What brought The American Theatre Critics Association to Sarasota, Florida, for their annual conference last week?  This small city on Florida’s west coast is best known as the winter home of the circus, initially Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, now 16 smaller circuses.  John Ringling wanted to put his adopted home town on the map and his influence has culminated in Sarasota Opera, Sarasota Ballet, a world-class museum, and a varied selection of live theatre.

          The conference opened with a dual reception by two of the city’s largest theatres.  Asolo Repertory Theatre’s board president Ron Greenbaum and wife Rita opened their breathtaking gulfside home for a cocktail party where we watched the sun sink over the yardarm.  Then we went on to the Florida Studio Theatre’s satiric cabaret, “Laughing Matters”, created by Rebecca Langford and a wickedly talented young cast, directed by Richard Hopkins, FST’s Artistic Director.  FST has three stages and we saw excellent productions in each of them during our stay.

          Our keynote address “Perspectives on Criticism” was delivered this year, not by a critic, but by Michael Reidel, theatre columnist for The New York Post, who also chairs “Theatre Talk” on PBS.  If you thought after Walter Winchell they broke the mold, think again.  Although he claims Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen ranged from sentimental to scalding, Reidel’s column is pure show business.  Astute, funny and dedicated, he likes face-to-face interviews.   He writes about plays that he believes are in tune with his readership but comes down hard for a point of view.

          The Asolo (pronounced Oslo) Repertory Theatre comes not from Norway but from Italy.  It’s a beautiful 19^th century space, spotted by John and Mabel Ringling on one of their talent and artifact collecting trips.  They brought the whole thing here where it housed live theatre until the needs and programs grew and now is preserved in the Ringling Museum for lectures, etc.  Its name lives on next door in a huge state-of-the-art theatre space which presented smooth professional productions of Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple”, Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” and Jeffrey Hatcher’s “Murderers” during our visit.

          The Ringling Museum is really three museums.  There’s the classical art collection of Ruebens, Van Dyck, Titian, Gainsborough and others, artfully hung on many-splendored brocade walls.  There’s Ca d’Zan (House of John in Venetian dialect), the Ringlings’ opulent gulfside mansion inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and there’s the Circus Museum, which contains costumes and artifacts from Ringling’s historic circus world. 

One of the most amazing is the monumental model circus layout, created over 50 years in exquisite detail by Howard Tibbals who was there to talk to us about it.  Before you ask, yes, the Ringling circus goes on but it’s not under a Big Tent any more, it’s in indoor spaces large enough to hold the trapeezes and the animals.

          At the Golden Apple, the longest-running dinner theatre in America, we experienced the pleasures of eating, drinking and a well-staged production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat”.

          Performance and creative arts spread to the littlest Sarasotans.  There are classes in circus skills.  We met Steve Smith, former Dean of the Clown College which is based here, and were reminded that only in the U.S. is circus regarded as a children’s art form.  Not so in Europe where, in Italy alone, there are 500 circuses. 

Among the conference panels was one on jobs in theatre criticism, work on the internet, the future of dramatic criticism, the future of arts organizations and how Sarasota became Florida’s cultural capital.  That panel included Jim Ragona, Managing Director of Circus Sarasota who told us about the touring life of a circus today.  Deborah Walk, Curator of the Museum Circus Galleries, Rodney Huey, former Ringling Brothers VP for Public Relations, Patty Campbell, director of PAL Sailor Circus, a 60-year-old youth circus, Peggy Williams, first female graduate of The Clown College and the hilarious Steve Smith made a dynamic panel.

The Florida Studio Theatre has spearheaded the Write A Play program which includes Under Six, written by kids sixth grade and under, and, to date, has reached over a million students.  We saw a sample of their dramatic and touching plays Saturday afternoon with teen-age performers who were among the most ebullient and delightful casts all week.

          Saturday afternoon and evening wound up the conference at The Florida Studio Theatre, whose emphasis is contemporary theatre.   We saw “Blackbird” by Scottish playwright David Harrower, the 2007 Olivier Award-winner for Best New Play, which explores child abuse from many unusual angles. Although it started over the top, giving the actors nowhere to go dramatically, it was so fascinating and strongly done by Dan Patrick Brady and Sarah Stockton that it held the stage.

In “Black Pearl Sings!” by Frank Higgins, a songseeker (Forrest Richards) tries to unearth songs from an African-American prisoner (Alice M. Gatling).  Richards, who has done mostly cabaret, played a dramatic role here.  We were dumbfounded to learn that Gatling, a professional actress, made her singing debut in this role, and is a talent to watch.

          We shoehorned in time to enjoy the hotel’s pool with its waterfall and the silken aqua waves of the Gulf of Mexico with their white sand beaches.

