I'm not sure if I'm qualified to list the ten best movies of all time, but I can list my ten personal favorites. Even that's hard, I narrowed it down to thirty or so and had a tough time crossing anything off. These ten, though, I can watch at anytime and have repeatedly:
1. Logan's Run (1976, dir. Michael Anderson) - My first favorite movie, I made my mom rent the vhs multiple times back in the day. Great 70's analog synthesizer sound effects and silly miniature future-scapes, and the acting is actually not bad...well, with the exception of Farrah Fawcett. Renew!!!
2. Dune (1984, dir. David Lynch) - My other favorite movie, tied with Logan's Run, and also my favorite book. More great actors in a cheesy sci-fi setting, and I love every bit of it. Not very true to the book, but fun anyway.
3. Singles (1992, dir. Cameron Crowe) - Set in early 90's Seattle, lots of cameos by grunge icons. Probably my favorite soundtrack of all time and a good story. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in this movie, which is pretty cool :)
4. Amelie (2001, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet) - Just simply beautiful and warms my heart.
5. The Shawshank Redemption (1995, dir. Frank Darabont) - Kind of brutal but uplifting at the same time.
6. The Princess Bride (1987, dir. Rob Reiner) - I don't see how anyone could not love this movie, awesome cast including Andre the Giant! Yes, Fred Savage is annoying as hell, but at least you can focus on the awesomeness of Peter Falk in those scenes. A great one for an all ages crowd.
7. Poltergeist (1983, dir. Tobe Hooper) - I saw this movie when I was way too young, so it made a big impression! It's holds up really well for an 80's film, still freaks me out.
8. The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir. Irvin Kershner) - My favorite of the original trilogy, although I absolutely love all three.
9. The Fellowship of the Ring (2001, dir. Peter Jackson) - Again, I love all three but have watched this one many more times.
10. That's the Way of the World (1975, dir. Sig Shore) Starring Harvey Keitel as a music producer and Earth, Wind, and Fire as "The Group." A cool drama set in the ugly recording industry of the 70's, great soundtrack and a satisfying ending. There's a scene with Earth, Wind, and Fire playing at a roller disco, worth watching for that reason alone!
It pained me to cross some movies off the list, so here's a list of runners-up which I love just as much: Idiocracy, Festival Express, The Thing(1982), The Big Lebowski, The Joy Luck Club, Napoleon Dynamite, The Evil Dead I&II, The Never Ending Story, Bloodsport, Amadeus, Jurassic Park, Clash of the Titans(1981), Akira, The Color Purple, and Spaceballs.
I’m not saying best because I’m just a guy who’s seen a couple of films; I don’t qualify as a cinephile or cineaste or whatever.
Favorite Science Fiction Movie: Blade Runner. (1982, dir. Ridley Scott) The problem with sci-fi is the ones that I’ve seen tend to be either/or: either they have good special effects story or they have an interesting concept. This is one of the few that had both and more impressively, it’s pre-CGI.
Runners-Up: 2001, The Terminator. The former is obvious I suppose but the latter may be a surprise. That being said, think about it. The story is simple but it works. The concept isn’t that crazy. The only things that the film suffers from are very dated special effects and bad 80s haircuts. I’m willing to overlook both of that.
Favorite Western Movie: Unforgiven. (1992, dir. Clint Eastwood) Good story, good acting and also, I’ve never seen Shane, The Searchers, How The West Was Won, or High Noon.
Favorite Action Movie: Road Warrior. (1981, dir. George Miller) All three of the Mad Max films are good. I actually like Thunderdome a little bit better but I don’t really think of that as an action film. I may not want Mel Gibson as a neighbor or as an explainer of Scottish or American Revolutionary history but he’s great as a post-apocalyptic anti-hero. Also, as long as there’d be a designated driver, I bet he’d be fun to grab a drink with.
Favorite Historical Movie: The Baader-Meinhof Complex. (2008, dir. Uli Edel) At best, a historical film is often only good at showing historic atmosphere in Technicolor. Usually the history is totally off or it doesn’t even bother trying to be anything than a costume drama to serve as a vehicle for some actor to get an Academy award. This one is different, and it wasn’t made by Ken Burns.
Favorite Ahistorical Movie: Amadeus. (1984, dir. Milos Forman) Nope. Mozart wasn’t indirectly killed by Salieri or buried in a mass grave (the last one makes no sense; he was the most famous musician in Europe!). Nonetheless, this film is very entertaining and has a great soundtrack. I like that one of the guys from Animal House got to play possibly the greatest musical talent in history.
Favorite Gangster Movie: Casino. (1995, dir. Martin Scorsese) No, this is not as good as The Godfather, Goodfellas, Godfather II, or whatever, but I like it better, because a) it moves faster than The Godfather, and b) the story is much more tightly told than Goodfellas. Also, I’m always interested in the intersection between legitimate and illegitimate business (“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Honore de Balzac), which Casino has much more of than the other films.
Favorite Film About Teenagers: Dazed & Confused. (1993, dir. Richard Linklater) Most teenage films are vapid wastes of time. This one I like because all of the characters were to some extent believable. Also, it’s set in the South but there’s very little caricature. And it looks it was shot in the town I was a teenager in.
Honorable Mention: Wargames. (1983, dir. John Badham) my all-time nerdiest moment? I don't know if this qualifies but it's up there. Remember Wargames? I loved that movie as a child. Matthew Broderick's greatest role. Still relevant seeing as nukes are still being pointed at each other. Anyway, one day I watched it and I was totally fascinated by the different strategies listed in this scene: http://youtu.be/NHWjlCaIrQo
I wrote down as many of them as I could read for purposes of further research (which didn't happen, so I guess I never reached my apotheosis of nerdery.) I watched it again and decided some of them wouldn't be bad as a down-tempo or lounge fusion band or something like a cheap Thievery Corporation knock-off.
Possible candidates include:
Far East Strategy
Iceland Maximum
Atlantic Heavy
Arctic Minimal
Denmark Massive
Pacific Defense
Spain Counter
English Thrust (also a possible swash-buckling themed porn title)
I stayed up very late Tuesday Night when I realized that Chinatown was playing on TCM. I’d seen it at least twice before, and for years, it’s held up in my mind as as great and devastating a movie as has ever been made. To be sure, the movie’s still a virtuoso miracle of craftsmanship, plotting, pacing, acting, and relevance. In our era of The Great Recession, few movies have more to teach us about the evil which makes our world a worse place to live. But as it is with Rosemary’s Baby before it, and The Pianist afterwards, Roman Polanski shows a mastery of locking you into a plot, and slumping you further and further into your seat as you feel claustrophobically trapped by the disgust of the situation he exposes. He doesn’t entertain you, he brutalizes you - he puts your sensations on edge and lets you feel every raw nerve in your body. This is not a movie to be experienced lightly; if you watch it too often, you could go mad.
