800 Words: The Survival of Les Miserables - Part 2

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 25^thanniversary 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 19^th 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 (as we read in the novel) 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.

If the movie can be said to have real strengths, it comes in scenes which the earlier movie either doesn’t  cover (the Thenardiers are in one scene and Young Eponine is simply an extra), or does a bit worse than the rest of the movie (Marius and Cossette). Both Sacha-Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are mildly funny and suitably slimy for the Thenardiers. And while the Master of the House sequence is nowhere near as fun or funny as it can be onstage, the staging is far more logical and coherent. But their performances wear badly as the movie goes on, and by the time we see them at the wedding, they’re simply an annoyance rather than funny. To my endless surprise, the best sequence in the movie is by far the sequence with the ingénues, which is usually the point when stage show sags the most. In My Life and A Heart Full of Love were almost downright moving, with the endlessly drab colors exchanged for the lush landscape of the Parisian spring and three young actors who can convincingly play young lovers. The rendition of On My Own was passable, but it suffered from all the same problems as the rest of the movie. Samantha Barks’s singing was decent, but done in immovable closeup even when it came time for Samantha Barks to belt the song’s climax, the belting of which could not erase memories of Eponine’s past, or even memories of how dumb the song is. Eddie Redmayne and Amanda Seyfried were both serviceable even if they’re not particularly great singers. Redmayne in particular is a very fine actor whom I’ve seen live onstage, but his rendition of Empty Chairs and Empty Tables was just plain dull.

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.)

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800 Words: The Survival of Les Miserables Part 1

I just saw Les Mis last night, and it is a truly great movie. Not the Les Mis out in theaters now, I mean the 1998 movie version. I will probably see Les Mis at some point this weekend. But I doubt this movie will be half as good as the 1998 Les Miserables – a movie so absolutely underrated as to be a scandal. Les Mis stars Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe, the latter of which is featured in more overrated crap than any movie star since Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford (it’s amazing how often boring movie stars make good directors…), whereas Les Miserables is not a centimes short of magnificent. It’s directed by Bille August, an Ingmar Bergman protégé, and stars Liam Neeson and Geoffery Rush – who between them seem to have made more great movies nobody but me and five other people remember than any two stars in Hollywood today. Geoffrey Rush is particularly great. Not that this should surprise anybody, anyone who’s seen Quills knows that he is the equal of any screen actor in movie history, and all he has to do to inhabit Javert as no one else ever could is to dim the wattage of his eyes. The terror implicit in that scowl is enough make viewers jump three feet out of their collective seat.  Claire Danes’s overacting notwithstanding, the rest of the cast is just as wonderful. Hell, even Uma Thurman is great as Fantine. To put it simply, I don’t see how  there can ever be a greater, more moving, more hallucinatory, or higher reaching cinematic vision of Les Miserables than what we got in 1998. And unlike the novel, it takes two-and-a-half hours to get through the whole thing.

As perhaps none of the other ‘loose baggy monsters’ of 19^thcentury 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 19^th 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 20^th 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. 

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800 Words: My Cultural Heresies - Middle-Aged Movies (Part 2)

-          George Lucas should never have made another Star Wars movie after A New Hope. He should have just filmed Apocalypse Now (originally his project) or Indiana Jones or whatever else he wanted for his next movie and left well-enough alone. Star Wars garners its entire imaginative appeal from the fact that it’s just one episode in a huge Saturday Morning Serial which anyone who saw B-movies or read comics and science fiction could have thought up just as well. Even if The Empire Strikes Back is better than the original movie, all follow-up installments were bound to be a disappointing next to the continuing stories which fans could imagine for themselves. 

-          At this point I think I prefer watching Star Wars Uncut. The rabid fandom is in so many ways more interesting than the work they worship.

-          Jaws was the beginning of the revolution which allowed special effects to take over humans in American movies. In the year Jaws was released, moviegoers had the options of seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver, Nashville, The French Connection II, Dog Day Afternoon, The Magic Flute, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and those were just the ones by directors I like). Compared to that fare, Jaws seems totally brainless. Yet if Jaws were made today, it would be considered daringly brainy and completely undriven by special-effects compared to today’s thrillers.