          For those who had never been to Sarsota, it was an amazing revelation.  It’s a great place to visit and, judging from the circus people who have made their homes there, a great place to live.  Two journalists in our group interviewed the famous Flying Wallendas who have been trapeze artist royalty for generations.  The scenic beauty and the circus influence which gave birth to a proliferation of classic, contemporary and musical theatre make Sarasota a unique theatre town in the tropics. 

• Slumdog Millionaire

   

            I must be the last person in town to see this film which I avoided for, perhaps a snobby reason, that I never watched the game show and, a squeamish one, that I can’t watch torture scenes.

            One day, my 90-year-old girlfriend, an actress who gets screeners, wanted to watch it and I agreed, feeling it would be easier to escape the bad parts in a corner of her living room than a theatre lobby. 

  The torture was brief and mild, by movie standards.  The game show was used to drive the plot, an incredibly far-fetched concept which was overcome by the brilliant cinematography and Danny Boyle’s direction.

   Jamal (Dev Patel), who survived the slums, gets on a Millionaire quiz show because he knows the love of his life, Latika (Frieda Pinto) will be watching.  By an absurd coincidence, all the questions summon childhood memories which provide him with the right answers.  But dramatically this works and the story of his life, told with dazzling speed by Boyle from Simn Beaufoy’s screen adaptation of Vikas Swaraf’s novel “Q & A” sweeps us along.  Despite the violence and squalor which are a very real part of Boyle’s story, the film brims with the color and excitement of boys who are too young to find life anything less than amazing and of India itself.  I spent a few weeks with a film company in India some years ago and, though it was in a very different milieu, I’ve never forgotten the vivid exoticism of that huge sprawling country.

            My first introduction to India came from a book given to me by my godfather as a Christmas present.  It was Richard Haliburton’s “Book of Marvels” and I thought the Taj Mahal was the most beautiful building I ever saw.  It plays a pivotal role in this film and its dedication to the love of a man for a woman is a symbol and theme of the movie.

            I’m glad I saw it but what makes me happiest is the way the mainstream American public has embraced a foreign film, something they too rarely do.

   

   

Waltz with Bashir

January 5, 2009

The satirical title of “Waltz with Bashir” is reflected in the form of this unique and stunning animated feature from Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. The documentary is based on his own repressed memories of his role as a 19-year-old soldier in the attack on Lebanon in the early 1980s. After the assassination of Lebanese president-elect, dynamic young Bashir Gemayal, retaliatory massacres occurred at the Palestine refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, spearheaded by a group called the Phalangists supported by the Israeli Army.
The film begins with vicious dogs of war charging head-on almost off the screen straight at the audience. They’re the recurring dream of a former Israeli soldier who remembers being compelled to shoot dogs whose barking would alert the enemy. As he tells this story to the filmmaker, the man realizes he can’t remember his part in the Lebanese invasion and goes on a pilgrimage of self-discovery, interviewing fellow soldiers who were there. Their stories, climaxing in the massacre which the filmmaker witnessed, are drawn in brilliantly innovative ways, combining fantasy, guilt and the painful unearthing of the past.
Annimation proves to be the perfect form for this story, allowing us to see the surreal side of investigative journalism. The characters are drawn with expressive realism and the imagery is beautiful. This brave film by an Israeli filmmaker with the support of the Israel Film Board climaxes with archival footage of sobbing Palestinian women fleeing the camps, mourning their losses.

Last Chance Harvey

Whatever’s happening around him, Dustin Hoffman creates a fully-rounded character. In “Last Chance Harvey”, he plays the title character, an uptight businessman who is compelled to answer his cell phone even in the middle of his daughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner to deal with trifles that eventually have no significance. His daughter has asked her stepfather to give her away and, upon losing his job, this is the worst day of Harvey’s life. So he tells Kate (Emma Thompson), a woman who has become so low key that her natural charm and empathy is drenched. They meet at a Heathrow airport restaurant and, although she’s had a hell day of her own, including being rejected by a blind date and riddled with phone calls from her lonely mother, Kate agrees that he wins the misery stakes.
Predictably, Harvey and Kate wind up spending the day together. He admits he feels his wife and daughter look better with the more sophisticated stepdad, played by James Brolin, and that his workaholic obsessiveness manufactured to overcome his insecurity has destroyed his family life. Kate’s part is more thinly written. She feels guilty about an early abortion but, apart from that, it’s Thompson’s charm that carries her through.
Writer/director Joel Hopkins has molded this predictable vehicle around his stars and Hoffman and Thompson are a pleasure to watch. They are so sharp, perceptive and humane in their characterizations that it’s an inspired lesson.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Scott Fitzgerald’s short story takes 10 minutes to read on the internet. The same topic of reverse aging is the subject of an excellent full-length novel “And Again?” by noted Irish writer Sean O’Faolain.
Brad Pitt plays Fitzgerald’s title character who ages backwards. He meets Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett, the love of his amazing life when he is an old man physically, though a 10-year-old chronologically, and she is a child. They journey down the years together on separate aging tracks and come together for a brief joyous time when they are both physically and psychologically the same age. Their reunion brings a daughter, played in adulthood by Julia Ormond.
Set in New Orleans which, over the decades, reverberates like another character, this version, directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, is no more than inspired by Fitzgerald’s whimsical plot line. The performances are exemplary, the New Orleans setting which begins in 1918 gives an initial flavor of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age world and the question of where you go when locked in an irreversible tragedy with the love of your life is one which resonates, no matter what the situation.

