as they feel about it: Anna is more practical and tougher than Alice, for instance, who can't believe when the bomb explodes even though she's heard it whistling towards her from the first scene (when Dan told her he had a girlfriend, right before he asked her name).The women in Closer want permanent connections — which is different from being suited to maintaining them. Anna may consistently want to have a child but changes her mind about who the father will be. The men, on the other hand, are always drawn to excitement, challenge, though they certainly do not want things to change, except on their own initiative, of course. Marber seems to accept (guiltily?) Anna's statement that "men are crap" when, post-come-on, she hears Dan has a live-in girlfriend (meaning, in that instance, Alice).The men can't read the women, who are trying to tell them what they think the men want to hear but can't always guess right. Sometimes the guys want to be conned, or say they do. And the women can be very good at it: at her show, for instance, Anna explains away her shadowy chat with Dan by telling Larry that Dan's father has died and immediately turns the situation around with a crack conwoman's skill: "Were you spying?" What moves the story along as much as anything are the moments when the women alternately lie and tell the truth when it would have been better not to do whichever it is they've just done. (Although the men might not have been any happier with the alternative.)The seeming inevitability of miscommunication is clearest in the strip club where Larry pays for private "entertainment" with Alice and tries to break through her provocatively impenetrable bewitchery. He throws large-denomination pound notes at her to get her to tell him her real name. He thinks he already knows the answer, that he's a step ahead of her, and so fails to recognize the truth when she tells it to him.Thus, the characters in Closer divide by sex (though hardly in solidarity) and also line up too neatly for naturalism—arranged by occupation they cover the ground from most "dead" to most "alive," or perhaps most "unconnected" to most "present": obituarist, photographer, dermatologist, stripper. At the same time, the characters are not only allegorical personifications of socio-sexual traits but differentiate quite clearly. Nichols helps root the play's stark confrontations in evocative film settings, and, in a similar vein, his actors blend their particularized characterizations right into Marber's shrewdly dramatized generalizations. It's as if Pinocchio had become a real boy while remaining an expertly crafted object in wood.The late-night club scene, for instance, features an emblematic face-off between inconsolable man and inconsolable woman. Nichols shoots the strip joint as a hermetic, sleazy underworld of electric pastels, blue and pink, where you can see the smears on the mirrors. It's a synthetic fantasy of debasement, a circle reserved for self-hating horndogs in a Dantesque Disneyland. But it also looks the way dives look in the wee hours when you feel like Larry and Alice do. The sequence is thus also a believable face-off between Larry, the most dominant character at his weakest moment, and Alice, the most wounded character at her most controlled.Larry spots Alice in a bubble-gum-colored wig and pays for her time in the Paradise Room, one of eight so named. Alice recognizes Larry, too, but refuses to act out her emotions about their defecting partners, or to help Larry act out his. Larry feels that the professionally teasing Alice is playing with him wantonly—as if a woman intentionally arouses every inflection of what a man projects onto her. Reacting to her as elusive "woman," an impassive archer-goddess, he calls her cold at heart, which is exactly wrong. She's the tenderest body in the movie, and the least adept at amorous sport. (She doesn't think love is a game, sport, war, which may be why she keeps losing.) She's cold only to the touch, especially of someone whose intentions are as suspect as Larry's. Yet Alice is also the most fiercely independent character of all. This seems to be why she can work at a strip club, because the clientele can never "touch" her.Marber's characters are recognizable as both individuals and configurations (of hormones and opportunities). They're also both "people" and types—the types that people become by acting on and responding to these inveterate, self-seeking impulses. What we witness is the process by which desperate men and women archetypally turn themselves and each other into stalkers, con artists, liars, brutes, and whores, and Marber's various ways of approaching character function surprisingly well in the partner-switching plot.The central effect of Marber's importing rough experience into a sexual roundelay is to counteract the easy-to-love sugariness of farce, to give it a less airy texture and a savory tang. Thus, in Closer the glamour doesn't quite stick to the action as it does in a Cary Grant movie such as The Awful Truth (1937) or The Philadelphia Story (1940). This isn't a fault—it's the point. Closer gives you the misbehavior of farce without the comic archetypes that allow you to accept the improbabilities of both the obstacles and their eventual resolution. And it manages to be as lightweight, flexible, and swift as farce without stripping the irresoluble anguish out of the characters' romantic entanglements.This is the pay-off to the combination of genres—allegory, naturalism, farce, and, inevitably, irony. Closer is paradoxical high-end movie farce, glossy and yet unvarnished. As Marber said in this October 1999 interview, "The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure—the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play—and inelegant emotion." Marber looks at farcical giddiness with a hard-won sobriety.Closer has a direct precursor in Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen. (Written in 1897 and privately circulated among the author's friends in 1900, Schnitzler's piece was not intended for performance and was not in fact performed publicly until 1921.) Reigen comprises ten encounters between lovers, showing them both before and after sex. One half of each pair then appears in the following scene with a new partner. The pairings give us a glimpse of every level of society: a prostitute, a soldier, and a servant up through a poet and an actress, on to the bourgeoisie and the nobility. Schnitzler trained as a doctor and had studied syphilis, and, although this is not made explicit in the text, the chain of lovers replicates the transmission of the spirochete, which recognizes no social boundaries, defers to no yearnings or honorable intentions.Schnitzler kept a diary for 50 years until just before his death; during one part of it he recorded every orgasm, with some of his many sexual partners. Reigen thus reflects the author's findings in the field as well as in the lab. In the middle of each of the play's ten scenes, Schnitzler places a row of asterisks to indicate the elided sex act, and in the second half of most of them he captures the male's mysterious post-orgasmic change of mood better than any work I know. He was scrupulously observant of "love" as a congeries of physiological facts and whatever social forms or emotional projections the participants consider necessary or desirable.Both Closer and Reigen take an ironic approach to farce, but on balance Marber tends to favor experience, Schnitzler observation. Thus, unlike Reigen, Closer is detached but not clinical—there's nothing as concrete as syphilis underlying the characters' movements or accounting for their bafflement and pain, for instance. Nonetheless, in both plays the low-temperature approach keeps the emotions from overwhelming other responses. In Closer, you register and respond to the characters' illusions, lies, opportunism, and manipulations, but you don't see them from their self-serving perspectives. For instance, when he goes to Larry's office sniveling that he wants Anna back, Dan gets his comeuppance from Larry, in both immediate and time-release forms. We're too acquainted with Larry's brutally effective "caveman" side, however, to cheer. (After seeing Dan for the first time at Anna's show, Larry says to her, "I could 'ave 'im" (as in a physical fight) like a pitbull marking his territory.)In this slightly sterile atmosphere, Marber enables you to identify with the characters in a way that doesn't permit you to make excuses, either. I could identify with all of them in part, and unless your love life has been considerably more placid than mine, you, too, will have done to others, or had done to you, everything that Larry & Anna & Dan & Alice do to each other. Though considerably toned up, this is how your romantic entanglements would look from a disinterested viewpoint. Closer is a voguish farce that, rather than making you wish you were like the characters, makes you wish that you hadn't been.Marber started his career as a stand-up comedian, but as clever as he is he doesn't make "cute" about the characters' behavior. At the same time, it doesn't feel perverse of the movie to use Così fan tutte as background music and cultural referent, because Marber is laying out the old bad news with a light hand: with a caviar knife not a trowel. Closer is even less idealistic than Così fan tutte, with its the 18th-century urbanity, and it's less "fun" as well, which is not to say it isn't a successful work of entertainment. The adroit dialogue isn't the brittle, polished repartee of classic farce, in which all the characters say at the perfect moment and with perfect timing what would be l'esprit de l'escalier for us, at best. Marber's highly theatrical writing makes the term "punchy" seem more literally descriptive than usual. The dialogue indicates why these people would find each other attractive but also the problems they'll run into. It has the depressive gleam of beauty reflected in polished jet.I particularly love when Alice first tells Dan she worked as a stripper in New York and then exclaims, "Look at your little eyes!" Since he's trying to win her, all he can manage is, "I can't see my little eyes." By the end of the movie you realize that though this is expert first-meeting banter, making Dan seem smart and funny, it also means he's not focusing on what he feels about what he's hearing. He saves the moment but only defers the damage, which will be worse for the deferral. Some of the lines, particularly Larry's, are bruising, but are sensationally effective in theatrical terms and emphasize the impossibility of taking back what's been done and said. The plot is, by the end, ingenious, but I was completely engrossed in the exchanges among the four characters and didn't think about the dénouement until it was happening.I have never liked a movie directed by Mike Nichols more than Closer. Marber's detachment perfectly suits the man who, in this 2 December 2004 interview, said of his relationship with Diane Sawyer:Love involves leaving each other intact, rather than trying to absorb the other person… My wife for instance doesn't answer the question, "What are you thinking?" … It's very interesting. I'm not as good at not answering as she is, but it's important to remember that you don't have to answer, "What are you thinking?" The point is that it's what you're thinking. It's not what you're saying. It's yours.As a director, Nichols has almost always been too sure a showman — you never needed to ask what he was thinking. Here he scores all Marber's points but with Marber's address (rather than, say, Neil Simon's, among the playwrights Nichols has been associated with). Marber hits everything just enough — we're not being petted or pummeled. And Nichols doesn't treat Closer like a surefire hit or a costly literary product. In his 70s and apparently having relaxed into his reputation and talent, he treats Marber's play with the honest respect he brought to his brisk, imaginatively engaged performance in David Hare's filmed reading of Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner (1997).Nichols does open the play up, but not obtrusively. As beautifully designed and shot as Closer is, I never felt it was merely picturesque. His handling of the adaptation is supple to the point of liquidity. He shoots the much-talked-about cybersex correspondence with an adept friskiness, setting it to the Overture of Rossini's La Cenerentola. Where the play uses tricky staging to juxtapose the two couples' break-ups, Nichols takes advantage of the intercutting possible in movies in a way that keeps you especially alert. The play flows from one set-piece to another, carrying the whole range of ideas and emotions along with it.The actors are more restricted by the combination of Marber's irony and artifice and Nichols's seasoned dexterity than the actors in the looser, more exploratory (1975), which is farce reimagined in naturalistic terms (and which did not begin life on the stage). This is not to say that actors can't give fine performances.Even Jude Law is more effective than usual. It's usually a problem that Law always manages concentration without density. Here it's just right for Dan, the romantic cipher, the fantasy lover who can't survive outside the fantasy. (As Larry says to him, he doesn't know the first thing about love because he doesn't understand compromise.) The still-insurmountable problem for Law, with his fibreless blond English dreaminess, is that he doesn't work to connect with the audience and has generated a lot of ill will. He isn't actor enough to make Dan's weakness memorable (which it might be if he were as talented at comedy as Ewan McGregor) and so he comes off as pathetically weak, an empty package for discarding.Julia Roberts gives some wonderful readings, particularly comic ones, when, for instance, she tells Larry the name of Dan's novel. And her expressions can be quite specifically eloquent, her lowered gaze during the break-up fight with Larry, for instance, in answer to his saying, "But we're happy, aren't we?" which he had intended as a rhetorical question.And Roberts isn't afraid of all that's unflattering about Anna, but she lacks the theatrical technique to draw us in to the character's waffling, which hurts other people worse than decisiveness would and doesn't even get her what she wants. Roberts also gets the hollow self-loathing of Anna's "I'm disgusting," spoken immediately after confessing how long she's been hiding her adultery. But Roberts never really seems disgusting here, or whorish or as enamored of a guilty fuck as Larry says she is, or as witchy as Alice says she is, and we can't be sure whether Marber intends the other characters to be misspeaking or exaggerating (doubtful) or whether Roberts is simply not right for the play. She's not wrong for it, but that isn't enough. (Probably a bigger problem for the movie's success is that when Roberts runs her starshine through a dark filter, it gets a little dim. Not as dim here as in Mary Reilly (1996), which was inferior material, but still.)Alice, for whom waitressing is not a temporary thing as Anna assumes, is the most masochistic role, just as Larry is the most sadistic, and she reminds you of any number of underappreciated nice girls in movies. Natalie Portman stands with the very best of them, Juliette Binoche in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), for example. Her performance even benefits from a certain gaucheness in her domestic scenes, which involve the most direct emoting in the movie. She gives Alice enough teary-babyishness to impress you with the amount of shellac she has applied over it in the public scenes. The inscrutably pert way she says "Thank you" over and over to Larry in the Paradise Room, for instance, is classic, so repetitive as to be maddening and yet beautifully expressive, as measured by what Alice is refusing to respond to. Portman has been directed very well so that the waif-dominatrix iciness Alice gives off registers as deliberate protective cover. When your life is out of kilter, or you just want money, you give the world what it expects and values, but you never identify success in the assumed role with satisfaction. This leaves Alice open to being misinterpreted and doesn't help her get what she wants anymore than Anna does, despite being less compromised than her rival. She's the last character we see, now turning heads as she bobs down a mobbed Times Square sidewalk in the same seductive slow motion as in the opening, on her own again.Clive Owen has the most impact among the four stars, probably because he has the role that is technically the hero, i.e., the man capable of effective action. This isn't heroic romance, however, and so you remain aware of what goes into Larry's maneuvering—not just the good intentions, intelligence, and judiciousness, but the male rage, class resentment, deviousness, and competitiveness. In his first, vain triumph after he's been told he's a cuckold, Larry provokes Anna into telling him the dirtiest truths about her affair and then says, "Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die … you fucked-up slag." (The scene is so superbly orchestrated that you credit Larry with the combined skills of Marber, Nichols, and Owen. You wouldn't want to hide a secret from him.) Owen doesn't hold back any more than Roberts does, but he does so without losing what makes him magnetic onscreen.Owen originated the role of Dan in London, so the change in roles protects him against seeming overpracticed in his role. More to his credit, you never think of Owen's considerable vocal flair as "theatrical," anyway. It's how a man like Larry dominates a room, a situation. He's Clark Gable the sexual realist with more temperament than Gable had as an actor (Gable always overrelied on simplified gestures, such as the trademark smirk) and without the airbrushing of Gable's character imposed by MGM.The fact that his face isn't perfect, and Larry admits it, only helps. Larry's emotions seem to be legible in the cells of Owen's mug, allowing him to get the most effect from utterly direct readings. Owen suggests Larry's awareness that he may not win, and in the strip club we see the negative side of his stability and strength—the sadomasochistic flagrance of the civilized caveman's misery. Owen's great feat is to embody his crafty archetype so thoroughly that he crosses the natural/artificial narrative boundary. As Larry, he's Harlequin armed with a truncheon, and his performance provides the heat and energy that fuse Marber's amazing composite structure.