-          Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a miracle. It’s one of the few movies that uses special effects to make us feel awe rather than fear. James Cameron has been trying to recapture that awe for his entire career, but he never did it better than the original.

-          It’s best to view ET as a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (still his two best movies). Spielberg said in an interview that the germ of ET was the thought ‘What if one of the aliens from Close Encounters got left behind?’ But I’ve always thought that it was the other way around. The missing father in ET is in fact Richard Dreyfuss. Together, the two amount to a kind of secret emotional autobiography by Spielberg. More on ET later…

-          Soylent Green is not nearly as good as Soylent Cow Pies.

-          Forty-five years later, The Producers remains the funniest movie ever made.

-          Every Mel Brooks movie is slightly worse than the one before it (yes, even Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which honestly sucked pretty badly…why do I think this is the comment that will get protest tomorrow?) – a cycle ending in Dracula Dead and Loving It – a movie so depressingly unfunny you can’t even laugh at how bad it is.

-          Today, a Mel Brooks in our age group couldn’t get a job fixing a film studio coffee machine. Hollywood, like America, has become so timid about offending one another that a director wouldn’t even be able to get financial backing for a movie that makes fun of bigots. We can show gratuitous feces and penises now, but god forbid anybody make a joke or even say a word that's politically charged - even (especially?) if it's being said for all the correct reasons. I don’t know if it was a wish to avoid controversy, but after The Producers and Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks grew ever more timid. Perhaps he realized the depressing truth about those movies: people were offended when they realized that the most honest discussions of anti-semitism and racism in American movie history were made by a low-brow comedian.

-          I can understand people who dislike later Woody Allen films, even if I completely disagree with their assessment. But if you dislike earlier, purely funny, Woody films like Bananas or or Take the Money and Run or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, you’re a bad person.

-          Woody Allen is the world’s most fervent believer in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

-          Love and Death has dated rather worse than some of the other early Woody films because it makes fun of literary pretensions. The fact is that few people have literary pretensions anymore, and that is incredibly sad.

-          I love both Annie Hall and Manhattan. I do not defend the overwhelming narcissism of either movie, I nevertheless love them both.

-          Rocky is awesome, it’s just not good.

-          The only evidence ever uncovered that a Jewish conspiracy controls Hollywood is that people still think Marathon Man is a good movie.

-          Walkabout sucks.

-          I’ve never seen a single Alien movie and I don’t particularly want to.

-          Monty Python and the Meaning of Life is the best of their movies, because it’s by far the closest in spirit to the original show. Holy Grail is too ‘nice’ and G-rated, Life of Brian is too ambitious. It’s the only Monty Python movie with anything approaching the anarchy of the show. Meaning of Life is one giant misanthropic middle finger to every convention a proper movie is supposed to have.

-          OK. So Clockwork Orange tells us that the personality of a rapist thug can be conditioned into not assaulting people, and we’re supposed to think that’s a bad thing?

-          Jack Nicholson does everything he can to save The Shining. But not even Jack can breathe life into a movie when Stanley Kubrick is there to suck all the life out.

-          I somehow always manage to fall asleep when the Mad Max movies are on.

-          Like all Werner Herzog movies, Aguirre, the Wrath of God is absolutely ridiculous. And that’s what makes it great.

-          I didn’t much care for Fitzcarraldo, perhaps because this is precisely how I behaveon a regular basis whenever I’m working on my latest world-changing project.

-          If I can help it, I solemnly swear that I will never watch another Wim Wenders movie.

-          I’m ashamed to say that I really love Z. It’s a shameless piece of pure communist propaganda (seriously), but it’s amazingly well-made.

-          Last Tango in Paris is so amazingly dumb that there isn’t a word for it except the string of pigshit vomit and butter tourettes type rants Marlon Brando keeps going on.

-          Cries and Whispers is amazingly disturbing – and still a wonderful movie.

-          Bergman’s The Magic Flute is the best production of Mozart’s Magic Flute I ever expect to see – even if it is in Swedish.