The Reader Kate Winslet gives the best performance I’ve ever seen from anybody as Hanna, an illiterate 35-year-old woman who has an affair with teen-age Michael (David Kross). Later, as a law student attending Nazi trials, he discovers that she was a concentration camp guard and complicit in an even worse tragedy revealing a deep moral illiteracy, in the words of director Stephen Daldry who did a Q&A after the screening I saw at the Directors Guild. I told him the last time I’d seen him at a Q&A was after “The Hours” (another film he directed about a woman) and I was just as blown away by this one. Winslet’s character ranges from the 35-year-old erotic tutor of young Michael to a woman on trial to an old prisoner. David Hare, who also adapted “The Hours”, adapted this screenplay from Bernhard Schlink’s novel, a best-seller in Germany. The story uses books and reading as a deepening medium, expanding the story beyond the lives of one woman and one man. Bruno Ganz, the superb German actor who starred in “Wings of Desire”, plays Michael’s professor and interlocuter. Ralph Fiennes gives a subtle portrayal of Michael as an adult who, 20 years after Hanna’s conviction, still, like many Germans, wrestles with questions of national guilt and how long the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the next generation. The film’s questions about the borders of love and values make this one of the best in a year of great movies.

Gran Torino Clint Eastwood who produced, directed and stars could qualify for the award of Grand Old Man of American Movies. In this story by first-time screenwriter Nick Schenk, Eastwood unabashedly plays his age as grim retired factory worker Walt Kowalski whose wife has just died. He resists all efforts of young Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) to be his friend and bring him back to the church, as his beloved wife wished. He resents the Vietnamese families moving into his neighborhood and they don’t understand why he doesn’t leave with the other white homeowners. His teen-age neighbor Thao (Bee Vang) is instigated to steal Walt’s treasured 1972 Gran Torino as his initiation into his cousin’s gun-toting gang. When Walt catches him, Thao’s humiliated family begs him to let Thao work for him as penance. Alienated from his boring, greedy children and grandchildren, Walt finds himself drawn into the life-affirming neighbors (and their wonderful cooking). Funniest is Grandma (Chee Thrao) who bests Walt in a spitting contest. The two try to outstare each other before becoming friends. The neighborhood is becoming a fighting ground for gangs, including one who tries to jump Thao’s pert Americanized sister Sue (Ahney Her) and her hunky boyfriend Trey (Scott Eastwood). Walt intervenes but later the spunky Sue is beaten and raped by her cousin’s gang who resent her independence.
Walt sees only one way to protect the two young people he has come to love. Those who expect an Eastwood shoot-out may think they see one coming.
Eastwood, who calls this his last movie as an actor, expands his tough-guy repertoire with wonderful tight-lipped snarls and the portrait of an American veteran who is set in his ways and scarred by memories of the Korean war in which he had to kill kids Thao’s age. The script is a portrait of a specifically American man and his time. Probably no one but Eastwood could have gotten it made and he does it justice, delving deep as an actor and carving the movie with his customary chiseled and astute directoral style.

Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, says the dictionary, means that a part stands for the whole or vice versa. For example, “suits” means movie executives. Charlie Kaufman’s new film, his first as a director, follows one man, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a theatre director in upstate New York, who receives a genius grant. Caden is so obsessed with staging an immense work of art that will reflect his own life that he fails to see the world falling apart around him. Buildings disintegrate, streets decay, cities are abandoned. Their synecdoche reflects Caden’s self-obsession that leaves him with an empty and deteriorating world.
One thing Kaufman’s new film has in common with writer/director Woody Allen’s work is an abundance of beautiful women in the hero’s life. Caden’s wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, goes off to Germany where she is declared a genius, too. Caden re-marries an actress (Michelle Williams), has an intriguing relationship with his receptionist (Samantha Morton) and plunges into his mamouth creation staged in a warehouse. He builds various spaces, hires many actors, rehearses countless scenes from his own life.
How often do we think, if only we could live our life over and do things differently, what would it be like? While the real world falls apart into deserted streets and shabby buildings, he worries at his personal past, casting and re-casting characters from his life. There’s no resolution, no happiness. If Aristotle declared “The unexamined life is not worth living”, one of Kaufman’s points seems to be the uselessness of nothing but self-examination. Kaufman often uses his own world of theatre or screen-writing as a metaphor for trying to solve the riddle of the universe by acting it out. Here he seems to be trying to show us the futility of enlarging the world by subtraction. The more he ignores the world in favor of his personal explorations, the more it dies.
Anything Kaufman does is worth seeing: “Being John Malkovich”, “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and, a personal favorite, “Adaptation” starring Nicholas Cage. This film has the pleasures of Hoffman’s work and the rigorous, if elongated, trail hewn by the author.