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.

Movie Review: Notes on a Scandal - You Were Temptation

Alan Dale — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:23:52 EDT

She had begun to feel strangely detached from the proceedings. "I was sort of watching myself," she recalls. "Smiling at what a silly I was being. It was as if I had become my own rather heartless biographer." Next, I got out the toolbox from under the sink. Eddie's tools are terribly expensive and grand. I was nearly seduced by a hand-carved mallet with an ivory handle. But I settled in the end for a small, steel axe. (Less beauty, more power.) — Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal) (2003) WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS In Notes on a Scandal, adapted by playwright Patrick Marber from Zoë Heller's witchily astute novel, Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) is a 60-something history teacher at a London comprehensive school, who, if she ever had high expectations of the career in education she began nearly 35 years ago, has long since given up on them. Barbara is now a washed-out, scrub-haired, pinch-faced martinet who doesn't confine her sharp discipline to her own classroom. In all public spaces she speaks smartingly to the multi-ethnic "pubescent proles" from the school's catchment area, whom she despises because most of them will not profit from her instruction in ways she values. Barbara also provides voice-over narration read from a diary she has kept since the 1950s and we hear her refer to the students as "future shop assistants and plumbers. And doubtless the odd terrorist too." She plays the prison wardress and is effective precisely because she harbors no illusions about the students, none.Barbara doesn't partake of her colleagues' idealism about education in any formal way — in the movie, for instance, she refuses to write a full-scale report of how her department could be improved. Her flinty expression tells her fellow "educators" that they are incapable of altering her rock-bottom estimate of them. And sometimes she just tells them, though not in so many words. Her point is not lost, however, because she is a mistress of words (and Marber's screenplay, though theatrically compacted and slightly altered from the original, makes for a wonderful read right alongside Heller's novel). On the subject of the school, Barbara's tone is arsenical.Apart from her beloved cat Portia, Barbara does not find satisfaction outside work, either. A repressed lesbian, she had previously befriended Jennifer Dodd, a young female colleague who responded to the attention until Barbara grew too insistent. Barbara projected a shared life with the unwitting — and heterosexual — Jennifer. After Jennifer announced her engagement, she had to threaten Barbara with an injunction to keep her at bay.At the start of the school year, Barbara's eye is caught by Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), the new art teacher. Though Barbara initially describes Sheba quite tartly, and not at all inaccurately, she soon senses that Sheba is "different." Nothing like squishily upbeat Sue Hodge (Joanna Scanlan) — whom Barbara refers to in the novel as "Fatty" and calls a "living anthology of mediocre sentiments" — who advises Sheba to console herself with the "gems" among the students.In short order Barbara falls in love with Sheba, and a bond fortuitously forms between them when Barbara breaks up a fight in Sheba's class that the novice teacher plainly can't handle (and doesn't realize is about her). Sheba is so grateful she invites Barbara over for Sunday lunch with her older husband Richard (Bill Nighy) and their children — a petulant teenaged daughter named Polly (Juno Temple) and a son with Down's syndrome named Ben (Max Lewis), whom Barbara snidely pigeonholes in her diary as "a pocket princess" and "a somewhat tiresome court jester." After lunch, Sheba takes Barbara back to her home studio and confides lavishly in this woman she barely knows. The problem isn't that Sheba is imparting too much information but that she's unsuspectingly exciting Barbara, who will later preserve a fallen hair from Sheba's head between pages in her notebook and then save a seat at the school Christmas pageant for her as if they were attending it on a date.When Sheba doesn't appear at the pageant, Barbara goes looking and spies her putting her clothes on after dallying with Steven Connolly (Andrew Simpson), a 15-year-old student. (In the book, when Barbara tells of the school's history as a Victorian orphanage it's hard not to think of Heller as giving sly new meaning to Dickens's Dotheboys Hall.) Barbara is infuriated by what she thinks of as a "betrayal," though it's only a betrayal of her fantasies, which Sheba is unaware of. Barbara's denial is so impenetrable that she expresses her anger at this "rejection" as inflexible rectitude. As she tells her diary, however, this "disappointment" actually presents an opportunity to insinuate herself further into Sheba's life.Both women are unself-aware in ways that only entangle them further. After Sheba initially opens up to her after the lunch, Barbara (who is from a resolutely middle-class family but nonetheless "the more educated woman" compared to "posh" Sheba) writes mordantly of the "immediate incautious intimacy" in "bourgeois bohemia." This also means, however, that Sheba will be only too ready to confide every gradation of her affair to Barbara, as if the truth — which Sheba reveals in the light of her relatively innocuous habit of quasi-therapeutic self-examination — couldn't possibly harm her. Barbara makes Sheba promise to stop seeing Steven, which Sheba does without realizing what Barbara will read into this act of submission. In Barbara's mind, acutely observant and yet as emotionally turbulent as Polly's, this is the beginning of a love affair. For a living mummy like Barbara the absence of consensual signs and words is without significance.Barbara makes her boldest physical move at Sheba's house just when Sheba is expecting Steven, whom she couldn't resist seeing again. (Sheba should know better, but it's made clear that this fox-eyed scamp with burning cheeks seduces her rather than the reverse. Sheba isn't a predator, merely a fool, though far less deluded and remote in the movie than in the book.) This allows Barbara to increase her demands, imagining that she'll be able to break Sheba away from her family and even that it's for Sheba's greater happiness that she's doing so. When those demands become too great for Sheba, as they had for Jennifer, a spent Barbara, smeared with dirt from grubbing Portia's grave into which she also throws an expensive gift from Sheba, tattles to a fellow teacher with the lethal cunning of a Borgia courtier. The repercussions extend beyond Barbara's expectations but she doesn't care because the two unemployed ladies end up alone together in Barbara's basement flat.It is not a sense of duty that makes me go into the plot in such detail, but something more like gourmandise: I could talk about this movie non-stop for weeks on end. The characters' motives are base enough, and there's an odd combination of petty incidents having walloping consequences, but the ironies are as delicately layered and "delicious" as they could possibly be without a hint of preciosity. We're always aware that we're watching an ironic comedy about two women who can't control their lust and who bollocks their way into a parody of a relationship. At the same time, this wicked, pungent entertainment is also a work of sensibility, partaking of the still-vibrant tradition of the English novel (as did Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, Julian Fellowes's Separate Lies, and the Australian John Hillcoat and Nick Cave's The Proposition [all 2005]).Barbara's narration is an amazing combination of acute observation of character and class; nastiness and conniving that wouldn't be out of place in an abduction melodrama; and girlishly exalted sexual reveries and bitter resentment when abruptly awakened from them. The narration, which in the novel Barbara writes retrospectively with the goal of "shed[ding] a little light on the true nature of [Sheba's] personality", tells us much more about Barbara herself. Thus, we are privy to the workings of Barbara's strong mind as it is warped by her emotions, at the same time that she pushes the story along, chop chop.Although Barbara manipulates Sheba in the manner of a villainous seducer, and both women's offenses resemble romances of temptation, their stories have been conceived in terms of novelistic identification rather than allegorical admonition. That is, Barbara is not the personification of Sheba's temptation and its consequences — she's not apparitional (as Glenn Close is in Fatal Attraction [1987] by way of contrast). Thus, the whole raft of allegorical surnames — Covett, Hart, Pabblem, Rumer, Shreve, Bangs, Self — register without making the story symbolic or didactic. Barbara never becomes a "type," not even in the book when she attaches the Pecksniffian euphemism of "Sheba's unofficial guardian" to herself to justify rummaging in the younger woman's handbag. One of the great ironies of this brisk, candid approach to character is that Barbara's self-deception is so exactingly portrayed you wouldn't have a keener sense of what it's like to be Barbara if you were Barbara.She remarks that she was a quiet girl and dissembles to Sheba by saying that she never had time to have children, but even as a lesbian Barbara has faded and withered without having bloomed. It's apparent she has no memories to carry her into old age, and it's this depth of dustiness that puts people off and makes every new day as bleak as that past. The stern exterior, the commanding air, which present the very image of adult authority, result from sexual repression that has left her chaotically delusional: under the crusty shell of a drab old maid bubble the gooey insides of a lovesick girl who exults about her flaxen-haired "friend" to her diary and plasters the pages with gold stars. But her repression is hers; Marber explicitly refuses to lay it off on the "deferred gratification stock" from which she comes. As we see during a Christmas get-together, Barbara's family attempts to accept her as a lesbian; she coldly says she doesn't know what her sister is talking about.Barbara is believably repellent but much of her acerbic commentary is dead-on, and many of us would love to treat bureaucratic paper-shuffling with the open contempt it deserves. In the book, Heller gives Barbara more "devastating" speeches on various topics: the "unrelenting sanctimony" and "titillated fury" of the press coverage of statutory rape cases; her colleagues' "do-gooding fantasies" of "making a difference"; the tendency of "bleeding hearts" to concoct "soppy rationalizations for delinquency". Marber understandably had to trim them because onscreen they would probably sound smug, editorializing, as if we were supposed to like Barbara because we agreed with her.When it comes to Barbara's early comments about Sheba's sense of entitlement, they are devastatingly right and funny, even if tonally off (too much feeling invested). But let's be frank, even when Barbara's comments descend to meanness — with respect to Sue Hodge and Ben — it's possible to identify with her because you know her disappointment has cut her off from other people and she has no idea what to do about it. Heller has constructed character with classic novelistic scrupulousness and Marber, whose original work is rather more vulcanized, fully respects it.The narration goes back to the beginnings of naturalistic prose fiction in the epistolary novel, replicating every nuance of the character's personality in her own voice. At the same time, however, despite Barbara's "wish