The Wednesday before, I watched Lincoln. I saw it last year, and while I liked it, the movie seemed trapped in its own staginess. It seemed far too dialogue heavy and far too enamored of its subject matter to truly branch out into real vibrancy. But during this viewing, tears welled up in my eyes five separate times. It is not a movie with anything approaching Chinatown’s perfection, but it does make you feel hope. Like Chinatown, it has no illusions about the evil which men do, but it does offer us the possibility that by engaging in acts which resemble evil without yielding evil’s most potent temptations, evil can be surmounted and virtue win out. Is it a more truthful portrayal of humanity than Chinatown? I have no idea, and I’m inclined to believe that humanity usually acts closer to the manner which Chinatown portrays. But even if Lincoln is based on a lie, then it’s based on the lie which we all need to believe if we’re to keep on plugging away at life.
It’s all too easy to dismiss Lincoln as an earnest, inspirational movie which should provoke us all to greater action because of its message. But that’s much too easy a write-off for a movie which is so cynical about the political process it nevertheless espouses. In this movie, Abraham Lincoln is so powerfully charismatic because he is very much a cynical, wheeler-dealer politician who always puts his Machiavellian machinations at the service of higher ideals. The hope which Lincoln offers is that moral compromise need not automatically mean the triumph of corruption. In our lifetimes, we will all make hundreds of thousands of moral compromises, and we all need to believe that we can still be good people who retain our humanity in spite of often acting badly. The only alternative is to believe that fanaticism is our only weapon to triumph over evil, and once we believe in fanaticism we allow ourselves far greater acts of evil in good’s name.
The compromised, crooked timber of humanity is what shines through in Lincoln. Like all of us, this hero is deeply flawed, but it’s by using his flaws that he makes the world better. Perhaps what Lincoln shows us is not a true glimpse of humanity, but if the straight-and-narrow pessimism of Chinatown is humanity’s accurate portrayal, then what is served by our knowing it?
Just as it does with people, the humanity of artworks shines through. Some people give back, and you feel better, more consoled, more supported, more uplifted in their presence than you would if they weren’t there. But some people are airless, they sap you of energy, they make you less your best self in your presence, and you hate yourself a little more by the time you leave them. Just as with people, without that human quality, the work in question is in some sense spoiled and corrupted - less great, perhaps far less, than it would otherwise be. Too much compassion and the work seems overly full of shit, too much contempt and the work feels abusive. It is in that middle ground between compassion and contempt in which a peaceful person exists. If human nature is ever to be better than that of Noah Cross’s, then we need more things - people, art, religions, philosophies, sciences, tools, moral maps - to show us the way.
I am, without a doubt, one of the least visual people I know. My mother has more than once wondered aloud whether I’m colorblind. And she has ample reason to suspect so: my paternal grandfather was colorblind, but then again, he was also tonedeaf, and I have absolute pitch about as perfect as as a person can have. But I have a particularly odd reason to wonder about my lack of visual sense - my experience of music is synesthetic; meaning that I see colors that correspond to notes, but my mind is synesthetic in the most pedestrian way possible. Whereas other people see different colors with regard to any note they hear, I see only two colors - white if the note is above middle C, and black if the note is under, with a greyish hue in the low notes if I catch any overtones. Rather than colors corresponding to the notes or keys, I see shapes corresponding to the tone color of the timbre. A sharp rhythmic attack will produce shapes or lines in my head with lots of jagged angles, whereas a rounded, soft sound will produce shapes or lines that are almost completely rounded. It is, frankly, nowhere near as interesting an experience as your run of the mill synesthetic, who can produce a technicolor light show in his head with the barest three chord pattern.
My experience with “art” is like the straight-A middle-school student who realizes in high school that she’ll never be able to master calculus. I can write hundreds of thousands of words, I’ve been able to play the violin since I was three and have dabbled in nearly a dozen other instruments - some more seriously than others; I can sing and act well, I’ve directed plays and short movies (not well), I can tell stories and jokes and I’m a good cook; but I have many pieces of paper from doctors assuring me that my spatial reasoning is not much better than a small child’s. I nearly failed 11th-grade ceramics, and to this day, my attempts to draw are roughly as successful as the ones on this website (oh my god he’s still posting new entries!!!). Though I forget when I dreamed it, I’ll never forget the dream I once had that I drew the entire skyline of Jerusalem on my childhood bedroom wall in a gold magic marker.
The truth is, I was probably much too hard on the art scene yesterday. I have no business commenting on an artform which everybody does better than I, and have still less business commenting on an artform that I have so little experience or knowledge with. I know what I like, but I certainly should not insist on imposing my own tastes on anyone else. There was one line I was unsure about including in the post, which, of course, was the line that another musician friend decided to scrawl around my facebook wall for everybody to see. Furthermore, like so many people claim with hearing classical music live vs. hearing a recording, I have no great affection for abstract art until I’m actually in the museum and seeing the piece upfront. Once you see the piece in person, it can in fact make sense and give pleasure in a way it never could on a 2-dimensional page or screen. I even (god help me) once had a good experience with Rothko at the National Gallery in DC, and for a few minutes I managed to convince myself that a two-tone blot of color could be genuinely affecting.
But what makes me uncomfortable about the experience is precisely what makes the concert hall so deeply discomforting for others, and it would probably be discomforting for me had I not grown up in it. What’s troubling is the sense that we’re all there as passive watchers, and that the experience is operating independently of our feedback - it really doesn’t matter what we think or how we look at it so long as we do. What a dispiriting thought that is, that we’re supposed to care so little that it doesn’t even matter what value we attach to anything. To be endlessly discussed is not a virtue within itself if the viewer doesn’t find the piece rewarding. This is the laissez-faire approach which is the same as in so many scenes in Baltimore and so many other cities in so many artforms, in which people go from show to show and you’re there to appreciate the… well just take what you want out of it. Within every scene, there are wonderful people and bad people, extremely smart people and idiots. The smart people will always find something meaningful in a meaningful artist, perhaps the idiots who make superficial comments are there for a good reason, but I don’t want to find out.
(Collecting videos of Robert Hughes when he’s grumpy has been a long ongoing activity of this blog)
But even so, I’ve been enormously curious about art since moving back to Baltimore. To my surprise, I’ve somewhat fallen in with a crowd of MICA graduates, and as such am looking at and discussing more modern art than I have since college. With some help from Robert Hughes’s trusty history of American Art (“American Visions”) and an enormously talented artist friend of mine, I’m beginning to try to get to wrap my head around this thing called ‘American Art’, and understand what it really is. I should have made a much longer list of painters I like yesterday, because all that list did was display how woefully illiterate I am about art, and American art in particular. There are all sorts of painters I’m curious of knowing more about: from Stuart Davis toRockwell Kent to John Sloan to Max Weber to Alfred H. Maurer to Jacob Lawrence to John Steuart Curry to Thomas Hart Benton to Jack Levine to David Smith to Larry Rivers to Romare Beardon to Tom Wesselmann to Edward Keinholz to George Segal to Mark Tansey to Richard Diebenkorn (How’d I forget him?) to Philip Pearlstein to Walter de Maria to Philip Guston to Leon Golub to Kiki Smith to Louise Bourgois to Allison Schulnik to Mark Tobey to Edmund Teske to Lou Dorfsman to Lucas Samaras to Will Burtin to Robert Arneson to Jess Collins to Ken Knowlton to Charles Csuri. But I can’t claim any great familiarity with any of them, and certainly not much familiarity as I have with many American artists I don’t like.