Rachel Getting Married

Jonathan Demme, Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs”, is back with another woman in jeopardy in an entirely different genre. This one takes place at a wedding. The theme of family relationships and long-buried tensions enriches the story of this bi-racial family, by first-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of singing legend Lena Horne.
The story follows the character of Kym (Anne Hathaway), Rachel’s sister, who has a week-end pass from a rehab facility for the wedding. Kym has been on drugs since she was a teen-ager and the death of her little brother is a subject that has never until now been thoroughly aired between Kym and her mother, played by Debra Winger. Winger retains her ability to hold the screen with anybody, projecting dignity and sensuality.
Hathaway shows a range she hasn’t had the chance to display before, boding well for a long and rich career. Demme gives this the feel of a home movie by using a hand-held camera to cover the rehearsal dinner. That feeling is augmented by having the speeches go on a tad too long, just as they do in real life.
Many treasures in this one. It’s going to take its place in movie archives.

Let The Right One In (Sweden)

This Swedish thriller is a very special vampire story. 12-year-old Oscar (Kare Hedebrant), a lonely only child of divorced parents, is bullied by classmates and never fights back. He thinks he’s found a friend when a pale 12-year-old girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson) and her father move into the next apartment. But when a rash of bloody killings sweep their town, he realizes she’s a vampire. This film doesn’t shrink from Eli’s necessity to feed on people but she’s just what Oscar needs. She encourages him to stand up to the bullies and he does, damaging the ear of the instigator.
After a particularly gruesome disaster involving Eli’s father, she knows she has to move on. A lonely Oscar is attacked in a swimming pool by the brother of the boy he has wounded, leading to an enthralling climax.
The combination of vampire lore, suspense, violence and the pure deep love between Oscar and Eli, he on the cusp of adolescence, she frozen in time forever, is unique. Set in winter in a soulless Swedish apartment block which emphasizes today’s alienation, the bloodlust of the little vampire stands out in vivid relief. Hedebrant, whose fair hair and white skin make him look like a medieval angel, is completely credible as an average kid who lives a reserved and withdrawn life. Leandersson projects the mystery and sadness of a little vampire who is trapped for eternity in a lifestyle that leaves scant room for the precious happiness that she knows exists. Directed by Tomas Alfredson from John Ajvide Lindquist’s script based on his novel, it swept European film festivals and is enjoying a long run here at the Laemmle theatres.