to be as rigorously and unsparingly truthful as possible" about herself in both book and film, we gather so much more information about Barbara than she intends to impart or would acknowledge as true that she is also that distinctively modern-ironic creature, the unreliable narrator, in the tradition of Ford Madox Ford's John Dowell and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. In fact, Barbara is no less an object of irony than the people she describes so scathingly, and as much as any movie I can think of Notes on a Scandal balances the audience's compassion for, amusement at, and aversion to its protagonist.Thus, what Barbara experiences as intolerable vulnerability looks like predation from the outside, and the moviemakers don't press us to resolve our ambivalence. Still, Notes on a Scandal is more fascinating the more you can identify with maddening Barbara — to see yourself as others may have seen you at those times when you have projected your own far-fetched hopes onto someone else, or made demands on people who don't realize you think they're offering what you've tacitly accepted as yours. Identification with Barbara darkens the outré anecdote into mourning shade. One of Marber's very best additions is Polly's line when she sees Barbara coming to speak to her mother after the scandal has broken: "Oh, Jesus wept! The spectre at the feast!" At certain times someone might have said this about almost any one of us with equal justice.It also makes a huge difference that we do not have the same access to Sheba's interior as to Barbara's. If we did, the temptation would be too great to identify with the pretty one and thus excuse the affair that puts her in Barbara's clutches, which would be to turn naturalism into melodrama. At the same time, the movie's Sheba is not the baffling creature she is in the novel, who ends up a husk, in Barbara's keeping. The movie's Sheba had to be different from the book's shifty, perverse, and arrogant adulteress, because any actress has too much presence to be that creepy without putting us off the story.The movie's Sheba is a downy vision of how money and class make swans of certain Englishwomen, which is key to her justification of her sexual indiscretion. The world simply is nothing like the swan pond she expected. Sheba looks longingly at an old photo of herself as a kohl-eyed punk as if to ask, How did I lose what I had? She also plays Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1980 LP Kaleidoscope for Steven, hoping to regain what she lost, not realizing the trap that nostalgia for adolescence sets. Without seeming inordinately spoiled, Sheba clearly feels she deserves a little something more when it presents itself in an unlikely, not to mention illegal, form.Thus, in the movie Sheba is as articulate, "creative," loving, and hopeful as nature and nurture could make her, so we can understand why ordinary life would not be fulfilling in the way she hoped it would be. At the same time, while Blanchett's Sheba may be more lovely in transgression than we would be, the movie casts Barbara's cold eye on her rationalizations and puts a stop to any romantic daydreaming on our part. The movie presents Sheba more sympathetically than Heller did, and even somewhat indulgently, but the book's fundamental astringency remains.The script is spectacularly fine, but it wouldn't be nearly as effective without Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. This makes sense because Marber wrote the script with them in mind, and I say this without being a fan of either actress. Never has a less versatile or more ungiving movie actress than Dench been used as indiscriminately, though it's clear why directors and up-market audiences like her: she marshals and deploys her immense technical resources with military precision. So did the great Edith Evans, but unlike Dench, Evans enjoyed the fancy-dress, the occasion for grand gesture that playacting provided, the mannered dialogue that seemed to call for her archly reverberant delivery (that voice could quaver like a towering fruit-filled Jell-o mold). Dench conveys a sense of gravity, of somewhat humorless duty. She has become the personification of English theatrical skill at a time of morbid self-doubt, Britannia as a corroded but still razor-sharp battleaxe. She may be a great actress, but one who plays both Lady Bracknell and Lady Catherine de Bourg without getting laughs is not my kind of great actress.All of which makes her perfect for Barbara, and the sophistication and adamantine intelligence that usually keep Dench from melting into her characters is just right for Barbara, helplessly frozen inside herself. It's brilliant casting: that magnificent age-cracked picklepuss emphasizes the precision of the writing because we can see Barbara blasting possibilities with her glance and then retreating even further from what she experiences as a world without possibilities.Neither has Dench's delivery ever been so pointed — the humorlessness is brilliantly comic here. The imperious way this schoolmarm, this crone uses the term "Madam," for instance, is unforgettable, truly threatening and yet very, very funny. It's a vestige of the most Dostoevskian bits in the book, such as Barbara's disquisition on the ways in which lonely people are such terrible snobs about each other, "afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness". Heller, Marber, and now Dench are all capable of insights that make you shudder and laugh at the same time.And Dench by nature makes Barbara's emotionality believable without asking the audience for sympathy. There's always something welcome about Dench's refusal of easy connections with the audience, and here it moves her toward a bigger prize. Hollywood's legion of terminal starlets, desperate to be liked (and to be found as attractive as their granddaughters), are put to shame en masse by the fearlessness of Dench, who was over 70 when this movie was shot. In her hands, Barbara's story suggests how teensy a tragedy you can make of your emotional life. There are only a scattering of Shakespearean roles for women in this range, so Dench has essentially invented one. Though her story is outside the precincts of tragedy in a formal sense, Barbara acts with a tragic hero's combination of vigor and blindness. And Dench is so vivid that she turns this parched, underpaid professional into a confiding, self-defeating monster — Richard III in squalid middle-class miniature.Cate Blanchett has always underwhelmed me, too, though in her case it's because she's so adaptable as to be forgettable while always appearing aglow with self-satisfaction, as if praise and stardom were hers by right, like income from a trust fund. Just as Dench's carefulness and reserve work for Barbara, however, Blanchett's sense of entitlement works for Sheba. It gives her a certain narcissism that explains why this likeable, intelligent woman would be such a dilettante — not just as an artist and teacher but in her private life as well. It helps enormously that director Richard Eyre shows us Sheba as Barbara sees her, in rapturous, silky slow motion while frankly preserving the insanity of her sexual caprice. (This is nailed down in the scene in which Steven breaks it off with Sheba, exactly as Barbara has spitefully predicted.)Blanchett, a visual glory, draws us to Sheba yet does her share in dramatizing the perception that there are two, opposite ways of prolonging adolescent injudiciousness: by being totally out of touch with your feelings like Barbara, or by being too much in touch with them like Sheba. Barbara can't entirely repress her troubling emotions; they will out. But not all impulses are to be indulged equally, as Sheba learns startlingly late, that is, when her lover is younger than her daughter's boyfriend and in part only because the boy's mother pummels some sense into her and the police are alerted. (If one's superego is crucially underactive it will simply be externalized.)After her exposure, Sheba leaves her house at Richard's request and hides from the tabloid press at Barbara's. In the third-act climax, Sheba, bored and uncertain to the point of distraction, puts on her old Siouxsie Sioux makeup, as if the answer lay behind her rather than before. She notices a gold star stuck to her foot and, in an expertly rhythmed sequence, goes from gold star to a crumpled journal page in the waste basket to a search for the full trove — Barbara's diaries, which reveal not only her feelings for Sheba and her plot to win her but the fact that it was she who informed on Sheba and Steven. When Barbara returns from a frugal outing at the supermarket, Sheba turns on her and Blanchett lets it rip, using vocal and emotional resources I had not previously suspected she possessed. It's a phenomenal scene, in which Blanchett not only extends herself as an actress but extends the character as well (Sheba finds some footing) at maximal dramatic pitch.Sheba beats into Barbara, with tongue and fist, how Barbara's secret attachment and manipulativeness, her snideness and self-regard, appear to an observer whose disenchantment now equals her own. It is immensely, theatrically gratifying to have Sheba fling some home truths directly into the Gorgon's face, with a glass-splinter wit to match Barbara's own but an electrified physicality pushing it home. And the inadequacy of Barbara's responses jacks the comedy up that much further while deepening the pathos. When Sheba yells that she could get two years' prison as a result of Barbara's snitching, Marber has the older woman attempt to soothe her with, "They'll fly by! I'll visit every week." It's a miraculous high point, one of the crispest displays of pyrotechnical temperament in movie history and thoroughly dictated by the narrative structure. It provides as great a release for viewers as sex would have been for Barbara.Worked up beyond the power of articulation, Sheba runs out with the incriminating diary among the press lurking outside Barbara's door. She cannot bring herself to retaliate, however, but can only roar, nightshade queen of the mosh pit one last time. Suddenly bewildered and self-conscious, Sheba goes back inside with the notebook still in hand. She attempts to speak plainly to Barbara — elucidating, for instance, the insignificance of a merely polite invitation she had made some time back — and can only marvel that Barbara can't take in even this much. Finally, with exhausted and pitying generosity, Sheba returns the diary to its mad author and leaves, the surest sign that this is naturalism and not melodrama. Naturalism in an ironic-tragic vein, because Sheba isn't well suited to the changes that will be necessary from here on out and Barbara is incapable of them. Sheba at last understands what's been going on but what will her spiritual indolence be like without her illusions of safety? As for Barbara, we can guess what she'll be up to with the next compliant young thing she comes across.Last but not least, this is a great stride forward for Richard Eyre, who manages to keep the highly internal intrigue from becoming self-consciously "literary" (practically a miracle after his work on Iris [2001] and the literal-minded yet prancingly self-pleased Stage Beauty [2004]). In terms of movement and complexity, Eyre's work here can be spoken of in the same breath as Fred Schepisi's adaptation of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Working with the super-alert present-tense cinematographer Chris Menges and the film editors John Bloom and Antonia Van Drimmelen, Eyre moves the story along swiftly and yet never descends into moviemaking "flash." You may not be aware of his hand, but that's because he gets both the emotions and the irony breathlessly right. The story fairly absorbs you. And what he's done for these actresses deserves some kind of monument.