And then there are the famous American artists that I’m sort of neutral on - Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Naumann (Naumann was my first introduction to modern art when I was roughly twelve… anybody who can put the word ‘fuck’ in neon lights to a twelve year old has captured a part of his heart forever) - but I can’t claim I really love what they do either. Even Rauschenberg can be enjoyable, I just think it’s absurd to call him a kind of genius as it’s often claimed.
The art world is something I feel like I know very well even if I don’t know it at all, because it’s so similar to the classical music world. Visual art is clearly less diseased than classical music (everything is). I was at a few art shows this weekend with a perfectly engaged audience and a community which rallies behind one another when the artists have talent, and when I compare them to concert at Shriver Hall I went to Sunday evening to watch Mischa Maisky give a truly awful performance of a Schubert sonata, only to hear dozens of old ladies wax poetically about what they heard during intermission, I know that the art world is going to be in much better shape than classical music will ever be in my lifetime.
But even if the art world is a lot (leagues) cooler than classical music, there is the same dispiriting lack of enthusiasm. I suppose that’s part of the ‘cool’ aesthetic, but if there isn’t at least one or two people who look like they want to bat down the hatch to get into a show, what’s the point of staging it?
Abstraction is a perfectly legitimate medium so long as the abstraction expresses something coherent. From artists like Frank Stella or Anselm Kiefer, I get a genuine sense of something being expressed behind the painting - as though the patterns and the colors express some sort of emotion. But obfuscation for its own sake is as much technical exercise in art as it is in classical music. In both cultures, there is a huge distrust of American ‘superficiality’ and ‘vulgarity,’ as though to take the smallest part in representing any America which we’d recognize is to somehow be contaminated by it. I don’t think it’s ever occurred to many abstract artists (or musicians) that embracing the superficiality around them for exactly what it is is the best way to elevate one’s surroundings into something more palatable. When Jackson Pollock splatters paint on a canvas, I don’t see the emptiness of existence or any particular playfulness or dream-like ecstasy, I just see a shitload of paint. Nor do I see anything different when Rothko does the same in his particular way.
But even so, popular art has got to be as absurd an overreaction to abstract art as is possible. I can certainly think of many painters I prefer to abstract artists; and obviously, there are many ways to bend the rules of the genre, and some artists like Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann can be pretty brilliant at it; but the simplicity of it is completely limiting. Who needs art you can just as easily see on the street? I’m entertained by the idea of a 40-foot clothespin, but I don’t, as Robert Hughes does, see Brancusi’s The Kiss in it, nor do I think there’s any deeper meaning to Oldenberg’s piece than a giant fucking clothespin. I get that Andy Warhol did something different than any artist did from his era, but was it an improvement?
To me, the goals for painting and sculpture, just like the goals for symphonies and operas, are necessarily less ambitious than they once were. Even here in America, the kick which one derives from a piece like Winslow Homer’s The Life Line is probably impossible in any later painting. Because in an era of photography and particularly motion picture, it would never occur to most artists in ‘old forms’ to dare to compete with more realistic genres in the realm of action. And if few people are trying, there’s still less chance that someone will succeed so brilliantly.
When you see early photographs by pioneers like Jacob Riis and Matthew Brady, you see a level of veracity which it’s doubtful that any American painter ever reached - and frankly, a level of veracity which later photographers like Man Ray or Ansel Adams, for all the beauty of their shots, never cared to reach. Painting was a proper, ‘old school’ hobby for talented children of privilege. But it would never occur to such painters to look at tenement housing or fresh Civil War battlefields. With a snap of a camera and a little bit of dark room work, a photograph could expose the more horrific and dangerous parts of life which no amount of brush strokes had since Goya and Turner. Or compare the paintings of Thomas Eakins to Eakins’s photography. All that painting technique must have taken years to acquire, yet I’m not sure that a single painting by him feels anywhere near as exciting as any of his photographs, which are clearly more visceral, more erotic, and less generic. His painting nudes feel like academic portrayals of flesh, but in photography, those same nudes are shocking and dangerous. Furthermore, for all the horrific racism of Birth of a Nation, the movies of D. W. Griffith was a further example of how exciting the new technology was. If you look at Birth of a Nation today, it seems both both incredibly silly and incredibly disturbing. We watch as the heroes of the Ku Klux Klan charge to the rescue against barbarian hordes of white people dressed in black face who lust after white women and drink copious amounts of liquor. But even now, there is a visceral charge to it which only a great movie can provide. Only greatness could make people care this much, and Birth of a Nation both caused black people to riot outside theaters and caused white people, millions of them, to join the Klan (to say nothing of the lynchings these people instigated). Such are the dangers of art when used irresponsibly, but even so, it’s only possible when greatness exists in the first place. What film today could possibly make people care so much that the entire world becomes a different place after it’s released?
The silent era of movies was an age for visual artists. There were no writers to give interest with dialogue, so virtually everything one saw on the screen had to be done through the language of visual art. It should be no surprise that the Silent Cinema came at the same time as the Golden Age of Ballet. After a century when painters like Goya and Delacroix and Turner gave us whole new ways to view the earth, the most revolutionary idea was to put their poetry into motion. For all the excitement of visual art in the age of Picasso and Matisse, the work which truly excited the public was done in the movies. Even going into the early sound era, you look at Chaplin features like Modern Times, or Busby Berkeley musicals, or horror movies like Frankenstein and Freaks, and you see the kind of creativity that changes the world At the time, no country saw more potential for the possibilities of cinema than Germany, and there was hardly any visual technique to be found in the art of the 1920’s for which an equivalent techniques couldn’t be found in the work of directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and Robert Wiene, When things got particularly dicey in Germany, directors like Lang and Joseph von Sternberg made their way to America, and their influence upon American cinema was enormous. There’s no Orson Welles without the German example, and even Alfred Hitchcock, that eternal beacon of Britishness, went first to Berlin to break into the film industry, and the influences of German expressionism are everywhere in his work.