Doubt: The Movie

John Patrick Shanley’s play swept the awards boards in 2005, garnering Tonys and a Pulitzer, but transferring to the screen with equal success was problematic. Many movie-goers don’t read or care about theatre reviews. The story of a priest and a nun debating over the priest’s possibly predatory attitude towards a boy in his charge has made headlines repeatedly, so the theme is not exactly surprising. And that brilliant funny playwright John Patrick Shanley’s foray as a director of his own film script “Joe vs. The Volcano” didn’t save it’s wry whimsy from confusing both audience and critics.
So thank whatever gods may be that this movie and its writer/director got the green light to go together where they ought to go. Shanley chose a completely different cast from the Broadway production and, no slight intended to the Tony-winning Broadway cast, it’s fascinating to see new people interpret these roles.
Set in 1964 in the kind of Catholic school the playwright attended, it centers on the conflict between flinty principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) and charismatic young Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The sister suspects the father of preying on boys, particularly the vulnerable Donald Muller, first Negro child to be admitted to the school.
Streep as Sister Aloyisius is a traditional authoritarian who believes in her instincts almost more than in her God, with an asperity leavened by surprising flashes of dry humor. Hoffman is brotherly and charming as the charismatic Father Flynn. Viola Davis, in the unforgettable character of Mrs. Muller, is apprehensive but quivering with determination to do whatever she must for her child. It’s one of the most powerful scenes Shanley has written and Davis does it full justice. Amy Adams peels away the innocence of Sister James, the young idealistic teacher whose values are shredded by the play’s end.
There’s no trace here of the heightened language Shanley has used to such dazzling effect. This is the pared-down speech of every day but the playwright’s imagination inspires Father Flynn’s sermons and his humanity glows through Sister Aloysius’s wit. Shanley brings out the humor in the characters and, through his emphasis, new nuances in Father Flynn’s sermons. Doubt is already in play in Father Flynn’s mind, as he makes that subject the focus of his initial appearance in the pulpit. Shanley keeps the story as tightly in the confines of the school as it is on stage, with only one break-out scene where Sister Aloyisius walks Mrs. Muller back to her job along a cold grey November street. The walk heightens the sense of urgency because of the tightness of Mrs. Muller’s lunch hour and her conflicted desire to run away from what she has to say. The director also brilliantly contrasts the priests’ dinner table with its dim lights, laughter and wine to the nuns’ brightly-lit austere dinner table where only milk is served.
The film further expands by using visualization in Father Flynn’s pillow sermon in which the gossiping woman is actually depicted watching the feathers from her pillow fly irretrievably across the city. The director further his scope by including glimpses of the young students in this school.
Although Sister Aloysius believes she has the proof she needs, her final words summarize the theme of the play: “Oh, Sister James, I have such doubts, such doubts! “. She’s not referring to Father Flynn necessarily or even to Mrs. Muller’s revelations. She’s referring to the whole cusp of the world, as it lurches from the prim dogmatic 1950s into the fragmented openness of the 1960s. Not that she would ever go there but the fact that the crack in that door is opened by her is a testament to the nun’s character. The playwright will never give you a reading on what the play means but he doesn’t need to.
It’s all beautifully there with the questions, the passions, the conflicts and the spirituality of real life.
When I e-mailed my reaction to Shanley, whom I’ve known since the National Playwrights Conference in 1983, he replied, “It’s been a journey!”

Frost/Nixon (The Movie)

Peter Morgan’s dramatization of the famous interviews between British talk show host David Frost and former American president Richard Nixon began as a play, with video monitors augmenting the experience.
However, the big screen is where this really belongs and where it’s at it’s best. The screen is the medium where both Frost and Nixon made their mark.
Director Ron Howard is a child of television and has an innate sensitivity for the use both Frost and Nixon make of the media. He intercuts brilliantly, making a fascinating suspense story out of raw material.
Though a little drawn-out, the story of how Frost overcomes his talk show host persona to take down the more experienced Tricky Dick is the an intricate one. The final close-ups, in which Nixon finally admits he let the American people down, are powerfully expressive. But the telling line that we’ll all remember is when Nixon, driven to the wall, hisses arrogantly: “It’s not illegal when the President does it.”
Frank Langella and Michael Sheen repeat their Broadway roles. Although neither man resembles the person, both express the essence of their personalities. Langella lends Nixon a modicum of warmth that lurked in his feelings for his children and animals. No one is totally one-dimensional and Langella is too fine an actor not to find some sympathy in his character. Sheen plays Frost with sprightly sleaziness, but brings out the determination of a man who’s willing to risk his own fortune on interviews nobody else will back.
Rebecca Hall lends dry humor and off-hand sensuality to the role of Sheen’s girlfriend, Caroline Cushing. Sam Rockwell plays a fiercely determined James Reston, Junior, out to get Nixon and Oliver Platt adds heft and character to Bob Zelnick. Kevin Bacon fully inhabits Nixon’s militaristic aide, Jack Brennan, with a redeeming loyalty to his boss. Michael McFadyen is attractive and honorable in the thankless role of Jack Brit, Frost’s producer, a part with as little range for his talents as the real Brit.
Pat Nixon is played with ladylike resignation by Patty McCormick, who debuted on Broadway as a child murderess in “The Bad Seed”. Who would have thought she’d grow up to be Pat Nixon?

Milk offers a glowing performance by Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the first homosexual city councilman in San Francisco, who was murdered by colleague Dan Black, another fine characterization by Josh Brolin. It seems over-long and sometimes repetitious but Gus Van Sant’s film, with a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, brings out the tragic oppression experienced by homosexuals. Episcopal Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori said, “They’re the latest group but they won’t be the last.”

THE DUCHESS 

          Outstanding and original playwright Jeffrey Hatcher and Anders Thomas Jensen have done an astute job on converting Amanda Foreman’s biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, into a screenplay.  This 18^th century ancestress of Princess Diana was similar in the ways that count to mainstream audiences.  She was a gorgeous fashionista, locked into an arranged marriage with a member of the nobility who not only took a mistress but chose Georgiana’s best friend, Lady Elizabeth (Bess) Foster, and moved her and her three sons into their mansion. 

          Georgiana, whom her husband calls “G”,  is too spirited to take that lying down.  Drinking and gambling can only take you so far.  It’s inevitable that she takes a lover, childhood friend Charles Gray, an ambitious politician.  When she becomes pregnant with his baby, a cruicifying conflict ensues.  Will she abandon her three children with the Duke or her child with Charles? 