Movie Review: Jacques Rivette's L'Amour fou - Mr. and Mrs. Natural

Alan Dale — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:17:48 EDT

"Of all our authors," François Mauriac once said, "Racine is one of the least accessible to the peoples of other countries." Racine presents special difficulties for foreigners. They are by no means confined to foreigners (3). -- Martin Turnell, Jean Racine - Dramatist (1972)In Jacques Rivette's L'Amour fou (1969), a company of young Parisian actors attempts a more accessible rendering of Racine's Andromaque (1667) without changing the text. Perhaps you have to be French, or to have taken your French classes very seriously, to appreciate Rivette's gambit.Racine appropriated the story of Andromache (Hector's widow, reduced to concubinage after Troy's defeat) from Euripides, Virgil, and Seneca and gave it a classicizing treatment. The strange thing, for us now certainly, is that while the plot has to do with the destruction of a chain of four unrequited lovers (as in A Midsummer Night's Dream but without the final, restorative drops of magic flower juice), Racine was the most Apollonian of poets to treat the Dionysian emotional disorder of tragic drama. The immaculate surface of his plays can, in fact, mislead. In his 1961 autobiographical volume George, the Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams wrote of his own inability to digest Racine upon first acquaintance: "Racine is the most adult of authors, with a classic simplicity bound to deceive the most precocious student by his look of poverty: to the immature eye, the exquisitely right can look like the pedantically trite" (187).Racine's dialogue, written in rhymed alexandrine couplets (that is, paired lines of exactly twelve syllables each), has been called "rapid, economical, but never realistic" (90) by Geoffrey Brereton in Jean Racine: A Critical Biography (1951) and tends to strike the modern ear as highly declamatory. Since Racine used the academically "purified" vocabulary of 17th-century French, his poetry is also thin on original imagery, resorting instead to more efficient stock metaphors. This is why Racine's verse has been referred to as "jargon raised to the level of great poetry," as reported by Brereton (325).Racine's linguistic formality, which helps establish the characters' aristocratic decorum—even as they simmer, connive, rage in defeat, and crack up—is key to the effect of the plays. As Turnell generalizes:The contrast between the outward dignity of palace life and the ferocious passions unleashed is so extraordinary, the ending with reports of violent deaths pouring in and the sight of principals who have poisoned or stabbed themselves to death, intensified in one instance by the ranting of a madman, that we feel slightly dazed, wondering how it could all have happened, how people could have got themselves into quite such a mess (10).The short answer is "sex," but there's also remarkable psychological acuity about the ravages of thwarted desire. And since Racine expresses this more in strictly measured words than action, his drama is both headlong and stately, like a galloping charger in a sculptural frieze. Turnell argues that this is precisely where Racine's poetic genius lies: "in the contrast between the formal style and open violence, in the spectacle of the complete disintegration of personality within the walls of the alexandrine" (79). Because you understand the characters' feelings only by listening carefully to the compact verse, the turmoil can seem to be unfolding in a little duplicate theater in your brain, a ceremonial and yet intimate spectacle.Racine is a colossus of French culture (e.g., the face on the old 50-franc note) but his plays cannot be understood or enjoyed without submission to their protocol and the ethos behind it. In this regard it's interesting to note that when Rossini's librettist Andrea Leone Tottola adapted Andromaque, he remained faithful to Racine and yet de-emphasized the stalwart, principled captive Andromaca in favor of Ermione, Andromaca's inflamed Greek rival who causes the misery that overtakes all the characters. (The opera, tellingly retitled Ermione, received its first performance in 1819 at the San Carlo in Naples and its second only in 1987 at the Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival.)Like Racine's play, Ermione is moved by waves and then convulsions of both noble and ignoble desire, fury, and remorse, but there is greater lyric variation than alexandrine couplets permit, and this fractures the solemnity, burnished like a monumental sarcophagus, for which Racine, wielding his pen incisively yet weightily, as much like a chisel as a quill, is noted. First of all, Tottola's verse varies metrically. In addition, while Racine could split a line among as many as four characters, Rossini can have more than one character vocalize at the same time, quite apart from the contributions of the chorus. And he could handle the recitative in a different manner altogether.Finally, Rossini dictates the changes of tempo and his vocal writing shoots out coloratura sprigs in abundance; the sound of the composer's work itself conveys the stress that Racine can inform us of only in words. As a result, the music of Ermione is nakedly feverish whereas the verse of Andromaque conveys, in Brereton's words, "the atmosphere of the assize court temperately idealized" (92). (The latter could also be said of Mozart's idealistic Enlightenment romance La Clemenza di Tito, a markedly similar story but with an allegorically "managed" happy outcome.)In Landmarks in French Literature (1912), Lytton Strachey wrote, "The Elizabethan tradition has died out — or rather it has left the theatre, and become absorbed in the modern novel; and it is the drama of crisis — such as Racine conceived it — which is now the accepted model of what a stage-play should be." This may be so with respect to the lean structure of modern plays, but they sound and feel more like Rossini's version of this tale than Racine's. (This is so even though Racine seems more "modern" in some ways, beginning Andromaque in the middle of a conversation, for instance, whereas Ermione inserts two squarely explanatory scenes before the play's opening.)Rossini adapted Andromaque before the advent of theatrical naturalism, which is the direction in which Rivette further pushes Racine in L'Amour fou. In the movie, Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) is playing Pyrrhus and also directing. Sébastien doesn't want the actors to recite the alexandrines but to speak them as if their characters were saying them for the first time and thereby to let the rhythm emerge — somehow. His goal is to make this 17th-century tragedy, which was first read to Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans and first performed in the Queen's apartments in the Louvre, feel natural to his mid-20th-century paying public.A contemporary source cited by Turnell reports that Racine's preference, too, was for the actors to deliver the lines with a "beau naturel" (a pleasing naturalness or simplicity; 346). This would be relatively easy for a 17th-century company working within the conventions of the kind of theater Andromaque typifies — they were part of the world that developed the style. The problem for Sébastien, by contrast, is that he doesn't have a technique to realize his ambition. Thus, he ends up drilling the cast endlessly and aimlessly, trusting that what he's after will emerge, although he can't quite specify what he's after.Not for want of trying, however. About half the movie consists of the rehearsals for Andromaque and Sébastien's discussions about his approach both with fellow company members and with a journalist who is shooting a TV documentary about the production. (The body of the movie is in 35mm while the TV footage was shot on 16mm, both in black and white.) The most astonishing thing we learn is that Sébastien thinks that his method will put more emphasis on the actors and their insights and less on the director. That is, Sébastien is enforcing on his cast an idiosyncratic, vaguely formulated, and perhaps unachievable approach to the play as a way of de-emphasizing his own contribution. It's lunacy: he wants the actors to discover his great idea on their own. He'll know when it's right, but it never is.Sébastien stands in for Rivette, who films much of the rehearsals in real time and gets at the uncertainty and tedium of them suggested by the French word for rehearsal, "la répétition." There's no way a movie director who demands his audience's attention for 252 minutes in order to indulge an attempt to approximate unstaged reality has truly relinquished his reins or can be unaware that this is so. Rivette, however, has a huge advantage over Sébastien because, unlike a modern director staging an interpretation of Racine, Rivette has conceived his modern narrative in terms of naturalistic technique from the beginning.At the same time we can see that Rivette's modern story is based on Andromaque. Sébastien's wife Claire (Bulle Ogier) was originally cast as Racine's Hermione but dropped out after a disagreement. Alone in their apartment while Sébastien rehearses day and night, sometimes so late that he sleeps over with one of the women in the company, Claire starts unraveling. At first she continues to work on her role with a tape recorder, but then becomes distracted. She begins recording telephone calls, and then, in a understated but cuckoo parody of Sébastien's — and Rivette's — forays into naturalism, she holds the microphone up to capture the street noise that comes in through the window.Some of Claire's actions are more comprehensible than others. For example, she tapes a call from a young actress who breathily begs for a role in Sébastien's new production, any role no matter how small, and it's easy to believe that she wouldn't have called if Sébastien were not putting something out there to elicit such responses. This also means that while Claire may be out of the production, she is nonetheless in the position of Hermione, waiting for Pyrrhus's final decision as to whether he'll marry her as agreed or jilt her for Andromaque. Every now and then, while Sébastien is at the theater, Claire slips away to have perfunctory ego-stroking sex with an old flame, and thus she also has her Oreste. All that's missing is the dramatic structure which herds the characters toward the inevitable, devastating climax—slaughter at the altar of Hymen.More and more, however, Claire's identity simply crumbles, which only pushes Sébastien closer to the company. At length the cast and crew realize that Sébastien's approach isn't gaining traction and at the peak of frustration he holes up for two days with Claire. He wants to reassure her that he is still primarily committed to her, but his motive may be more opportunistic than that. Whatever, it's heaven for Claire, though by this point she's so devouringly needy that their vacation from the outside world becomes an id-fest, in which they destroy the furnishings and fixtures of their apartment between rounds of sex. (Reputedly, this extraordinary passage is based on Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard's histrionic break-up; it could also be the kernel for Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972).)You can continue to draw analogies between Claire and Sébastien as Hermione and Pyrrhus. In the apartment, for instance, it's as if Claire and Sébastien dig down and "discover" that the perfect marriage is all impulse and no structure, which is a fair description of what Racine's Pyrrhus wants (to renege on his betrothal to Hermione and go against his own people's wish by marrying Andromaque, the prize spoils of war, his defeated enemy's widow, instead). But what we see is that "actual" emotional trauma is even less like Racine than a naturalistic interpretation of Racine would be, precisely because the tragic narrative structure and the alexandrines have no analogy in "life." L'Amour fou reflects the texture-over-time of modern experience because those are the terms in which Rivette laid out the narrative.Moreover, while Sébastien wants his actors to arrive at the emotional core of Andromaque via their own instincts, he's not getting past those instincts, if he's getting that far. One of the women in the company tells him that he can't work out his feelings through the production, but he doesn't hear. Thus, the movie is not "about" the confusion between art and life, but shows the separation of the two by dramatizing the confusion of a man of the theater who doesn't grasp its significance. Rivette depicts at length the collapse of a form of youthful radicalism due to inherent contradictions in its principles, and L'Amour fou is as daringly clear-sighted about what these young people fail to achieve in the theater as Godard's La Chinoise (1967) is about the limitations of the militant political wing of the student movement of the '60s.Sébastien is lost long before he knows it and the sidelined Claire takes over the movie like a malignant wraith. No lead actress has ever played crazy less sentimentally than Bulle Ogier, who makes Claire almost dead-fishy in her mental disarray. There's no way for the other characters to connect with her stray, self-pitying, obsessive turns of thought, and she's incapable of accepting help, not in the sense that she'd like to but can't bring herself to, but in the more realistic sense that she doesn't recognize it as helpful. You can piece together how Claire got in such a state, but Rivette directs Ogier to make Claire's mania quite believably, sickeningly, Claire's own. Her emptiness is so genuine you can't project onto her, not even where in another movie you might, e.g., when Claire tries to steal a man's dog after Sébastien has said that a dog of that breed on a postcard resembles her.In Racine, the inability to curb desire leads to tragedy. In L'Amour fou it leads to irony. Claire is both slighted and nuts, like Hermione, but she isn't a tragic figure. Rather, she's drawn naturalistically, i.e., with scrupulous fidelity to the facts of experience, such as they are, and her narcissism makes her psychologically vulnerable but also tough, a survivor whose escape route runs through bedlam. Once Claire draws Sébastien into her project of externalizing the mare's nest of her thoughts and emotions, and their collaboration runs its course, she's restored to herself and is free. Sébastien is heroic in terms of his artistic intelligence and effort, but the best sailor isn't likely to bring a rudderless ship to port. Claire turns out to be the more powerful "director" by far. Hearing of Claire's departure on opening night, Sébastien is so thrown that he doesn't even show up for the debut of his misbegotten enterprise.Sébastien's proposed contemporizing performance of a classicizing tragedy (in other words, one that was already looking backwards from the 17th century) may not be as funny as the Broadway musical version of Faust attempted in The Band Wagon (1953), but it has a high wit and gives you considerably more to ponder. The irony is subtle — there are only a few times when something Sébastien says makes you laugh out loud — but irresistible for anyone interested in narrative paradox. L'Amour fou is one of the few movies, and one of the best, to deal directly with a literary subject. It's at the very pinnacle, alongside Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Movie Review: Dreamgirls - Half and Half