Perhaps classical music is now entering its ‘pop art’ phase in which people decide that they are going to reproduce the musical content of the world around them with not much difference between pop products and classical (more on that in a few days I hope). Contrary to popular belief, classical composers are not yet in a phase where 'anything goes.' We are now getting a second, populist/minimalist dogma growing around the atonal dogma as yet another pole through which young composers can be trapped. The result is just another dogma which artists have to break in order to create anything of value. Perhaps that’s inevitable that dogma will arise, maybe many artists need those limitations in order to thrive. But for those who don't, such a box makes it that much harder for artists to think outside of it.
I have now seen the new Les Mis movie, and can say with a
reasonable degree of confidence that with the exception of two scenes, this is
the worst movie imaginable that could have been made from this source material.
It is not simply bad, or even a disaster, it is perhaps a once-in-a-generation cinematic
apocalypse of poor judgment and bad taste.
There is one simple reason why this movie so bad. And that
is because this movie insists on trying to make Les Mis into something good. I
love the musical version of Les Miserables. I can’t help it, I memorized it
when I was six years old and it was the first inkling to this precociously
insufferable music lover that opera could exist in English and even in a
non-classical idiom. At this point in my life, I can still sing virtually every
song in the show from memory. But even in its best performances, Les Miserables
has long since become a guilty pleasure for me. Les Mis is a decent musical
whose runaway success is entirely disproportionate to artistic worth. The only
thing about Les Mis which speaks to any kind of creative genius is the
marketing which made it the most profitable musical of all time. And yet here is a movie that insists to us that the material behind this financial deluge is strong enough
to support one final attempt to transform a solid musical into a work of
immortal art.
The infinite ambitions of this movie are scrawled around
every shot that gives you a good view of a singer’s larynx and every new scrap
of plodding material written specifically for this movie. The stage show content has
been edited hundreds of times for the movie, and as you see them, you marvel at
how much sense these edits make. In all fairness, the musical direly needs
editing. Not only does the musical sprawl, but at many points it’s downright
incoherent. There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of edits, from the
tenses of verbs to whole new songs and scenes. Some of these edits exist
because they make more sense for a movie, some of them exist simply to correct
the long plot muddle in the play. Just to take the most obvious example, in the
play, we have no idea why Javert is still pursuing Valjean. To the best of my
memory having seen four live productions in two different languages, two TV
versions, and listened two cast albums, there isn’t a single line that refers to exactly
how Jean Valjean broke his parole. So basically, we’re expected to believe that
Javert harasses Valjean because he’s an a**hole who has some sort of
Kafkaesque explanation for the fact that Valjean committed another crime even if he didn't. The movie solves this in one simple stroke – the
first scene contains a line (from the novel) about how Valjean must carry the yellow ticket to any potential employer and landlord which says he’s an
extremely dangerous man until the end of his life and has to report to a parole
board thirty days after his release. The yellow ticket is in the stage play, but the contents of the yellow ticket are never revealed to us. At the end of the song (really just an ultradramatic
monologue) “What have I done”, Valjean tears up the ticket – something he's too busy singing to do in the stage musical - thereby refusing
to acknowledge his lifelong parole sentence. And thus twenty-five years of
muddle was cleared up in two simple, ingenious edits. I could point out a dozen
other edits that are similarly ingenious which make a more coherent plot. And
yet nobody seemed to mind the fact that Les Mis was a muddle in the first
place.
The problem is that the lyrics in these new edits are every
bit as uninspired, and sometimes moreso, than what came before them. The stage
show’s been honed for twenty five years, and even in the awful 25th
anniversary concert (as seen every hour of every day on PBS for the last two
years), it was still incoherent, but it nevertheless took you directly from one over-the-top
flight of fancy to the next. This show is ridiculous, it knows it’s ridiculous,
and it doesn’t care. Neither should you. But in trying to tie everything
together for a coherent narrative, in hewing closer to the Hugo novel than the
stage show ever dared, it loses the headlong momentum which made you forget for
an hour at a time that the show was ridiculous. The great bulk of the new
material is simply dull at the most fundamental level. Les Mis is grand opera,
and every bit as ridiculous and stupid as the 19th century Auber and
Meyerbeer operas which inspired it.
And then there are those close-ups. I completely understand why Tom Hooper elected
to use close-ups, as a movie version requires the kind of intimacy which the
grand over-the-topness of theater does not provide. But why did he keep all the
singers in extreme closeup when it was time to let their voices soar. The best
directorial choice in the entire movie, coming in an otherwise risible scene,
was to have Russell Crowe sing the famous belting aria “Stars” as he stares at
Notre Dame Cathedral – no doubt to distract from the fact that Crowe can’t sing
it. And that’s the moment when I realized… where is the landscape in this
movie? The main character of Les Miserables is not Jean Valjean, the main
character is France. And the moment the movie arrives in Paris, it completely
loses whatever little interest it had in the surrounding landscapes and almost
every scene takes place in an enclosed set. That may have been a choice made
for budgetary reasons, but it ruined any chance of redeeming the movie in its
second half. Rather than give us the epic view of French life which a movie of
Les Mis desperately needs, it ruined the movie version’s most fundamental asset
by focusing every song in the sort of extreme close-up that even Wayne and
Garth knew was a terrible idea. Instead of showing real scenes of French
peasant life, it opts this once to preserve the integrity of the stage show in
the choice where it’s most crucial that it shouldn’t. Rather than showing the
poor of France in all their misery, it shows the poor in the kind of highly
stylized dance moves that alleviates us from the burden of taking their miserableness
seriously. When it comes time for the prostitution scene, the prostitutes look
like dancing zombies from A Chorus Line.
And then there are all those unconvincing, sometimes
absolutely hilarious set-pieces. The chain gang moving the galley ship which looks like a pleasant day at the beach, the spontaneously
singing and dancing beggars who seem like they should be get a scholarship to
go to the high school from FAME, the aforementioned zombie hookers and the
delivery of I Dreamed a Dream after having sex in her prostitution bed, the
fake sword fight in the confrontation scene, the 1960’s style crowding of the
cops by the revolutionaries, the barricade so small that it reminded me of This
Is Spinal Tap’s ten-inch Stonehenge, Marius’s resolve to immediately leave his
own wedding after finding out where Valjean is without even a word of
explanation to his grandfather, or poor Colm Wilkinson playing the Bishop of
Digne and forced to wear a 1000-watt grin as he welcomes Jean
Valjean to heaven, and my personal
favorite,…the endless river of shit in the Parisian sewers. Not even Paris can
manufacture the smell which that much feces must give off.
But the ultimate nadir of this movie was Hooper’s choice to
have the singers record live in real-time. Tom Hooper makes costume dramas, and
like most costume drama directors, he is charitably known as an “actor’s
director.” But in this case as in very few others, the moniker seems to be
deserved. The King’s Speech is an overrated movie, but Colin Firth and Geoffrey
Rush were both fantastic. The John Adams miniseries sprawled at times, but it
had uniformly wonderful performances from every lead actor (Paul Giammati,
Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, David Morse, Stephen Dillane, and John Dossett).