          This screenplay makes the conflict all about children which makes these shallow beauties barely bearable.  Bess tells G she has become the Duke’s mistress because he is the most powerful peer in England and the only person who can wrest her three sons from her abusive husband to live with her.  She also stands up to the Duke and accompanies Georgiana to the country when she gives birth to Charles Gray’s child who is turned over at the Duke’s insistence to Charles’s father or else Charles’s career will be destroyed and Georgiana will never see her children again.

          In typical 18^th century style, Georgiana manages to have her cake and eat it, too.  She remains Duchess of Devonshire and visits Eliza, her daughter with Charles, on the sly.  The Duke is played by Ralph Fiennes with an autocratic droit de seigneur but Fiennes is too fine an actor not to display touches of humanity, even in a man who is basically interested in nothing but his dogs and having his own way.  He always has, he always well.  He has his mistress, he has his Duchess and when she dies, he marries Bess with Georgiana’s blessing.

          One wonders how Princess Diana’s life would have played out.

          As written G has a certain survivalist toughness, a desire from early youth to be a Duchess and a star, and a strong maternal instinct which humanizes her.  Beautiful Keira Knightley takes her that far and no farther.  Her Georgiana is a shallow ambitious beauty whose disappointments made her a gambler and an alchoholic.  There’s no hint of the Duchess’s supposed with, intelligence and political passion. 

Dominic Cooper is dashing as Charles Gray but it’s hard to imagine him as the inspiration for our delicate and beloved Earl Grey tea.

Hayley Atwell as Bess is not well served by her costumes but interprets Hatcher’s vision of a woman who is grounded, sympathetic and a survivalist with an eye to the main chance.

          It’s a gorgeous film to watch.  Director Saul Dibbs lingers voluptuously on the luscious costumes and lofty rooms, conveying the sense of 18^th century royal life .  If the film has a message, it’s to make life work any which way you can.

          It’s not the first time Arthur Miller has used his life as dramatic fertilizer, more famously in “After the Fall”, his full-length play much of which was autobiographical.  This play has just two characters, Irish cop Tom (Jack Kehler) and Angela (Beege Barkette), the fantasizing prostiitute, reminiscent of Miller’s second wife, actress Marilyn Monroe.

          Tom has been worrying a murder case for five years but it’s just as likely that he’s been worrying about what his true feelings are for the amoral Angela.  Over the next 80 minutes, the couple parry, claw and tease each other.  Angela eventually starts feeding Tom tidbits of information about the case which boils down to corrupted authority, one of Miller’s favorite themes.

          The old master makes it fascinating.  In John Iacovelli’s decadent silken hotel room wreathed in cigarette smoke and noir lighting by Frank McKown, corruption hangs heavy in the air, immersing every thought they think and every breath they take.  Michael Arabian directs Barkette as a tigress fighting for her emotional life and Kehler as a man trying desperately to have one.

          Although the highly charged relationship between the two is dramatic, the play gets repetitious and the murder case is too convoluted to be absorbing.  In the Miller canon, it may be seen as another excision of a relationship he was still trying to explain to himself and us, a scab that he picked at until 1982 when he wrote this play.

          If you didn’t know who the author was, it’s a play that will cling to your clothes as you leave the theatre, like the stale cigarette smoke that becomes an addiction.  By Laura Hitchcock

At the Hayworth Theatre, 2509 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, August 16-31.  Reservations:  (323) 960-4442.

         Woody Allen strikes mellow gold for the first time in a long time with a script that slashes comic irony with recognizable passion.

          Maybe it’s that Spanish sun, those Latin lovers whose fights have more life than other couples’ loves or that long-legged American girl captured intuitively by half-American British actress Rebecca Hall as Vicky.

          Vicky is the movie’s heart.  She’s a serious scholarly girl who has come to Barcelona to work on a thesis on Catalan Identity, despite the fact that she doesn’t know Spanish any better than she knows herself.  With her is her best friend, budding filmmaker Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), blonde, luscious, passionate and non-committal.  Vicky is into commitment, leaving a lawyer fiancé, Doug, tucked away at home who also wants commitment and is already babbling about houses non-stop on their cell phones.  Doug is a walking embodiment of all the conventional clichés attributed to yuppies.  Too bad actor Chris Messina and writer/director Allen don’t turn over a spade or two of the comic surface.

          Javier Bardem does that superbly as artist Juan Antonio, the soul of Spain in a splendid body.  Though we wonder where he gets that expensive red sports car and a private plane, Bardem never overplays the playboy, the Latin lover or the Bohemian artist.  His artistic technique may be inspired by his ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), as she claims, but his sensitivity and eye are all his own.  He turns them on himself as acutely as on every beautiful woman he meets.