-          Fanny and Alexander is very nearly my favorite movie. I love every minute of it, every scene, every weird not-quite-right piece of dialogue. I do not, however, love the five hour TV version, and neither did Bergman – who agreed with me. It’s a perfectly imperfect three-hour movie that is not a second shorter or longer than it needs to be.

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800 Words: My Cultural Heresies - Middle Aged Movies (part 1)

-          If I have to watch a Long Day’s Journey Into Night one more time I think I’ll borrow some of the mother’s morphine.

-          Bonnie and Clyde is an amazing but troubling movie that makes violence and radical chic seem amazingly appealing. Then again, The Godfather glorifies violence and right-wing authoritarianism…but more on that in a few minutes.

-          Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is really just a documentary in which Newman and Redford play themselves and decided one day to have a camera crew follow them around for a month while they wore 19^thcentury Western costumes.

-          Easy Rider is dumb.

-          How am I supposed to take Cool Hand Luke seriously when the main prisoner badass was Frank Drebin’s boss/sidekick in The Naked Gun?

-          I have never seen a Steve McQueen movie through to the end. He’s not alive to beat me up for that.

-          The Manchurian Candidate is the greatest movie ever made about American politics. It makes what seems like a completely impossible situation in American politics into something scarily plausible in ways which Oliver Stone can only dream about making. The fact that this movie ever got made at all is a miracle. The fact that it was ever re-released after the JFK assassination is a testament to the fact that America is still a democracy – however imperfect.

-          Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is total realism. We’ve all been at dinner parties with too much liquor that got that ugly that quick…don’t pretend you haven’t...

-          The Graduate is a good movie that would be great if it didn’t rely on those Simon and Garfunkel songs to reel in the young people…

-          I have no idea what The Dirty Dozen’s moral stand is…but it’s awesome!

-          The continued success of James Bond mystifies and irritates me. His attitudes on everything from patriotism to women to technology were anachronisms by the release of Dr. No.

-          If Inspector Clouseau isn’t there to bump into me at the gates of heaven, I don’t want to go.

-          West Side Story is an amazing musical and one of the most disappointing movies ever made – saved from fiascodom by the few dance numbers they allowed Jerome Robbins to direct.

-          Honestly, Audrey Hepburn wasn’t that bad in My Fair Lady… though Julie Andrews would have been better and hopefully saved from all the disasters she starred in which followed.

-          It took Orson Welles fifty years to turn into Falstaff. I got there in half that.

-           I love Planet of the Apes, as much for the seriousness of it as the ridiculousness.

-          Putting Godard and Truffaut together as equal partners in the French New Wave is as dumb as giving Howard Dean equal credit for the Obama presidency.

-          My Dad says that Last Year in Marienbad is the dumbest movie he’s ever seen.  Who am I to doubt him?

-          La Jetee is interesting, not good. Anything else I’ve ever seen from Chris Marker is neither.

-           There is a crapload of important French New Wave I’ve never seen. However, if I could name one New Wave movie nobody talks about that’s truly fantastic, it’s Love in the Afternoon from Eric Rohmer.  

-          Couldn’t tell you about the book, but Tom Jones is a completely forgotten Great Movie that everyone should watch.

-          Ken Russell’s film career had the twin unpardonable sins of creating the music video as we know it and turning the entire world off of classical music.

-          Persona is not a percentage point as deep as it thinks it is. But it has two spectacular actresses, some great scenes, and the hottest monologue in movie history.

-          Jiri Menzel is helped by his source material, but if I’d be very happy to watch Closely Watched Trains and I Served the King of England every day for the rest of my life.

-          Rosemary’s Baby is a thousand times scarier than most modern horror movies. And I’m scared by horror movies.

-          Never seen anything by Tarkovsky. And I’m tempted to never remedy that.

-          I still haven’t finished La Dolce Vita and I’m on try #6. At what point is the fault still mine?

-          How is Eight-and-a-half so much better?

-          Would anybody have ever taken the philosophy in Blow-Up seriously if it didn’t have a random threesome in the middle of the movie?

-          Spaghetti Westerns manage to make violence boring.