But most amazingly, he coached Helen Mirren through what might have been the
performance of her career. The (deserved) hype about The Queen overshadowed the
fact that she played Elizabeth I in an HBO miniseries that has to stand as one
of the very greatest TV movies ever made.
Clearly, Tom Hooper loves actors and they love him. But his
trust of actors proved to be the movie’s ultimate downfall. To make the movie
more intimate and conversational, the singers recorded live in real-time,
accompanied by a live piano. Singers could take their time on every line they
wished, they could make any interpretive choice to mold every scene precisely
as they felt it. As a G-list conductor who works with singers every week, I
feel confident in saying that any competent musical director of a show will
tell you the same thing – NEVER GIVE SINGERS A RUBBER STAMP! Conductors should
be held accountable for their whims as well, but the nexus of narcissism for
which this choice allowed boggles the brain. The sheer coddling it must take to
indulge every egotistical interpretive choice in this cast is stunning. Tom
Hooper obviously spent months patiently forming an interpretation of this show
in which he corrected all the continuity errors, found ways to stage scenes
which made far more sense than they ever did on the stage, and yet when it came
time for big numbers, he indulged the singers to go as far into ham territory
as they wished. And nearly every one of them took him up on his offer. Sometimes
the actors inserted their own lines of spoken dialogue into songs that must
have been improvised on the spot, and none more hilarious than the one towards
the end in which Jean Valjean finally confesses his past to Cosette, to which
the always gorgeous but not always the most talented actress Amanda Seyfried utters
a superbly awkward and casually plot-changing “I knew.” Maybe it wasn’t her
idea, but whoever came up with it will have probably earned a place in movie
history’s hall of shame.
Anne Hathaway recently did a skit on Saturday Night Live
which spoofed Homeland, in which she made fun of Claire Danes for giving
precisely the sort of over-the-top hammy performance she gave here – only Anne
Hathaway’s performance as Fantine is far more over-the-top than Claire Danes
has ever been in Homeland’s most far-fetched scenes – with as many painfully
awkward grimaces and diva pauses as there are syllables in the words of her
role. Of all the awful performances in this movie, Anne Hathaway gave the
worst, and to think that she’s being commended as the joy of the film is still
more bizarre than her facial contortions. Hugh Jackman clearly had no direction
as Jean Valjean, because his vocal performance stays on the same monotonous dynamic,
one shade of vocal color, and bleating-like-a-sheep vibrato through the entire
movie. He has as many portentious pauses as Anne Hathaway, but at least his
acting is merely boring rather than Olympian-level bizarre. For all the
complaints about Russell Crowe’s vocal performance, Hugh Jackman’s is far more
inexcusable because he’s the professional singer. During his every scene,
Russell Crowe seemed to have only one thought go through his mind: ‘Get me the
f-ck out of here!’ Crowe’s Javert has all the menace of Paul Giamatti playing a tollbooth collector,
and his vocal performance occasionally bore the subtle but unmistakable sound
of an auto tuner.
It’s doubly a shame, because on Friday night I saw a truly great
movie version of Les Miserables that is less than 15 years old which hardly anyone
seems to have seen. The performances of Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush, and Uma
Thurman, are as wonderful as Jackman, Crowe, and Hathaway are risible. The
direction of Bille August (best known for Smilla’s Sense of Snow), is as
pitch-perfect as Tom Hooper’s is disgustingly wrong-headed.
The good intentions of all these choices are absolutely
clear, and the result is that Cameron Mackintosh and Tom Hooper made a real
movie instead of simply a filmed stage version. The only problem with this is
that they made a tragicomically terrible movie, whose awfulness will become
increasingly recognized with time like so many long-awaited movies. The only
event in our lifetime that can probably compare to this is the arrival of the
Star Wars prequel trilogy. When The Phantom Menace was first released to the
American public, the reaction was simply lukewarm – the shock of seeing the
badness of something so long awaited muted the first reaction. And yet the
sense of outrage at the mind-crippling horribleness of what transpired only
grew with time, and as the years wore on, it deservedly became known as one of
the biggest disappointments ever to reach the screen. I have no doubt that this
movie will have a similar trajectory.
(A fan video made from the musical with the far better
movie. Compare and contrast if you like and mourn what might have been.)
As perhaps none of the other ‘loose baggy monsters’ of 19th
century literature do, Les Miserables cries out for a movie. The story itself
is nothing less than a primal myth about how humanity is kept wretched. Would
that other novelists learned from Victor Hugo’s example and wrote novels about
the world rather than their own navels. And yet, in my experience, this novel
is much less than its parts. I realize that this is the view from 2012, but
from the vantage point of our era, Victor Hugo seems to do everything he
can to dull his story’s inherent drama.
Now I should specify, I have not read Les Miserables from
cover to cover. But I’ve tried to dip into it many times, and I’m constantly
struck by the woodenness of Victor Hugo’s writing. Whether in Les Mis or Notre
Dame, Hugo is an amazing writer of descriptive prose. When the situation calls
for action, he has the entire world of language at his disposal. But when it
comes to the kind of repose that makes the characters truly breathe that illustrate his ideas,
Victor Hugo seems rather hopeless.
That Victor Hugo was a great writer of action and an indifferent
student of human nature shouldn’t surprise anyone. Action was his entire life.
He was born in 1802, the year Napoleon was elected France’s Consul for Life.
Hugo was the son of a Bonapartist general and raised in the milieu of the
Napoleon's iron fist. Napoleonic self-belief and humorlessness also seems to have passed to the young writer, and it stayed with him all his days. Some French
wag is said to have remarked “Victor Hugo was really a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” When the writer was in his seventies or eighties, a friend
expressed to Hugo his belief that the soul dies with the body, to which Hugo
replied “For your soul that may be true, but I know that mine is eternal.”
Whether or not Hugo’s soul is eternal, he seems to have done
absolutely everything within his power to ensure that posterity would not
forget him. By the end of his life, he’d written seven novels – nearly all of
which are of Les Miserables length – he wrote twenty-one plays, countless
numbers of polemics and pamphlets, and 155,000 lines of poetry! And that doesn’t
count any private correspondence. No one
but a person of messianic inner conviction can create an output so large, and
anyone who writes at such a frenetic pace for so many decades has neither the
time to make sure everything is of equal quality nor the self-awareness to
realize that the quality of his writing might improve if there were less of it,
nor the leisure time to make a proper study of human nature.