Alan Dale — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:20:28 EST

To say that Dreamgirls is a fictionalized account of Diana Ross and The Supremes is misleading. Rather, the narrative structure follows the climb to dominance of Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Jamie Foxx), the Berry Gordy, Jr.-like macher who repackages black musical performers for a broader market. Curtis's story is, like Citizen Kane (1941), a romance of temptation in which the Faustian protagonist's own ambition is his Mephistopheles. And like Kane's, Curtis's perdition comes disguised as unparalleled success. His record company, based on Gordy's Motown, and his L.A. mansion are the boundaries of his lonely hell on earth (one so emotionally parched that even his Persephone takes off for good). As in soap opera, the fact that it's a deluxe hell, with set and costume design meant to stimulate the audience's materialist salivary glands, is ignored.When the movie starts, Curtis is a used car salesman who hangs around backstage at a local Detroit theater hoping to break in as an artists' manager. Having seen too many black composers robbed of royalties, and too many R&B scorchers turned into bland pop hits in covers by white groups, Curtis liquidates his inventory and invests the proceeds in a label run by and for African-Americans. His goal is laudable, but he achieves his dream by turning it into something achievable.The first bad news is that success in the music business requires Curtis to engage in the corrupt practices of the era: he converts cars into payola and he's on his way. In addition, Curtis is totally focused on doing what it takes to get big money. His best shot, as he sees it, is to groom his acts so that their original versions can cross over from the R&B audience to the pop audience. He reshapes a girl group called The Dreamettes, led by Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), a raucous, ample-figured, soulful R&B singer, by moving the traditionally winsome Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) into the lead spot. The more cosmetically appealing trio, rechristened The Dreams, blasts to the top of the more lucrative pop charts, i.e., the ones that track sales to white teens.Curtis later tells Deena, then his disgruntled wife and star act, that he put her up front because she had a less characterful voice than Effie — it was all about an image he could manipulate. (Such roman-à-clef cattiness is on a par with having Citizen Kane discover an empty liquor bottle in the deserted room of Susan Alexander - i.e., Marion Davies - and is likewise easy to believe.) This also means that Curtis doesn't wait for white artists to tone "his" songs down — he does it himself and reaps the unprecedented benefits, which is also to say that he wins the war by capitulating before it starts. In addition — and this is where the story gets conventional, in its own bland, crossover way — the narrative emphasizes that Curtis does what he has to do to succeed, no matter whom he has to use, hurt, or destroy.Curtis's temptation romance is the storyline that holds all the others together, and he is the instigator all the other characters react to, but he's not the central character. (And once again, as in Ray (2004), Foxx suggests a fine performance without being given the material to realize it.) Moreover, nobody else is the central character, either. Everybody else has his or her quest and temptation, and the movie turns into a melodrama in which all parties purify themselves by rejecting Curtis and succeeding without him, or, in one case, by dying.Not surprisingly, the most entertaining characters surrounding Curtis are the self-destructive ones. Eddie Murphy plays James "Thunder" Early, a soul wailer modeled after James Brown (with dabs of Marvin Gaye), as a great intuitive pop artist who thinks of his creative work as a non-stop party in a traveling bordello. Jimmy doesn't need to take his music seriously in order for it to be fully achieved; in fact, not taking it seriously is part of what completes it. He embodies all our favorite lower impulses in the tremblingly responsive flesh, his voice the call of the urban wild. But Jimmy takes casualness to the point of prodigality, and is too burned out to fight Curtis when he decides he does want to be taken seriously. By the time the man disappears, the artist has already gone ahead.With his sketch comedy skills Murphy mimics the snake-hipped, sex-and-blues raptures of countless black male singers. The real felicity of the casting, however, is that the edge of parody Murphy brings to the numbers make them more, rather than less, intense because his style of comedy merges with the deeper comic sense that Jimmy expresses in his music: the sheer carnal wonder of being alive.It can't all be glad tidings; Jimmy exudes too much raw, ornery power for that. The high point of the movie comes when Curtis brings his troupe to Miami where he has formed tentative connections with a hotel nightclub owner who thinks his patrons will be uncomfortable watching black performers in such an intimate setting. Curtis has warned the performers to play it down, but Jimmy just can't help himself and goes all "black" on the audience in a way that harms Curtis the dealmaker and also displays contempt, whether consciously or not, for Curtis's deracinating business plan. As an actor, Murphy has the advantage of his age and expertly uses the map of experience incised on his comedian's happy face. We may presume that Murphy has learned from his own unruly life's record, but as Jimmy he shows what experience teaches even those who can't profit from its lessons.The female skyrocket is Effie, who is dating Curtis at the time he replaces her with Deena (who also moves into his bed). Early on, as this confident, ambitious, headstrong teen, Hudson sings the knock-off numbers in the manner of Etta James's up-tempo tunes (e.g., "Something's Got a Hold on Me," "Pushover") in which her voice is so round it rolls. And Hudson wags her dialogue with some of Bessie Smith's earthy sass. During Effie's initial ascent, Hudson steals every scene she's in, onstage and off.Then, as Curtis edges Effie out of the spotlight, Hudson is reduced to a self-pitying sullenness and rage that undermines everything that was so appealing about the tough young bundle of a womanish girl. Worse is the fact that Effie doesn't die broke at the age of 32 as did Florence Ballard, the member of The Supremes that Effie correlates to, but makes a long, drawn-out trudge back to self-respect — and the fame and fortune that it invariably leads to as we all know from our own lives. Effie's rise and fall and rise are exaggerated and yet drably predictable, just as they would be in the soaps. When you also consider that the script suggests Curtis causes Jimmy to O.D. (not intentionally, but by severing their contract), the movie starts to seem like a clearinghouse of sentimental dramaturgy.Effie's scenes might have been enjoyable with more flamboyance even without more truth, although Hudson probably is not yet up to the demands of higher theatrical style. She doesn't, for instance, have the technique to age Effie over the movie's 15-or-so-year time span. She gets more petulant but doesn't seem toughened or deadened, not on the inside certainly, and as a result she actually appears increasingly baby-faced. Until she's reborn as Roberta Flack, that is.Of course, the entire audience enters the theater waiting for Hudson's version of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," made famous by Jennifer Holliday in the original Broadway production. This number is rousing but tries so hard to be a non-stop gusher that it becomes monotonous. Yes, it's a feat to pull it off, but its appeal is basically trashy, a Broadway belter's dream of a masochistic show-stopper, something Judy Garland could have wrung out at Carnegie Hall if she'd grown up singing in a gospel choir. The song is all climax and Holliday puts it over by main force — screaming, belching, stomping, woo-wooing, gasping. The only way to top Holliday would be for the actress to die onstage after the last note.Holliday has the advantage of being more womanly than Hudson, but there's also the problem of Hudson's voice, which flattens out as she repeatedly attempts to outdo her previous paroxysm. She simply doesn't have the repertoire of skills — you could say tricks — that Holliday commands. A singer could have a lot worse voice than Hudson's — Janis Joplin's, for instance — and give a more expressive rendition. (The dramatic tact necessary to make a song build, the gift Barbra Streisand had in abundance, is currently out of fashion, so Céline Dion, squalling verse after verse after verse, as if she were trying to ring a fairground bell using her uvula as the sledgehammer, now passes for a diva.) In addition, Effie's big solo comes after a truly bad group recitative in which the characters either say what we already know or something that hasn't been prepared for at all, and the fun is over. The movie is nothing but soap opera from this point on.Still, the phoniest aspect of the show is making Deena a nice girl who not only has no intention of hurting Effie, but who begs Curtis not to make her the lead singer instead of her chubby friend (an approach at least as hoary as Donizetti's 1830 Anna Bolena, in which Jane Seymour implores Henry VIII not to cast off Anne Boleyn to marry her). I'm sorry, are we talking about the Diana Ross here? It's safe to say that no one who didn't want to be the group's lead singer and eventually a solo superstar would get where Miss Deena Jones gets in Dreamgirls. There is a potentially interesting irony in the fact that Effie, who possesses not only a more exciting voice but what we assume is a survivor's impudence as well, is the one who breaks down, while the more fragile Deena scales new heights for a black pop singer. The moviemakers are not interested in irony, however, and they leave it completely undeveloped.But if the purveyors of such material won't supply the irony, we just have to bring it ourselves. Deena is innocent of all ambition, and it not only isn't believable, it makes her seem downright insipid, a quality that Beyoncé does not need any help with as an actress. She lacked the growl-and-prowl necessary for the blaxploitation mama in Goldmember (2002), and here she's not so much as asked for anything like the uncontainable narcissistic exuberance that made Ross such a hot-footed glamazon.As things go downhill with Curtis's management of Deena's career, Beyoncé ends up simpering, and the older and more experienced Deena is supposed to be, the more noticeable Beyoncé's "niceness" becomes. (Her voice makes her as girlish as the white ingénues in Hollywood movies of the '40s and '50s; compared to Beyoncé, breathy, seducible Doris Day sounds like a phone-sex siren.) And, like Hudson, Beyoncé doesn't seem to age, but just takes on a weird, fashion-doll stiffness. The Deena subplot, in fact, starts to resemble Diana Ross's Mahogany (1975, directed by Gordy, costumes by Ross) — the agony of beauty, talent, love, fame, and fortune, with a thousand outfit changes — minus the relief valve of unintentional camp which is all that makes Mahogany watchable.The third member of The Dreams, Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose), has much less material than Effie and Deena. Hers is the classic sudser role of a married man's other woman, and she seems to be included not because historically there were always three members of The Supremes but because there have always been three girls in compare-and-contrast movies like Sally, Irene, and Mary (1925), Three on a Match (1932), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Les Girls (1957), Valley of the Dolls (1967), and Sparkle (1976), the most on-point precursor). Finally, Danny Glover as Marty Madison, Jimmy's first manager from whom Curtis romances him, and who later represents Effie in her comeback, shows up periodically to presage what everybody else will feel about Curtis by the end of the movie.There are just too many cornball storylines for the simplistic romance/melodrama structure. All these trajectories — the struggles, triumphs, and set-backs — might have been coordinated if the movie had been conceived of as the assimilation epic of African-American pop artistry and entrepreneurship. Adapting the Broadway hit, however, writer-director Bill Condon simply hasn't thought that big (or perhaps wasn't free to), and what he presents is too disorganized, even on its own terms. The ending, a last reunion of The Dreams that coincides with several other realizations and reconciliations, is so blatant and clumsy that you could lose all respect for the director though you'd loved everything that came before, which I certainly did not.The major problem with the movie version of Dreamgirls isn't the music, it's the dramatic structure. Can the music save it? While The Dreams are on their way up I would say yes. The movie opens at an amateur night contest in which some faked R&B numbers in a range of styles rock the house. It's also a plus that in the rising action the performers mostly sing onstage rather than just bursting into song. Crisply choreographed by Fatima Robinson, these numbers make you feel like you're burning calories just by sitting and watching. The burst-into-song numbers to come are all duds, and the ersatz singer-songwriter and disco numbers of the '70s aren't as enjoyable as the earlier material. It's possible that even if the later songs were good, the accretion of stale dramatic ideas would have overwhelmed them. Yet as painful as the movie had become by the end, I could have happily sat through the first half a second time, though I was barely able to sit through the second half once.