          Though he agrees with Vicky that he may have more in common with artistic hedonist Cristina, it’s Vicky with her serious probing of the Catalan soul who is, au fond, his soul mate.

          The American women meet their match in the dazzling and passionate Maria Elena who, though more than a little mad, may be the truest artist in the film.  The scenes between those two fiery Spanish actors, Cruz and Bardem, are the movie’s highlights.

          All three women are true to their natures as they swing around Juan Antonio like ribbons around a maypole.  But it’s Vicky who grows, who confronts sublimated facets of herself that she will carry back to the programmed life she planned, a life she may find she has already left behind.

By Laura Hitchcock

          Jay-Alexander directs a stage and screen production simultaneously, as the immense bowl which dwarfs the tiny figures on stage is flanked by movie screens which bring them to us in close-up.  His sense of drama and familiarity with the form and the show focuses an intense scrutiny on the musical that brings out all its faults and virtues and makes the audience forget that a concert version can’t portray the special effects and barricades of a full stage production. The sometimes clichéd words, the sometimes repetitive music are sublimated by the scope, heart and humanity of Hugo’s multi-charactered novel which makes clichés and repetition a part of human nature.

          I first read the novel in Classic Comics as a child and it leant itself very well to that now much-used graphic medium.

          This production is fortunate in having J. Mark McVey repeat his London and Broadway starring role as Jean Valjean, stalked by ominous and powerful Brian Stokes Mitchell as Javert, the implacable policeman who won’t let his innocuous crime rest.  As the tragic Fantine, Melora Hardin gives us an unforgettable “I Dreamed A Dream”. Lea Michele delivers a passionate rendition of the show’s great ballad “On My Own”. The young lovers, played by Michele Maika  as Cosette and John Lloyd Young (Frankie Valli in the original “Jersey Boys”) as Marius, have clear, almost operatic quality voices.

          This is not only a lovely way to spend a summer evening but, by the purity and power of its pared-down essence, a production that sets the bar for Les Miserables.

By Laura Hitchcock

Presented at The Hollywood Bowl, August 8-10, 2008.  Hollywood Bowl Reservations:  (323) 850-2000.

REVIEWING YOUR LIFE ON STAGE AND SCREEN

How often do we go to a theatre to escape the problems and mundanities of everyday life?  How often do we come out of the theatre talking about what we saw, what it meant and, specifically, what it meant to us and how it made us feel about ourselves in the world as we see it?  This series is a contribution to that dialogue.

       The reasons why La Vellini (Asia Argento) will be the last irreplaceable mistress of young libertine Ryno (Fu-ad Aattou) are abundantly and lushly repeated in the erotic scenes dear to the heart of French director Catherine Breillat.

          Although debt and destitution compel him to marry a beautiful heiress Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), not even his honeymoon, not even the isolated chateau in Brittany where the couple lives, can separate him from his mistress of the last decade.  That’s because they are erotic equals, aggressively obsessed with passion.  How can you leave a woman who provokes you into a duel with her old aristocratic husband and then licks the blood from the near-fatal wound he inflicts?
          La Vellini is the daughter of an imperious Italian princess and a fiery Spanish matador.  When she meets Ryno, they recognize each other immediately on some sub-conscious sensual plane and she takes him as surely as if it were her birthright.

          “Mine by the right of the White Election!  Mine by the royal seal!”  That’s not La Vellini, or Catherine Breillat, it’s Emily Dickinson whose passion may have been only in her dreams but who emotionally evoked it for all of us.

          Based on an 1851 novel by Jules-Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly, this film is very French.  The lovers’ passions have, as apostrophes, superb performances by Michael Lonsdale and Yolande Moreau as elderly society gossips and Claude Sarraute as Hermangarde’s aristocratic grandmother, who coaxes Ryno into telling her all about his affair with La Vellini.  The intelligence, intuitive understanding and mordant delight with which Sarraute drinks in this night-long confession take it out of the realm of gossip and the purely physical to demonstrate the almost metaphysical nature of intense sensuality. 

          Neither religion nor death can separate the lovers and by the film’s end, we understand wearily why their intense sexual compatibility is irresistible. 

cHRISTIAN BALE AS BATMAN

HEATH LEDGER AS THE JOKER

Christopher Nolan is a director of depth and dazzle.  Why would he trade in making such brilliant independent features as “Memento” for the Batman franchise, except for the money?

          He may be trying to take Batman someplace.  Having explored his origins in “Batman Begins”, Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan Nolan are now wrestling with how Batman confronts the evil that he’s submerged in every day without being maimed by it.