-          I don’t care how stuffy and fussy opera people think Zefferelli is. His Romeo and Juliet is one of the very great Shakespeare movies.

-          I’ll say this for Yojimbo, I finally made it through on try #4.

-          The period from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to The Right Stuff (1983) is both the greatest period American movies will ever have and the period when everything great about American movies began to crumble. Hitchcock, Hawks, and Lubitsch were all very strict classicists who played by an even stricter set of rules – and those who worked within them were able to have extraordinarily long and productive careers. But those ‘romantics’ from Welles to Coppola who insisted on making their own rules did not have guaranteed patronage – and were therefore just as susceptible to flameout as any romantic poet or musician.

-          M*A*S*H is still the best Robert Altman movie I’ve ever seen.

-          McCabe and Mrs. Miller ruins everything good about it with all sorts of excessively arty touches from the ‘I’ve got poetry in me’ speech to the snow shootout.

-          Nashville is a very good movie that kills its own momentum over and over again by refusing to rein itself in.

-          Five Easy Pieces is one of the forgotten Great American Movies – and yes, it has (still) the greatest of all Jack Nicholson scenes.

-          Anybody who doesn’t love The Last Picture Show hates America.

-          Ditto One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

-          Cabaret’s an amazing musical – shitty movie.

-          I honestly can’t get past the premise of Harold and Maude…

-          The Deer Hunter is The Godfather crossed with Deliverance disguised as a war movie.

-          There’s nothing to say about Chinatown except that Roman Polanski's ugly compulsions made him a great movie-maker and also ensured that he'd rarely make another great movie. 

-           Dirty Harry is neither fascist nor a symbol of America. Dirty Harry is just a dumb movie. Rent Coogan’s Bluff instead, at least it’s watchable.

-          The French Connection is still one of the most awesomely exciting movies you’ll ever see – doubly so for the fact that Gene Hackman plays such a schmuck.

-          Network is truly prescient. It’s also in terrible need of a script editor.

-          I know I’m not Catholic, but do people really find The Exorcist scary?

-          Do I really have to see another Terrance Malick movie?

-          The Godfather is best seen as ‘The Godfather Novel for Television’ with all the scenes done in chronological order and many deleted scenes restored. Part I absolutely survives as a masterpiece in its original cut, part II absolutely does not. The Godfather is an epic in the same way that Homer and Tolstoy are – there are boring passages, but it doesn’t change the hugeness of the vision which makes it all possible.

-          Nobody should doubt The Godfather’s towering greatness, but there’s something wrong about this movie at its very core. It’s a movie that makes a case for a police state in which we all need protection from violent thugs by violent thugs. The movie practically argued Richard Nixon’s re-election case for him.

-          The Conversation has a brilliant middle section – but forgettable in the extremities.

-          Apocalypse Now should also be seen with its deleted scenes restored. Coppola thrived on rambling – he was a director who went for vividness, not perfection. Every scene adds a new hue to the larger texture.

-          Coppola and Scorsese are two different visions of Italian-American New York from the same period. Coppola was the upper-middle-class son of an eminent orchestral flautist and his movies are drenched in allusions to religious painting, Italian opera, and high literature (both American and Italian). Scorsese was a lower-middle-class kid who probably would have ended up in the mob had he not been asthmatic – he found refuge in the moviehouses and his movies are drenched in allusions to the movies of Classic Hollywood.  

-          Mean Streets may still be Scorsese’s best movie.

-          Taxi Driver is still as powerful as ever, but it also glamorizes psycho loners for no good reason – with the end result being John Hinckley...

-          Raging Bull is better than Taxi Driver. I only understood that on the third time I watched it. Taxi Driver is about redemption through violence, Raging Bull is about redemption from violence. The latter is much, much harder to demonstrate.

-          George Lucas is a robot with a toupee. Even in American Graffiti he managed to create the appearance of real human beings while still making a movie whose main purpose seems to be to resell classic cars and old music. There’s just enough humanity in the movie to make all the ‘cool stuff’ on the screen believable, and not an ounce more.