Movie Review: Amy Sedaris in Strangers With Candy - The Imp of the Imperfectible

Alan Dale — Fri, 5 Jan 2007 10:28:09 EST

The movie Strangers With Candy opens with the 46-year-old protagonist Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) riding the Corrections Department shortbus away from her latest stretch in prison and earnestly musing in her banjo twang, "Can we chaynge?" This is a fundamental question in western narrative, and it has probably never been pondered by a soul less capable of change than Jerri.Strangers With Candy was originally a sitcom created by Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, and Mitch Rouse that ran for three seasons on Comedy Central starting in 1999. The concept is that Jerri, who ran away at 14 and has bumped along as a junkie prostitute for 32 years, returns home and resumes her life as a high school freshman. Though worn from hard use, she experiences all the dewy hopes and crushing disappointments of a blushing teen.The series is a twist on After School Specials, which set young people in dramatically pointed dilemmas at the end of which they learned important lessons. The character of Jerri, however, was based on Florrie Fisher, a middle-aged recovering junkie prostitute who in the '60s and '70s had a career as a motivational speaker. In a 1970 Public Service Announcement entitled "The Trip Back" (which has attained cult status), Fisher hectors a group of high schoolers, croaking that if they smoke one joint they'll end up like her. (That PSA is available on disk 3 of the complete Strangers With Candy series DVD.) The incorrigible Jerri always learns a lesson — and announces it straight to the camera — but the lesson is always a perversion or misapplication of the expected bromide (e.g., "I guess what I learned this week is that only losers do drugs … unless it helps you win. And in that case, only winners do drugs."). Strangers With Candy starts from a parodic concept but is so deeply ironic it digs way below parody.You don't have to have seen an After School Special to get that the writers and performers are undermining our belief in human perfectibility. Perfectibility may be a noble ideal, but if it's your governing concept of human nature then way too much behavior becomes inexplicable. Did all the backsliders and recidivists, all the Mel Gibsons and Marion Barrys of the world, simply not hear enough uplifting slogans? In other words, the series is an expression of total irony, implicitly answering Jerri's question about whether we can change with a resounding "No" (and taking in "improvement" as well as "perfectibility").This, for instance, is Jerri's explanation of why she won't identify a fellow student as a "retard," even though it means Jerri won't be allowed to go on the school trip to Good Time Island: "I've changed. People change.… I'm not the same Jerri Blank who informed on those blind orphans. I'm not the same Jerri Blank who revealed the hiding place of those Guatemalans … such as yourself. And I'm not the same Jerri Blank who took a crap in the Fleishmann's holly bushes … last night." She changes, all right: after the principal is unmoved by her speech, she changes her mind, rats the "retard" out, and takes the girl's seat on the bus.At the same time, the series manages to be as skeptical as Candide without Voltaire's righteous anger simmering just below the ironic froth. The trick is to assume that we will identify with Jerri not despite everything that's repellent about her, but because of those things. This makes the show bright and bouncy, even while Jerri's rankness allows Sedaris and her crew to conjure a nightmare version of our memories of that age (when, for instance, a teacher intercepts Jerri's note and reads it out loud to the class: "My vagina is on fire. I'm trying not to scratch it, Orlando, I'm afraid it'll get infected.").Clearly, this identification is not served up with the usual cynical-naïve pathos. When the popular girls in gym class pick a student with two broken arms over Jerri for their basketball team, we are not asked to shed a tear. In fact, the makers know how to cauterize pathos by mimicking the emphatic techniques Hollywood uses to wring salt water from us. But neither is the irony affectlessly inflicted on the characters as it is in Todd Solondz's Palindromes (2004). Instead, we observe Jerri with detachment from the outside while at the same time identifying with her — in all her near-worthlessness — from the inside. Jerri's grotesque appearance, speech, and behavior expressionistically externalize how we fear people — justly — view us. In this sense, the identification with Jerri tickle-tortures a silent confession out of anyone who responds to the show.At their simplest, the series and movie exploit the fact that Jerri brings to the typical experiences of a high school freshman not just the outlook of a middle-aged woman, but her anytime-anywhere taste for drugs and sex as well. (Sex with boys and girls — as she puts it with attempted worldliness, "I like the pole and the hole.") And all of this is inflected with the adaptations she's made on the street and in prison. For instance, her answer to a fresh-faced fellow student who asks what Jerri considers an obvious question is, "Does a pimp carry a razor?" The girl gives what she considers an obvious answer, i.e., that she doesn't know, and Jerri sets her straight: "Trust me — they all do."The character is more intricately knotted than that, however. Jerri would like to do better, provided it takes no effort, but she's got too little to work with. She's both stupid and ignorant, unable, for instance, to read the movie's title before it disappears from the screen. (She's a blank that can't be filled in.) Moreover, she is guilty of all categories of vice — victimless, petty, felonious, and moral — even when indulging a vice is self-defeating. (When a friend asks whether she's thinking of signing up for the science fair, Jerri replies, "No, I'm thinkin' about pussy. Science fair's for queers.") In the mooshy uplifter The Enchanted Cottage (1945), a disfigured serviceman and a homely woman fall in love and in that magic cottage they can see each other for what they "really" are underneath their imperfect surfaces. In Strangers With Candy, by contrast, Jerri's lack of external beauty only masks her lack of inner beauty. The character is inconsistent — eager for success yet incapable of applying herself; arriving at lessons though unable to grasp a concept or stick to it; vulnerable to insult and exclusion yet lacking in tact, generosity, and compassion; aggressive with street confidence yet mostly the loser in confrontations. She's inconsistent but not incoherent. For instance, in the movie some cool girls make fun of Jerri as she approaches the school for the first time all over again. Jerri, trying to pass along the pain, immediately makes fun of a boy in the same way; when he walks up to her angry and hurt, however, she asks him hopefully if he wants to carry her books for her. In other words, the writing team has replicated in a raunchy cartoon how the chaos of our experience correlates more than we may care to admit to the chaos of our personalities.What underlies Jerri's mad grab-bag of traits is a fundamental and unmitigated self-absorption. When a teacher chides, "Does everything have to be about you, Jerri?" she replies, "Well, I may not be much, but I'm all I think about." Jerri's not alone: there isn't a teacher or administrator with a vocation for his work (or even a basic competence in his subject). In the movie, as soon as Jerri enters the office of school grief counselor Peggy Callas (Sarah Jessica Parker, fitting her virtuosic sense of gesture and timing to the material), the woman blurts out, "Oh, God, it never ends." At the end of the abbreviated session, she blandly accepts Jerri's lunch money as a mandatory "tip." The parents are no better; there isn't one who could be trusted to put his child's needs ahead of his own desires — always excepting Jerri's father, who's in a coma.Taken together, the series and movie put folly, self-indulgence, and corruption on display as panoramically as Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Fight Between Carnival and Lent, except that there's not even a corner of the vision dedicated to a meaningful spiritual authority. Strangers With Candy reposes so little faith in our aspirations that life becomes one extended example of comic bathos. The makers see our species as worse than it is and laugh nevertheless, infectiously; not laughing in response would, if anything, make you more like the characters rather then less.Of course, this kind of irony doesn't present the whole truth. Rather, it's intended as a counterweight to the countless romances that glamorize or gloss over unpleasant facts and intractable problems, and that spin fantasies of accomplishment for us to project ourselves into. Even given its extreme bias, irony like Strangers With Candy can be more honest than such romances, and more recognizable. At the same time, insofar as Strangers With Candy is comic irony, it favors impact over plausibility, shocking us by assuming our identification with the loser-protagonist as she fails in ways that are depicted with no quarter for taboos or sensitivities.The movie stretches the material of a half-hour show to an hour and a half, with no subplots, and lifts a number of the best lines from the series. It's stretched but holds its shape and definitely shows the benefit of those three seasons of development. (The relationship of the series to the movie is comparable to the Marx Brothers' taking their show on the road to test the material that became A Day at the Races [1937].) As a thoroughgoing example of low-comic irony, the big-screen Strangers With Candy deserves a niche of honor alongside the Farrelly Brothers' Kingpin (1996) and Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor's Citizen Ruth (1996), as well as the very best of Chaplin's early shorts, the ones in which he really comes across as a scroungy tramp rather than the "soulful" Little Fellow who protects dogs and blind girls and orphans.Strangers With Candy is unimaginable without Amy Sedaris as Jerri. Sedaris is pretty enough to have had a repeated role on Sex and the City but has an hallucinatorily elastic face: she gives Jerri a buck-toothed grimace that is as tempting as it is difficult to imitate. In this respect, Sedaris is easily on a par with Jim Carrey, and in her lack of concern for being conventionally attractive or likeable, she's way ahead of him.A portion of our responses are due to the costuming and the hair and make-up: Sedaris wears unflattering "Comfort Zone" get-ups over "fatty" padding on her ass and thighs, hideous stiff wigs, garish eye shadow, and stains on her teeth. But she's also a fantastic mime. Her head movements perfectly punctuate the lessons she's getting wrong, and she's absolute mistress of a buggy eye tic.In addition, Jerri always finds cruel jokes and painful mishaps funny, no matter who the victim is, even herself, and Sedaris does a single-shoulder movement when she laughs to rival Chaplin's ability to make sobbing, when seen from behind, indistinguishable from agitating a cocktail shaker. Sedaris's voice, unlike Chaplin's, is constantly surprising you as well. It can parodically mimic girlish expectancy, the "wisdom" of hard experience, a jailbird's bravado, seductiveness, frustration, and simultaneously both breakthrough realization and idiocy.Moreover, the writing team has a Swiftian perception of the grossness of human physicality; no equally achieved comedy with