          Christian Bale’s lean saturnine Bruce Wayne, the millionare behind the Bat mask, seems ready to retire.  He tells his childhood sweetheart Rachel, given wry integrity by Maggie Gyllenhal, that the city needs a defender with a face and he thinks he’s found that face in the chiseled features of hard-driving District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who is also his rival for Rachel.

           A face of another caliber belongs to that master criminal, The Joker.  Although his make-up isn’t grisly nor does his face look mutilated like Dent’s at the film’s end, the late Heath Ledger creates a character who never knew what good was.  He hooks us with mannerisms, a darting snake-like tongue, twitching lips, furious eyes, a hulking body.  It’s the monsters’ movie, as Dent’s torments transform him from White Knight to death-dealing Black Prince.

Bale could be aced off the screen by Ledger and Eckhart but he’s such a riveting actor that in his too-rare appearances he wrenches us back to absorption in this weary warrior, who is eventually worn down to a lethal sword’s edge by The Joker’s tricks.  The Joker giggles gleefully as Batman gives him the violent beating that, to coin a cliché “hurts him more than it does me.”  It really does.

          Gary Oldman gives Inspector Gordon an understated decency and Eric Roberts plays Salvatore Maroni, the mob boss, with an off-hand world-weary authority that takes corruption for granted.   Morgan Freeman as inventor Lucius Fox finally reaches his walk-out point without losing his cool.  There’s a glimpse of Cillian Murphy, the Scarecrow, but so brief and undeveloped you’re not sure he was really there.  Nestor Carbonell as a striking Latino or Italian Mayor named Antonio nods by implication to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  And let’s never forget Michael Caine’s magisterial Alfred, the Butler, the closest thing to a father figure this movie and this Batman have.

Though there are themes underscored late in the day, a good 30-45 minutes could be lopped off the front of the movie and never be missed.  This is not a sculptured story. It’s an irrepressible mélange of dark violent scene studies shot by cinematographer Wally Pfister to the drumming music of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.

          The Joker is not after money.  In fact, he burns the pyramid of dollars he’s heisted from the city’s banks.  He wants to remake the world in his own image, starting with Harvey Dent, and he almost succeeds.

          The face imagery, masks for Batman, mutilation for The Joker and Dent, beyond their comic-book drama, make this a movie about face in the Oriental sense.  If you lose face there, you are destroyed.  Face is honor.  It’s who you are.

          Then there are the two ferryboats whose passengers have to choose which of them sinks.  Although The Joker loses here, the movie is so busy it doesn’t have the impact it should.  The indefinite ending has no impact, either. 

          There doesn’t have to be a tidy ending or even a point.  We’d settle for a quip or a question.  Christian Bale and Batman have earned more than action sequences and pervasive corruption.  Even so, this film battles its way to become an intriguing addition to the Nolan/Batman canon.

PIERCE BROSNAN AND MERYL STREEP

          As someone who used to think Abba was an English stove (confusing it with Aga), I came to this musical and subsequent movie like a virgin.  The musical was a lot of ebullient joyful hopping up and down and the movie is much the same, though half an hour too long.  Even marvelous Meryl Streep as Donna couldn’t make sense out of  “The Winner Takes All” and Pierce Brosnan’s subsequent lugubrious solo at the wedding feast was equally tiresome.  “Mamma”’s mandate to include every note Abba wrote must shoulder the blame here.

          Who wouldn’t want to go to a wedding on a gorgous Greek island with a tinsel wrap-around story of a bride who has invited three men suspected of being her father?  The distaff side is represented by Donna and the Dynamos, a ‘70s rock group.  What-if is all we know of plot and all we need to know.

          The choreography works best with a long line of boys on a quay stretching out into the sea in poses taken from the friezes on Greek pottery.  The best song is still “Dancing Queen”, seconded by the humble charming “Thank You For The Music”. 

          Amanda Seyfried is a real find as the young bride Sophia, part bubbly teen-ager, part yearning fatherless child, with the best voice in the film.  Her groom is Dominic Cooper, the most gorgeous boy from “The History Boys”.  Colin Firth is touching as Harry Bright and Stellan Skarsgaard as credible as anybody can be in a creampuff like this as the third potential Dad, adventurer and author Bill.  As the Dynamos. Julie Walters mugs a little too much. Christine Baranski’s familiar dissipated glamour is put to good use in better lines, such as “Yoga makes my feet bigger.”.

          Scripted by the musical’s writer Catherine Johnson, it was directed by first-time film director Phyllida Lloyd who did the stage version. Apart from that last draggy half-hour, Lloyd did OK.  She found wonderful Greek faces among the villagers and let her stars do their thing, including in the cases of Streep and Brosnan their own singing, which I liked better than a Marni Nixon version.

          To those sour reviewers who tear this cobweb apart, remember it’s a fantasy, people!  Wake up and dream!