-          I love many things about Star Wars, but it’s influence is still the most evil thing to ever happen to movies in America. Thanks to Star Wars almost no American director can ever in our lifetime make a movie about human feelings for more than 1/20^th the cost of a special-effects blockbuster.

-          I love Stephen Spielberg and will do battle with anybody who says he’s anything but a great filmmaker. But we’re kidding ourselves when we say that even his best movies can compete with the best of those moviemakers of his generation who’ve barely been able to fund a project in thirty years.

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800 Words: My Cultural Heresies - Slightly Less Old Movies

-          Preston Sturges is droll, not funny.

-          I’ve never seen a single film by Visconti or Rossellini. I haven’t seen The Bicycle Thief since I was roughly seventeen and I know I didn’t finish it. The only DeSica movie I know I’ve seen from beginning to end is In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and it’s fantastic. So in case it ever occurs to anyone to ask me a question about Italian neo-realism, anything I say on the matter will be a lie.

-          Jean Cocteau is everything about France which I can’t stand. He thought fascism was an interesting aesthetic choice, didn't know a person who wasn't famous, and dabbled in enough art-forms to show that he wasn't particularly talented at any of them.

-          In a hundred years, it’s quite possible that Alfred Hitchcock will be as synonymous with movies as Beethoven is with music and Shakespeare with literature. And that development would terrify me. I often think to myself that his movies are Greek Myths for the modern era in which everything we ever knew about human relations is recodified and turned completely upside down. I love Alfred Hitchcock, but as I begin to approach middle age I grow ever more disturbed with the lack of anything we’ve been taught to recognize as human nature in his makeup. Is my problem with Hitchcock, or with human beings?

-          Rear Window is not necessarily the greatest movie ever made. But it is surely the most perfect.

-          Of the great Hitchcock movies, Vertigo is the worst. Though nevertheless a great movie, it has long passages that are clumsy, cheesy, and just plain dull. Its new place at the top of the Sight and Sound Poll of the Greatest Movies Ever Made is quite depressing.

-          I watched Psycho at 12. The perfect age for it. As I had no idea what would happen, that experience is to this day both the most scared and delighted I’ve ever been by a movie in my entire life.

-          Rebel Without a Cause has long since dated for most people and made teens want to yell at James Dean to get over himself. They’re wrong, James Dean is still a perfect reflection of them.

-          The Searchers has the most unwatchably bad scenes of any great movie ever made (this is John Ford after all…)

-          Singin’ in the Rain is the Glee of its time. Enjoyable, strangely avant-garde and brilliant-seeming at times, and utterly annoying if you watch more than a half-hour of it once every year.  

-          On The Waterfront is a good movie. It’s not great, it’s not bad. It’s not a paean to good citizenship or to snitching. Shut up about On The Waterfront!

-          Billy Wilder should have been born fifty years later and made sitcoms for HBO.

-          There isn’t a single Billy Wilder movie that doesn’t have a collection of amazingly brilliant moments. Yet not a single Wilder picture adds up to the sum of its parts (The Apartment comes closest).

-          When people say that they love Some Like It Hot, they really mean they love the middle third and the last line.

-          The first time I watched Some Like it Hot, the women in the room repeatedly had to close my mouth for me. Marilyn Monroe was amazingly hot, and sadly still is. Men are hard-wired to long for women with huge boobs and low self-esteem. We can’t help it.

-          If you have to have watch movies by one director whose every movie is a stirring paean to mid-20^th century liberal clichés, make sure it’s Otto Preminger and not Stanley Kramer.

-          Twelve Angry Men SUCKS!

-          If you want to be sad, look at a list of Orson Welles’s unfinished projects. … or look at this...

         

 Critics love David Lean’s early movies. I’ve never seen them. But I’ve seen his later ones, and critics love them too….

-          The staying power of Lawrence of Arabia is utterly mystifying. It’s a three-and-a-half hour movie about sand that manages to glorify imperialism and be insulting to Arabs.

-          I could watch a Jerry Lewis movie, or I could just keep watching clipsof the highlightsfrom his telethons. 

-          Retro science fiction is like new science fiction – the trashier, the better.