And yet Victor Hugo is probably the most widely beloved
writer in French history. His fictions are about very real issues, yet they make no real intellectual demands on the reader. Even if insipid, the prose is always crystalline, and when he was at his considerable best, the excitement of his plots carried his writing forward through whatever weaknesses they possessed. In both his time and long after his death, there was
probably not a single person in France who did not have strong feelings about
Victor Hugo. If you could read French, it’s likely you read every scrap of his writing
you could find. If you couldn’t, somebody probably read it to you. In order to
understand the importance of Victor Hugo to 19th century France, you’d
have to combine Stephen Spielberg, Bob Dylan, Christopher Hitchens, and Norman
Mailer. His only contemporary peer in this regard is Charles Dickens, who like
Hugo, was the voice of his entire country: every region, every social class, every
ethnic group, every background. There might be a few 20th century
writers who served the same purpose to give voice to the stories of small
nations, but none of them have anything resembling the enormous international presence
which Hugo commanded as well.
(West Side Story: The Citizen Kane of
American theater – the summit to which every piece of theater before was
leading, and every piece since was a reaction. The one-off moment when America’s
three greatest young theatrical talents: Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and
Stephen Sondheim, put their titanic egos aside to make a musical together. The
result was a sublime achievement on a level that in so many ways has never been
equaled in the history of America – a seemless fusion of dance and song, a
perfect melding of grand opera with popular idiom, and most importantly, a piece
that speaks to the entirety of the American experience; both native and
immigrant, on a level that no other piece of theater ever equaled, and perhaps
never could. It gives the poorest and crassest of America’s residents a high
dignity that humanizes them to people who’d cross the street to avoid these
characters. And yet, it’s also totally ridiculous… with gang members speaking
in a mixture of slang that probably dated already in 1957 and bad love poetry, and
constant breaking into abstract highbrow ballet whose movements make no sense
as often as they do. Such is the unfortunate, confused, ridiculous plight of
American theater, which still hasn’t found sure footing 236 years after the
founding of the country.)
Friday night was as good a night as a person
will get from American theater today. August Osage County is probably the most
endlessly praised, talked about and commented upon American play since Angels in
America, and with good reason. It is a play that seamlessly plants the most
painful, debased aspects of human existence within a Himalayan mountain of
comedy. I can’t think of any American movie in the new millennium that exposes more
of the dark crevasses of human existence. For more than twenty-four hours after
I saw it, the twisted, macabre mood of this play remained very much with me.
But there’s something about this play that feels utterly
synthetic. There isn’t a single scene in this script that doesn’t feel cribbed
from some other play which all of us who’ve sat through high school and college
friends’ ill-advised attempts at artistic greatness have seen before: The
fucked-up intellectual family in a claustrophobic house, the realist chamber
drama, characters who grapple with the terrifying silence of secrets, grappling
with addiction, infidelity, incest, racism, and pedophilia. Just in America,
we’ve again and again praised as masters playwrights who’ve covered all these
same issues on stage - O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Albee, Neil Simon, August
Wilson and Sam Shepard, and even before it came to America we can watch all
sorts of similar discussions in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov. There is
something about the issues discussed in this play that feels so endlessly
rehashed, so totally completely indebted to its predecessors, that I (no expert
on theater) find it nearly impossible to pick out what’s original from
everything I’ve seen before. Another matriarch addicted to painkillers? Another
precocious teenage girl falling for a sociopathic predator? More families
beating the shit out of each other? More breaking dishes? More incest? More
relatives gone missing? More half-century long family secrets? The whole thing
plays like an encyclopedia of every shock we’ve experienced in the last 150
years of world drama.
The production too was as good as we were probably ever going to
get in nearly anywhere in America today outside New York, LA and Chicago. Yet
the whole night relied upon our good faith to continually suspend disbelief
from minute to minute. There were some truly fabulous actors on stage, but among
the thirteen different principles, there were thirteen different accents in
spite of the fact that 11 of these characters were supposed to hail from the
same hometown. All three of the sisters (Chekhov anyone?) were superb, yet all
three were clearly ten years too young for their roles and far too pretty. The
father was supposed to be a bookworm whose books dominated the house with their
oppressive weight, yet his erudition was represented by a single lonely
bookshelf. Rather than give us the great music of Oklahoma during the scene
changes (like Woody Guthrie or Wallis Willis or Wanda Jackson…a lot of W’s in
that state…), or even something ironic like Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, the
transitions were accompanied by African drumbeats, as though to hit us over the
head with the fact that this family exists in a primitive state of nature… I
can’t be the only person who read something uncomfortably close to racism in that.
All the characters constantly commented that the mother never turned on the air
conditioning and the house was constantly 90 degrees, yet the entire four-hour
play was accompanied by the blasting hum of an air conditioning unit, keeping
us all quite comfortable in a 70 degree theater. The cumulative effect was not
to transport you to Oklahoma but like a great staged reading in which you had
to take on faith that if people tried harder, they could make a truly great
night for us. Instead, it felt like a troop of talented amateurs, utterly
adrift without a competent director to combine their talents into a coherent
vision. It’s an experience that makes you sad for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve tried doing theater at various points in
my life – as an actor, as a director, even as a theater musician, and I’d be
lying if I said that I didn’t usually regret the experience. I don’t know if it
was always true of actors, but I can’t deny the fact that I neither much like
most theater people or that most theater people don’t much like me; and to talk
about why, I have to traffic not only in empirical evidence but in stereotyping.
I don’t know if it was always true that actors and singers were known
throughout world history as grade-A narcissists (they were probably too poor
and ignored for most of history to be thought of that way), but that is the
abiding stereotype of them today, and I wish I hadn’t accumulated so much
evidence to bear that out. It’s not to say that I don’t’ know many actors and
singers who aren’t perfectly nice people who pay their taxes and wouldn’t burn
heretics if given the chance; but whether it was enduring the tantrums of
actors and singers because I asked them to do something one too many times, or
watching another director chew out an actor as a ‘liar’ or a conductor telling
his singers that he wants to ‘kill’ them, or watching so many of these same people
make make inappropriate scenes in their personal lives, I can’t
deny there is something creepily self-centered about so many stage animals that
make me prefer leaving their company to others who like them more – or at least
ditching them to hang out with the techies. The claustrophobic vulnerability
required in life as a contemporary actor seems to make people who become
actors a bit nutty, or maybe they were already nutty and just needed an outlet
for it. For a person like me who’d prefer to be less nutty than he already is, he would
do much better to take up painting or join a band or an orchestra. It’s
much easier to get along with artists and instrumentalists than singers and
actors – acting and singing is based on showing off your ‘person’, whereas
playing an instrument or painting a canvas requires the humility to say that
you need an extra tool which your body does not already have to create
something beautiful. Perhaps this lack of humility is also inherent in writers,
but at least I can hide behind the fact that I’m also an instrumental musician.
I have no idea what causes narcissism in
people; is it inherent in a person’s genes, or does the environment of a
person’s upbringing provide for it? And if so, is it too much pressure in a person's upbringing or
too little? And maybe I’m completely wrong about theater people and just
trafficking in the kind of offensive stereotyping that would make them angry
(not that that wouldn’t delight me…). But what I can’t ignore is the fact that
there are two competing strands in American theater that seem to speak to
precisely this sort of narcissism of which I’m speaking.