a female protagonist has ever been nastier. Jerri, for instance, thinks it alluring to inform intended partners that she's "moist as a snake cake down there." What you see in one episode of "down there" — (a stunt double's) bruised, cottage-cheesy inner thighs, crowned by a little bell hanging from an unseen labial piercing — will definitely put you off your snake cake.The nearest equal to Sedaris's performance would be Laura Dern's in Citizen Ruth, but Sedaris has a talent for mimicry and pantomime beyond Dern's. Sedaris's performance is something like the performance that the Tracey Ullman of A Dirty Shame (2004) might have given as Citizen Ruth, but even baser. In fact, Sedaris plays Jerri with all the incongruous comedy (but none of the tragedy) of Charlize Theron as the butch-lesbian roadside whore and soon-to-be robber-serial killer Aileen Wuornos interviewing for clerical jobs in Monster (2003).Sedaris gives the most staggering female slapstick performance in the exaggerated, creepy-frantic Keystone vein in movie history, and with more tang than any Keystone comedienne ever had. As Jerri, Sedaris embodies an ironic view of human nature that borders on a revelation of the horror of total hopelessness but then turns that glimpse of horror back into all-out burlesque. With the series and now the movie, Sedaris has become the all-time queen of the one-dimensional, so-bleak-it's-comic visionary. (For my money, she gave the most unforgettable performance by a lead actress in 2006, edging out even Judi Dench, who in Notes on a Scandal finally gave the astonishing performance she has repeatedly been credited with.)The movie wisely retains almost the entire supporting cast from the series, and Stephen Colbert as the teacher Chuck Noblet is a close rival as a mime to Sedaris. He does split-second 180s, emotional as well as physical, and on a broad scale, windmilling his limbs like a baseball pitcher. But he does more than invent the body language of an unfit, rebarbative teacher; he creates a character who compensates for his inability to conceal anything effectively with a lightning ability to put the other person in the wrong. And he does all this while nailing the over-explicitness of bad acting in bad scripts, yet without setting himself apart from the movie. Currently, Colbert is da man when it comes to multi-level fakery.Paul Dinello as the art teacher Geoffrey Jellinek (who is involved in a "secret" relationship with Chuck) lacks Colbert's pantomimic boldness and precision, but has distinct assets of his own. He's the best practitioner of false modesty since Harvey Korman and has one of those cracking voices that everybody loves in '30s comedians. Dinello also effortlessly sends up a narcissism so blatant and dopey that both compassion and anger are kept at bay. (And he has a phenomenal bod, too little seen.) Geoffrey's self-love is believable for a gay man but the jokes feel more inside than the average fag joke. You are way free to laugh.As Jerri's wicked stepmother Sarah Blank, Deborah Rush has a brittle delivery that adds a high-comic exactness to the proceedings. (Her voice also cracks on cue.) The poise with which she combines her suburban hostessliness and her dislike of Jerri is matchlessly poisonous. Rush, who was particularly memorable in Compromising Positions (1985) and Family Business (1989), maintains her high-comic, needle-prick adroitness even when she asks Jerri in front of her new, popular school friend whether she wiped her ass on the bathroom towels. Finally, Gregory Hollimon as the openly and even criminally self-serving principal Onyx Blackman reads his lines with a gusty delivery that gives the man an authority that is both formidable and hollow.I don't want to claim too much for the movie. I am not, however, asserting that the people behind Strangers With Candy intentionally put everything I've written about it into the show and movie. It's clear from the group interview at the Museum of Television and Radio, included on disk 4 of the complete series DVD, that they were aware of the ground rules by which they played, but both the series and the movie are so good because those rules fully express the group's ironic intuitions. These are people who know how to stay in their lane while relentlessly chasing laughs.At the same time, the dialogue is as imitable as in any comedy in recent memory (e.g., Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [2006], Napoleon Dynamite [2004], Romy and Michele's High School Reunion [1997], and Clueless [1995]). The writers have a low-comic genius that also involves brain-teasing wording like nothing I've ever heard. In the series, for instance, Mr. Noblet asks a question so incomprehensible that his students fail their midterm exam before taking it simply by raising their hands. (If you want to see line-crossing low comedy without wit, and that's syrupy despite its irony, rent Another Gay Movie [2006].)Other neat tricks include the way the teachers confuse the students' interests with their own. When Mr. Noblet insists on grooming Jerri as a concert violinist, he tells her, "I am the only one who can help you realize my dreams of yours." There's also the way the characters lie, transparently, to evade the consequences of their behavior (e.g., "I wasn't pushing you away, I was pulling me toward myself"), or the way they say what they mean without exactly meaning to (e.g., "Look, there's a really ugly rumor I'm about to start, and I want to make sure I've got it right"). This last is an especially important verbal component of the show's nightmarish quality. And the nightmare never ends because these verbal and mental contortions infect your thinking and speech. When my boyfriend recently answered an accusation with, "Believe me, if I had done it, I would be the first to not admit it," I knew he had a dose as bad as mine. (And I believed him.)Strangers With Candy has a lot more going on in it than the very funny Borat, another movie expanded from its star's TV work. As the whole world (including several courts of law) now knows, in Borat, the Englishman Sacha Baron Cohen plays the eponymous Kazakh TV news anchor who comes here to make a documentary about America for the benefit of his homeland. Cohen's m.o., perfected on Da Ali G Show, is to speak to people on camera who don't know he's putting them on and get so outrageous that the interviewees either figure it out, make asses of themselves, or get so angry they end the conversation. (It's like the premise of Allen Funt's Candid Camera pushed right up to the point of deceit, harassment, assault, and battery.) In the movie, Borat and his producer travel cross-country from New York, which enables Cohen to patch together the most successful of these stunts in an ironic version of a quest romance. (Initially his quest is for "cultural learnings" but then switches to a pursuit for the hand of "virginal" Pamela Anderson.)Cohen has two main sources of inspiration: a low cunning about what will puzzle, shock, offend, or outrage people and a live-comedy genius for taking his victims slowly, by degrees. In one sequence, Borat has wangled a gig singing the national anthem from the center ring of a rodeo. Before starting, he offers cheers for the current President Bush, which begin relatively innocuously and then head downward. When he sees that he can get away with, "I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards!" he sinks further, exulting, "May George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!" You can practically see Cohen thinking, Are they ready for this next one? Will this be too much?Eventually he starts singing — the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner" but the lyrics of the supposed Kazakh national anthem, which, boasting of the country's superior potassium, sounds like something by Tom Lehrer. And eventually the crowd begins to boo. It's theatrical genius: Cohen has devised a split-level act in which being hooked off the stage by his in-the-movie audience makes for success with his at-the-movie audience.Cohen's shtick is almost entirely opportunistic; far too much has been made of the content of what Borat says and elicits from his victims. Most of the humor that doesn't derive from the tension of live encounters with unwitting participants is dialect humor about the simplicity and backwardness of immigrants, which was a staple of the vaudeville circuit. And the fact that the rodeo audience seems at first to go along with Borat's zany oratory doesn't tell you anything besides the fact that an audience hearing something so out of the ordinary will react slowly, because it's out of the ordinary and because there can be a certain inhibition among members of a relatively random group. Cohen thus makes possible some highly unusual sociological observation, but the comic substance resides solely in what he's saying and doing.True, Cohen, an observant Jew, lampoons peasantly Old-World anti-Semitism in the carnivalesque "running of the Jew" in Kazakhstan and in Borat's fear of the Jewish-American owners of a bed-and-breakfast where he stays. (He remains wide awake in bed, clutching dollar bills to throw at his hosts so they won't harm him. When two cockroaches (released by the filmmakers) scurry under the door, he throws bills at the supposedly shape-shifting Jews and runs for his life.)Thus, there's a strand of satire in Borat, but the majority of the set-ups, including the rodeo scene, which begins with Borat leading the organizer on to make homophobic remarks, and the dinner party at which Cohen pretends not to know how to use an indoor flush toilet, are not examples of it. Not even the infamous RV ride, in which three South Carolina frat boys get drunk and make moronic comments about "minorities" and women, is satiric. How could it be—Cohen didn't know what they were going to say until he got them to say it. Satire, by contrast, implies militant intention on the author's part. There may be a satirical purpose in Cohen's selection of clips, but that's pretty weak as satire goes because it doesn't permit enough distortion. (Dryden, for instance, doesn't let Shadwell speak for himself, however ill, in MacFlecknoe, because the target of his scorn would never have worked out a caustic, mock-heroic caprice featuring himself as the King of Nonsense's successor, "[m]ature in dullness from his tender years.")These sequences show Cohen as a sneaky, extemporizing dramatist of confusion and audience discomfort. One of the funniest episodes in the movie is when Borat and his producer get into a fight over Pamela Anderson, which turns into a staged nude wrestling match in their hotel room followed by a live streak in a crowded elevator and through a busy hotel conference room. Though gauche, Borat is deferential and unfailingly well-intentioned, but just under the skin of the character you can see that Cohen the performer has nerves of carbon composite, and those nerves propel and shape the show. He is as focused on exploiting opportunity as a comedian can get and he fears no boundaries (as shown by this incident last November on a New York street). All the world's an improv stage.Its spontaneity makes Borat more alarming than Strangers With Candy in some ways, especially for people who are prone to squirm over awkward scenes in public, even ones that don't involve them. This also means, however, that Borat lacks the completeness and amplitude that Strangers With Candy achieves precisely because it's scripted (by wizards and devils). Both movies made me laugh so hard I hee-hawed, but Borat didn't spank my mind to attention the way Strangers With Candy has.