-          I’ve tried watching Robert Bresson many times. I expect to keep trying until I’m dead.

-          Max Ophuls is the kind of technical master you fall asleep to while admiring.

-          I don’t understand why Jean-Pierre Melville is amazing, I just know that he is and know from a very deep place.

-          Jean-Luc Godard has managed to get away with not being punched in the face by me for the last fifty-three years. For the first twenty-three of those years, it can be excused by the fact that I wasn’t born yet. For the next thirty, the fault was entirely mine.

-          The 400 Blows is amazing and I find it difficult to get through with a dry eye.

-          Jacques Tati is the French Charlie Chaplin. But the fact that nobody ever made him into a god makes me enjoy him far more than I ever did Chaplin.

-          It’s a shame Ingmar Bergman retired when he did, he was becoming a really great director…

-          The Seventh Seal is a good movie, which troubles me. Because a movie that pretentious should be truly heinous.

-          How is Akira Kurosawa considered a master director when he wasn’t even the second-best Japanese director of his era?

-          Rashamon is on my short list of most overrated movies ever made.

-          Ikiru has one overwhelmingly moving scene. The rest of the movie I can take or leave.

-          Every Kurosawa-lover do me a favor. Go on Netflix, find Ugetsu and Sansho the Baliff and watch them immediately. They’re the two most famous movies by Kenji Mizoguchi and they’re both samurai related. If you don’t forget about Kurosawa forever, I’ll be surprised.

-          Yasijiro Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’ is the most moving movie I’ve ever seen. If you get through it without crying… don’t tell me. I won’t like you.

-          No moviemaker has ever captured life as we live it half as well as Ozu did. He’s Chekhov, he’s Brahms, he’s Neil Young. He’s completely ordinary, and that’s what makes his movies such a miracle.

-          I’ve been contemplating the meaning of Antonioni’s L’Avventura for seven years, and what I still don’t understand is… how did anyone ever come to watch a movie of his after seeing it?

-          I’ve never seen The Mouse that Roared. I’m scared to see it, because it has the funniest premise of any movie I’ve ever heard.

-          I feel like Luis Bunuel and I would get along, but I still haven’t seen a single movie by him.

-          At the very top of my list of movies I need to see is ‘The Apu Trilogy.’ Unfortunately, I’m in a fight with my local video store about a movie I know I returned (Our Man in Havana in case you’re wondering) and they claim I didn’t. I’m too lazy to get Netflix. Screw you. It’s my blogpost and I’ll go on digressions if I want.

-           Stanley Kubrick is a filmmaker whose sole reason for existing is to piss me off.

-          The only funny person in Dr. Strangelove is George C. Scott.

-          2001 is the single most overrated movie I’ve ever seen. No interpretation of this movie changes the fact that we spend at least a half hour of it STARING AT A RECTANGLE!

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800 Words: My Cultural Heresies - Old Movies

-          Charlie Chaplin is pleasant and charming, occasionally he’s even funny. But are you kidding Early-20^th century? If this is the funniest stuff you had, I’m glad I live in the Age of the Farrelly Brothers and Bromantic comedies.

-          Buster Keaton is fascinating technically, but his movies aren’t all that funny.

-          The Three Stooges are incredibly stupid and not all that funny. I don’t care. Curly Howard is the greatest man who ever lived. I’ve thought this since I was eight, and will never betray my eight-year-old self by betraying it now.

-           Laurel and Hardy are like a b-list Three Stooges.

-          German Expressionism (Fritz Lang, Murnau) like much German Romantic culture (Wagner, Goethe, Nietszche, Thomas Mann etc.), depends on your ability to stifle laughter. If you can get past the fact that it’s unbelievably ridiculous, it can be amazingly compelling. None is more amazing and ridiculous than Metropolis, in which the most amazing techniques imaginable are put in the service of a story so stupid as to defy contemplation. A pattern which more modern cinema repeats over and over again…

-          Ditto Sergei Eisenstein.

-          At least C. B. DeMille seemed to be winking at you, as though in the back of his mind he knew just how ridiculous his movies were (though I couldn’t swear to it).