(Somehow,
when you no longer believe in American optimism…Rogers and Hammerstein doesn’t
make much sense, does it?)
Fundamentally speaking, I can see two
traditions in American theater that are alive and ‘well’ – music theater and ‘straight’
theater. Music theater, for all its exceptions, seems to have very deep roots
in escapism – do Rogers and Hammerstein musicals have anything to do with the
realities of Oklahoma, Siam, or the South Pacific? Does Andrew Lloyd Webber
(British as he is…) appear to have any real knowledge of Argentina, The Bible,
or alley cats? If you find yourself particularly drawn to these pieces, and
many, many people are, you’re being drawn to a world of imagination – and
frankly not the world of a particularly fascinating imagination. There are more
exciting escapist visions; better researched, more excitingly done – anyone
who’s seen a Kander & Ebb musical (Chicago & Cabaret) knows that
there’s nothing wrong with escapism if you mean to escape to somewhere
interesting.
(A Long Day’s Journey Into Night – take your
suffering like a man!)
But then there’s the world of plain,
‘straight’ theater. I can’t imagine that somebody didn’t come up with the title
‘straight theater’ as a way of implying that music theater is effeminate. And
perhaps even now such a stereotype works all too well, because so many
‘straight’ American plays require you to sit in your seat and take your dose of
suffering like a ‘man.’ In such a tradition, we’re introduced to the
sadomasochistic abusiveness of characters from Eugene O’Neil, the false hope of
Arthur Miller’s protagonists, the sexual repression of Tenessee Williams’s, the
savage ironies of Edward Albee, and the still more savage ones of David Mamet.
Each of these writers are tragedians, but not in the Greek sense in which a
great man falls from his height – because in America it’s only a tragedy if you
never were great. In America, the most tragic state is to be a small person,
and then realize how small you are. In such plays, there is very little
catharsis as the Greeks would define it. We pity Oedipus and Orestes for how
far they’ve fallen; they were once superior to us, and are now our inferiors –
and that creates a certain awed distance from them which we can no longer have.
Neither Willy Loman nor Blanche DuBois have any height to fall from – at no
point in their lives were they living anything but the nightmare in which the
play began – and their nightmares are all too similar to ours. By the end of
these plays, we don’t feel purged of our demons, we feel inflamed by them. If
life is only joyless heartbreak, then why do we even go to the theater? For O’Neill and his descendents, the theater
becomes a prison of inward focus; a queezily intense, claustrophobic place
which perhaps is a perfect reflection of the kind of environment that makes
people crave the stage in the first place. So many of these plays are monuments
to empty drama – making us feel tension almost past the point of exploitation,
and it becomes tension without release. You leave Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet
feeling elated from spasm after spasm of tragic delight – you leave Long
Day’s Journey Into Night wondering how you’ll ever get out of bed the next
morning. Again, there are exceptions to
this rule. Anyone who’s ever seen a high school production of Thornton Wilder’s Our
Town knows that the inconsequential, suffocating lives so often portrayed on the
American stage can have purpose and true dignity. In a different way, the same
is true of Angels in America, or the Pittsburgh Cycle, or Porgy and Bess, or A Raisin in the Sun, or The Music Man, or even The
Crucible (if you squint…).
In either the case of musical theater or
‘straight’ theater, it would appear that America produces a brand of theater so
myopic, so inwardly focused on either the suffering of the self or escaping
from it, that its achievements can’t help but be miniscule compared to American
achievements in movies, television, popular music, perhaps even novels and
poetry. In spite of these exceptions, or perhaps
because they’re mere exceptions, American theater has produced neither much
great music nor a great linguistic outpouring, or even enough memorable characters. So
many of the great American playwrights seem to flame out after just a few plays,
not even capable of writing three plays which are accepted worldwide as
unimpeachable masterworks. Eugene O’Neill has The Iceman Cometh and A Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, and after those two everybody starts debating which
of the others are great. Tennessee Williams got The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar
Named Desire before everybody started debating exactly where he began to
decline (I think it started in Streetcar…). Arthur Miller has Death of a Salesman
and The Crucible, and All My Sons has lots of champions, but then… Lorraine
Hansberry had A Raisin in the Sun, and died before she wrote a worthy followup. No two theatergoers seem to agree on which the best Sam
Shepherd plays are. And no two theatergoers agree on whether David Mamet is any
good at all. Some feel Neil Simon is trivial, everybody's forgotten about Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, and most have never heard of
Horton Foote or Lanford Wilson (I’m pretty sure I don’t even know a play of either
of theirs, I just know they exist…). Compared to all those master creators we have from movies, from television, from the best in rock
and jazz, American theater provides us with preciously few insights into human beings, preciously
little music worth remembering, and preciously few characters vivid enough to take with us into
our lives. Aside from all the others from Britian’s peerless theatrical
tradition, England has hundreds of
characters merely from Shakespeare which no one will ever forget having met
them for the first time. Norway and Sweden, countries with one-sixtieth our
population where the claustrophobia we find in American drama was truly earned,
we have all those characters from Ibsen and Strindberg: Hedda Gabler, Peer
Gynt, Brand, Emperor Julian, Soleness, Nora, Hilda, Jacob Hummell, Miss Julie,
The Stranger, Laura, and all their surrounding galleries… but among the
similarly living, breathing, unforgettable characters embedded in a larger American consciousness, we
have Willy Loman, Amanda Wingfield, Blanche and Stanley, the Stage Manager in Our Town, George and Martha, maybe Roy Cohn, David Mamet’s fuck patois… and that’s about it.
The comparison with England is particularly
sad. In the land of Shakespeare, it can’t be denied that theat(re)er simply
means means more to them than it does to us. It is the very foundation of their
cultural identity as much as movies are the foundation of ours. And it also
can’t be denied that the greatest plays on the British Isles, whether the
English bedrock of the human condition which Shakespeare is (or his
contemporaries like Marlowe or Jonson), or the Irish-English comedy of ideas
that is Shaw and Wilde, have an open-air scope of the world which nearly any
American play I can think of cannot possibly touch.
Last Friday night, I was in London, at a
production of Julius Caesar by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This was truly a
production of the world – Julius Caesar done with an all-black cast as an
African dictatorship. Julius Caesar is, to say the least, an imperfect
Shakespeare play, with at least as many dull scenes as there are that catch
fire. The action seemed endlessly rethought, with Caesar conveying his belief
in Cassius’s potential treachery in front of all his subjects and portraying
Brutus and Cassius’s fractiousness as a civil war within the civil war (as so
many third-world civil wars become). The result was something that could only
happen with a director in charge who has a bottomless command of Shakespeare’s
text, and actors who took what they were doing with the utmost seriousness and
integrity. The results spoke for themselves, and the makeup of the audience
spoke of that wonderfully. A full half of the sold-out audience was black, and with as
much diversity in age as color. This was truly Shakespeare for everybody,
intended to convey a universal message which you did not have to be of any
particular creed to understand. How many times do you see such a diverse
audience for any show of any type in contemporary America?