Movie Review: The Queen: Popular v. Sovereign

Alan Dale — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:31:47 EST

Fourth Citizen:You have been a scourge to her enemies, you havebeen a rod to her friends; you have not indeed lovedthe common people.Coriolanus:You should account me the more virtuous that I havenot been common in my love.--Shakespeare, Coriolanus II:3The Queen briskly illustrates the contrasting reactions of recently elected Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) to Princess Diana's 31 August 1997 death in a car crash in Paris. The Queen sees it as a private family matter and, since she loathed Diana anyway, does not feel called upon to interrupt the family's vacation residence at Balmoral Castle, make a public statement, or, contrary to custom, fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Elizabeth's first concern is for Diana's boys, who are, of course, her grandsons as well as potential successors to the throne.Elizabeth does not grasp the significance of Diana's popularity with "her" subjects. In fact, the Princess's mediagenic quality is one of the reasons Elizabeth disliked her, because she deemed it inappropriate, infra dignitatem for an "HRH." Elizabeth believes that the English public in 1997 still values what they valued during World War II: the suppression of emotion in the performance of duty.Tony Blair, by contrast, emphatically gets that Diana's popularity alone demands a response from the royals, and the movie is a touchy negotiation, mostly by telephone, between allegorical figures of the new way and the old. Sheen and Mirren are admirable performers, but the movie stops short of full-blown naturalism, irony, or romance, so there's no basis for them to exceed what screenwriter Peter Morgan has written.The Queen takes what we've all heard about the interaction of the parliamentarian and his sovereign and stages it with tasteful directness, but I didn't come away feeling I had been granted any greater access than mere presence at these behind-the-scenes vignettes. The movie does not elaborate the characters, and Mirren thus doesn't get the opportunity to do with Elizabeth II what Bette Davis and Glenda Jackson did with Elizabeth I, i.e., give individual range and volume to the historical figure. (Nor did Mirren join their ranks in the recent TV movie Elizabeth I, which dramatized historical events as if they were episodes in a soap opera, and featured generally Elizabethan-sounding dialogue that helplessly made the show more, rather than less, camp.) Mirren's Elizabeth II isn't a star performance, it's a star disappearing act, the movie equivalent of a Cindy Sherman photo (minus the anti-glamorizing sense of estrangement, of course).To give the narrative depth, bite, or oomph, as naturalism, irony, or romance, or some combination — which is not an unreasonable expectation of director Stephen Frears, whose best movies include My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), and The Grifters (1990) — Morgan would have to have invented more (as Shakespeare and Schiller did with their historical royalty), and we probably would need to see Elizabeth's relationship with Diana. So much of Elizabeth's reaction springs from her pole-to-pole repulsion from Diana that it dulls things a bit not to witness that back story.As it is, the movie springs from journalistic and biographical matter presented as the moviemakers believe it happened, but they wouldn't dare go absolutely anywhere a dedication to naturalism might lead them. Otherwise, the movie is full of interesting details, such as the fact that Elizabeth prefers to drive her own car and, having been a military driver during World War II, can readily assess the cause of a breakdown. Frears also has a light enough touch to show us only peripherally that her Welsh Corgis are as well-trained as if they were in variety, and other minor matters. These data do not, however, add up to a narrative structure.Despite the movie's default naturalistic handling, the makers don't appear to identify with Elizabeth or with Blair. Their attitude is probably best represented by Blair's wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), a left-progressive barrister who is highly skeptical of the royals and who predicts that her husband will become entranced by the Queen. Cherie is a minor character, however, so this doesn't add much in the way of an ironic structure. There's plenty of juicy material for a more inventive, and likely more intrusive, approach. I tend to see Diana ironically, as Princess Barbie, with her figure-skater's hairdo and star-struck teenagers' dreams of being a royal celeb; her careful, cultivated vacuity and contrasting flagrancy; her seeming unawareness of immense privilege combined with a frequently aired sense of grievance. Since Elizabeth displays a surprising dry wit, her distaste for Diana might have made a better source of irony than Cherie Blair's ideological posture. But Elizabeth's wit is too dry; in response to it my facial muscles didn't move any more than hers do. (She may be the Queen of England, but she's no Tallulah Bankhead.)Instead, the moviemakers gesture toward an ironic view of the Queen herself, who, in contrast to her daughter-in-law, perceives as higher virtues her own impassiveness, even her own dowdiness. (Elizabeth chooses to be nutritious rather than delicious, and forget about the attractive packaging.) She imagines it is enough for her to shoulder the responsibilities of sovereignty without faltering, even if that does not make her the kind of queen the public wants. You may suspect, in fact, that her conception of the English character is that they would take pride in a duteous queen almost because they don't particularly care for her. That gets right to the heart of "fealty," after all.The movie feels far more cheeky than coruscating, however. It couldn't possibly offend Diana's fans and is reasonably gentle with Elizabeth. Blair's entrancement with the Queen, for instance, takes the form of defending her to his own staff who have been helping him convince her to address the public. The greatest scorn is reserved for Prince Charles, depicted as a selfish coward whose principal reaction to his ex-wife's death is fear of assassination. This is just crude, in the nature of an editorial cartoon.In terms of romance, there is an allegorical development of her feelings when a contemplative Elizabeth sees a magnificent 14-point stag in Scotland. She tries to start it so that her consort and grandsons won't bag it, but eventually sees it headless, hanging in a neighboring gamehouse. (The old England is gone.) Though allegory, with its demonstrative yet seductive unreality, can be a great genre, its use here is not intricate or magical enough for it to sustain interest on its own.At the end, after conceding to Blair's pressure to stage a response to Diana's death, Elizabeth strolls among the mourning crowds outside Buckingham Palace and asks a little girl if she may place a bouquet for her among the heaps laid for the late Princess. Elizabeth is confused when she says no, but when the girl explains that the flowers are for her, the Queen, Elizabeth is as thankful as a gentle giant in a fairy tale once he is "understood."That's about the limit of the movie's tonal and emotional complexity. In sum, The Queen is a collection of small-scale sketches in an assortment of styles — postage-stamp likenesses, caricatures, icons — but even spread out side by side they aren't expansive enough to fill the frame.