Isabella Rossellini also scores with her best work since David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), but she's less passive here, showing more gusto as a performer. Madeline Kahn might have been funnier (think of her Dietrich put-on in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974)) but not as abandoned. Rossellini throws herself into the role of this mutilated-but-glamorous pewter-pot empress without seeming like a Warholian specialist in grotesquerie, and has the theatricality of a veteran without the stale air of well-practiced technique. She cranks it up for the movie but plays a coarse, perverse character without coarseness or perversity. (Read Maddin's truly goofy account of meeting Rossellini in this 29 April 2004 piece he wrote for the Manchester Guardian Unlimited.)
But as good as the actors may be, and McMillan in particular is quite funny, you still can't empathize with the tormented characters. And the key, I believe, is in the approach of Chester, the "American" brother, to the music contest. His big production numbers suggest that to the extent Maddin has a discursive point it's the inability of commercial movies to convey emotion. He sees conventional American fare as having the reverse Midas touch--everything Hollywood touches turns to tin. But The Saddest Music in the World isn't a show-biz satire. It resembles a mainstream spoof of a specific, earlier style like Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (1974) but it also resembles a diffuse, inner-directed, remote work like Eraserhead. Maddin goes in for disturbing, hyperbolic vignettes but gets entranced by the aesthetic problem of how to represent them. He's extraordinary in that he focuses on aesthetics without muffling the whole proceeding: The Saddest Music in the World has the moody abstraction of a nocturne and the open playfulness of a scherzo at the same time.
Maddin may have hoped that his irony would help us experience the characters' anguish because it signals to us that he knows better than to exploit the emotion, and our susceptibility to it, but I don't think that's how the movie plays. Instead it makes you feel that all movies are fake--you're always looking at the window not through it. And that's mostly right, and keeping it in mind should prevent your being carried away by numbingly insistent dramas like The Hours and Mystic River and 21 Grams. Literary hogwash like Cold Mountain and House of Sand and Fog push self-seriousness over the brink into self-parody, which is where Maddin starts, with a knowingness that makes all the difference. The beauty of Maddin's imagery and the seductiveness of his rhythms make you swoon, but it's undisguisedly the result of set design, camerawork, and editing, and the show is a show, inescapably. But you do swoon. Maddin says of himself, "I knew I would never be a neat and tidy craftsman. It's a thrill to be a primitivist." When a director's "primitive" style is as developed as Maddin's, your aesthetic response can seem like all the emotion you need, his thrill your thrill.
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