Perhaps the problem isn’t American theater,
perhaps the problem is theater itself. Perhaps the whole idea of theater has
become so weighed down over the centuries by realism, by scenery, by the
demands of production value, by the demands of professional actors and theater
workers, that it simply can’t take the same flights of imagination which we see
in King Lear, in Tartuffe, in The Simpsons…
The theater of Shakespeare’s time was
infinitely more flexible. There was no scenery to change and the actors were
mostly tradesmen who were simply happy to be onstage or working behind the
scenes. There was no way of describing action or atmosphere without words, and one scene could begin at the very second
another ended. The stage jutted out so far into the audience’s purview that
solilioquies could be delivered in a much more intimate manner than today’s
stages allow for (unless the stage is miked…). The Shakespeare plays were not
just plays, they were complete entertainments – meant to service everyone from
those who craved sublimity to those who preferred vulgarity.
It was a complete dramatic, poetic experiment of a type that was only possible
because an artform was being birthed – and there were few if any rules as yet
to be followed. By the time of Moliere, there was scenery and an insistence on
Aristotle’s rules of unity which made it virtually impossible for comedy and
tragedy to intermingle. By the time of Ibsen, Shakespeare’s romantic notions of
drama had grown so sclerotic that the best dramatists had to do away with soliloquies,
blank verse, and diversity of action. Instead of watching a whole story, we
watch lives unfold in their most dramatic moments. We still dine on this model,
and the end result is that theater, like classical music, still subsists on
models invented in the 19th century.
Even in England, they’re still chewing the comedy
of ideas which George Bernard Shaw formed from one of Ibsen’s limbs. English playwrights
can out-intense Americans at the claustrophobic drama game – watch Harold
Pinter or Alan Ayckbourne if you want to see how intense Brits can make things
onstage (be prepared). But among the elder generation of British dramatists,
there is a bevy, a veritable gaggle, of dramatists who traffic primarily in
ideas: Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Peter Shaffer, Ronald Harwood, David Hare, Alan
Bennett,,. It’s not exactly an approach to drama that seems to be granted a much
longer life than it already has, but it’s healthier than ours and shows that
book learning still has a place on their stages even if it doesn’t on our’s.
Is there any hope for American theater? Have
there been any truly great creators of it whose total you could stack against
the greatest dramatists of history, or the greatest filmmakers among their
contemporaries? Well…yes, probably two, one of whom is great enough that perhaps all this grousing is completely unnecessary. Two is a paltry number, but for the ‘posterity’
game, two may be all that’s needed to add a fourth name to the SMI (Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen) Index.
Leaving aside David Mamet who is as much a
moviemaker as he is a playwright, there are only two theatrical writers who to
me have managed beyond dispute to build a career of masterful play after
masterful play out of all the wreckage which surrounds them.
(In case you’re wondering what people 300
years from now will regard as the classic of narcissistic upper-middle class
urban alienation, it’s probably Company. A claustrophobic American drama which
suggests that life may be beautiful all the same.)
One is Stephen Sondheim – a theatrical
creator on the level of Shakespeare and Mozart who built a world apart from the
movies that let him use Broadway as a laboratory to grow human beings realer
than real humans. Is Sondheim truly on their level? Well, maybe…. for
linguistic command he may be the one stage writer of all time who can box in Shakespeare’s
ring, and even if his musicals are generally not made of the same life-or-death
stuff as Shakespeare, their characters do feel extraordinarily real. But his most amazing quality is that he’s done all this during
the most fallow possible period. Sondheim has taken the insipid banalities of
music theater and created something miraculous out of them – a complete
entertainment that challenges intellectually, inspires serious pathos as much humor,
and provides dozens of memorable characters (especially his women…Joanne,
Desiree Armfeldt, Sally Durant Plummer, Dot, the Witch, and Fosca), any one of
which could become as iconic as Sweeney Todd and Mamma Rose in another fifty
years. History may show that he is the new way forward for drama – and dramatists,
who now have more to do with song lyricists than prose, have at least as much
to chew on for as long as they have with Ibsen. Posterity has an odd way of
connecting people who should never be connected, and Sondheim may be remembered
as the shadow-twin of Bob Dylan. Both of them were far, far more impressive
lyricists than they were composers, and their music – so to speak - is nothing
but a glove on which to fit some of the most complicated, poetic, mythical
lyrics that will ever be written. The
themes of Dylan’s music generally look toward the future and toward the folk
music of the forgotten man, Sondheim looks nostalgically toward a world of
sophistication now forgotten and wistfully remembers the gin-soaked urbanities of
the 20’s cocktail bar. Oddly enough, because he was shielded from the frustrations
of the movie industry, his impact may one day turn out to be larger than any
American moviemaker of his time. And yet even Sondheim found the circumstances
in which he created theater to be so difficult that for the last twenty years
he’s barely produced any new musicals – he's now in his early eighties and long since
unable to summon the fortitude to keep going at the blistering pace he once
set. In a better world, we’d have had twice as many Sondheim musicals as we do
now.
(The Piano Lesson. An American answer to The
Cherry Orchard set among a black family in The Depression)
The other is August Wilson, whose achievement
is in some ways more astounding than Sondheim’s. Sondheim was the son of
Manhattan socialites with a degree from Williams College who became a writer of
musicals because he grew up as the next-door neighbor of Oscar Hammerstein.
August Wilson was a high-school dropout who educated himself by going to the public
library. But the rather condescending calculus of overcoming adversity doesn’t
do him justice. What makes Wilson amazing is the gallery of characters: Boy Willie
and Wining Boy, Troy and Cory Maxon, Bynum and Loomis – caught in historical forces
past anything within their control. The fact that these characters are black
frees them from the confines of ‘proper’ English language, allowing them to
express themselves with a memorable distinctness that is entirely missing from
Wilson’s white counterparts. Wilson is the modern master of American plays, and
while it’s good that he lived to complete the Pittsburgh cycle, it’s a shame he
couldn’t write any more afterwards.
But the fact that there are so few with a consistently awesome
achievement makes it all the more sad when compared to the larger worlds of
movies and TV. While O’Neill, Miller and Williams were exploring the suffocating
inbred air of the single-room chamber drama; Welles, Hitchcock and Hawks were taking the entire world into their gaze. Whereas Mamet, Neil LaBute and Tracy Letts
are perpetually stuck on shock mode, we have series like The Sopranos and Mad
Men for which shock is just one weapon in an encyclopedic arsenal. Whereas
Shakespeare could get through seven scenes in twenty minutes, we’re lucky now
if we get through the prologue in that amount of time.