-          I’ve only seen one Carl Theodore Dreyer movie. And The Passion of Joan of Arc may be the single most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t know if I have the mental composure to ever get through it again, but even if I don’t, it will haunt my dreams for decades.

-          The Marx Brothers are amazing, even when their movies suck. Period. Accept no debate on this matter.

-          Jean Renoir is the spiritual center of movies. Anybody who believes life worth living should watch them all on a yearly basis. Debate on this matter is confined to the Marx Brothers category.

-          The Rules of the Game is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest work of art ever made. I judge you by your reaction to this movie. Be warned (though if you go in thinking you’re watching Blazing Saddles, I make an exception).

-          Hitchcock’s early movies are as though they’re from a completely different director. They’re just as good, but they’re so…English! How did he adapt to America so easily??

-          Triumph of the Will is the dumbest piece of shit ever put on screen. How did anybody take it seriously?

-          Howard Hawks is the first truly ‘Great American Filmmaker.’ In his movies you can trace the development of everything that is amazing about the greatest Hollywood movies – the love of language, the banter, the sex, the battle of the sexes, the violent sex, the sex and violence, the sexy violence... Everything after Hawks in Hollywood is a reaction to the template he set.

-          Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday are the most awesome couple in movie history.

-          Frank Capra is Howard Hawks through a sex filter. Hawks realizes it’s all ridiculous, Capra thinks it’s all serious, and as a result makes towering paeans to everything that’s wrong with America – the earnestness, the susceptibility to easy narratives, the rampant demagoguery.

-          In Mr. Smith goes to Washington I root for Claude Rains. Jimmy Stewart’s character is a fascist.

-          Potterville is a much more reliable economic future for Bedford Falls than the Wall Street bailout which George Bailey gets in It’s a Wonderful Life.

-          Ernst Lubitsch blows Billy Wilder’s comedies out of the water. Shame nobody remembers them. Start with To Be or Not To Be, then find Ninotchka.

-          If Frank Capra is everything that’s wrong with America, Disney is everything that’s wrong with America’s place in the world. The idea that every American is a Disney hero or heroine, and all the anthropomorphic animals exist at the behest of their happiness. Yes, it can be seen as a metaphor for everything people hate about America, and they’re right to hate those things about it. Even if they’re not right to think that that is everything America is, Disney is representative of America at its worst. Don’t hate America, hate Disney.

-          Orson Welles was the great artistic genius of the twentieth century. And like so many similarly explosive geniuses (Mozart, Tolstoy, Leonardo…), we only got a small sliver of what he was capable.

-          Citizen Kane is not the greatest movie ever made, but it’s damn close. Not only is it great, it’s also fun. People of my generation are tired of hearing it vaunted as the greatest movie ever made and think of it as stuffy and old-fashioned, meanwhile they hold up far stuffier and more old-fashioned movies as paragons of greatness (Vertigo, 2001, Man with a Movie Camera…).

-          John Ford is amazingly overrated. Hawks’s movies never die, but the Western genre is almost completely dead and shows no signs of serious revival. It’s whole conception of America as a land to be conquered by brutal men we should hold up as heroes because they abide by antique codes of honor is incredibly dated and offensive.  Carry Hawks on our shoulders, throw Ford into the dustbin.

-          Casablanca gets better every time I watch it. For a sloppily thrown together movie, it really is amazing.

-          Sometimes I think Olivier’s Henry V is the greatest Shakespeare movie ever made. It’s certainly 20,000 leagues better than his Hamlet.

-          Most of The Third Man was probably directed by Orson Welles in secret under Carol Reed’s name so he could get financial backing.

-          The Ealing Comedies need a comeback. The Lavender Hill Mob is still one of the funniest movies ever made. 

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800 Words: The Sorry, Myopic State of American Theater

(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 nobody’s ever heard much about what she did since then. 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 of American theater we have Willy Loman, Amanda Wingfield, Blanche and Stanley, Roy Cohn, Mama Rose, Sweeney Todd, 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 19^th 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. A paltry number, but for the ‘posterity’ game, two may be all that’s needed to stack up to the SMI 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 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.  Most amazing 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.

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