Homotextual: Reflections on Everything

Dear Stephen Sondheim: I dim the lights and think about you.

                

Stephen Sondheim has written that he owes the construction of Losing My Mind to an imagined collaboration between George Gershwin and Dorothy Fields. I can’t really confess that I hear much of Gershwin in there (even though Sondheim claims it as a near-stenciled theft of The Man I Love). I do, however, hear Fields and her clipped, simplistic, conversational, and highly romantic phrases.

(To my mind, the song is a torchier version of Fields’ Exactly Like You. Both are about heroines who “spend their nights in longing,” to borrow another torchy lyric. In one, Prince Charming shows up. In the other, the wait continues.) 

I know why I’ve waited

Know why I’ve been blue

I pray each night for someone

Exactly like you  

Compare those (albeit more optimistic) pop lyrics to Sondheim’s homage to Fields:

 

I dim the lights

And think about you

Spend sleepless nights

To think about you

 

I have always loved the paralysis implied by Sondheim’s lyrics here: the inescapable routine that Sally (the desperately unhappy housewife at the center of 1971’s Follies) must daily endure. Daily is the operative word here, as the song’s lyrical build comes from its chronology. Sondheim carries us through a twenty-four hour period in Sally’s life, indistinguishable from any other day, in which pining for her bygone lover is all that seems to pass the time. The sun comes up/the coffee cup and then the morning ends/I talk to friends, but all afternoon Sally is fixed on the memory of her great love, thirty years gone.

Repetition works especially well in conveying the fatalism of Sally’s situation, the ceaselessness of her fixation. (And the preposition to instead of and—as in Spend sleepless nights/TO think about you—suggests to me that Sally’s obsession is especially nice. It suggests that Sally’s memories, which volley between grief and obsession, are not interrupting her daily routine. On the contrary, obsession is the only thing giving her life meaning and everything is done in service TO it.)

Nobody does this better than Dorothy Collins, who delicately conveys all of Sally’s pain, and also the ways in which Sally clings to that pain to give her purpose. Sally’s obvious masochism is replaced, in Collins’ hands, by a strange kind of romantic nobility. If the memory is all that she can have, the memory is all that she will have.

I find that most singers get wrapped up in the gorgeous melody and fall prey to making pretty sounds. The song has, over the years, become a standard for cabaret and musical theatre performers, and in the hands of even our greatest singers that is exactly what it sounds like. (Peggy Lee’s might-have-been-awesome rendition is saddled with a hokey Don Sebesky/Al Capps arrangement; Liza Minnelli’s dance version with the Pet Shop Boys is just plain weird; and I have nothing bad to say about Barbara Cook’s exquisite version, except that it has gotten better over time.)

In the context of the show, Sally performs Losing My Mind during an abstract, psychodramatic follies sequence, in which all the main characters explain their existential predicament through theatrical idiom (i.e. a Bert Lahr-ish vaudeville comic turn, a Astaire-y top-hat-and-tails number.) Losing My Mind is meant to evoke the torch songs of the 1930s and 40s, Sally is befitted with a beaded gown and stands in a lone spotlight, suffering exquisitely. It’s a tricky tightrope act, performing a sentiment that is very real indeed.

In the last two New York productions of the show, I found that this concept—the push/pull between erstwhile fantasy and the disappointments of reality—tripped up the actresses who were asked to play both extremes at the same time.

When Victoria Clark finished to thunderous applause at City Center, looking ravishing in a white gown that offset her flowing Veronica Lake hair, I felt that the torch element had swallowed up any indication of who Sally was. Clark landed the breathy phrasing and the sensual tosses of the head, but ended up registering too confidently, as though this man had gotten away, but there would be another the next night.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, in the Roundabout’s 2001 staging, Judith Ivey—looking like a maiden aunt dressed for a wedding—became positively unhinged during the song’s accusatory final lines. You said you loved me/or were you just being kind? It was, to be sure, an interesting choice—watching Sally’s rage bubble up to the surface right there “onstage”—but there are still two songs to go before the follies sequence breaks down and reality intrudes. Ivey is a tremendously gifted actress and, as a feat of emotionality, her rendition was very effective. In the greater context of the show, however, I’m not so sure. (This all has more to do with inept direction and shabby production values, but Ivey is not blameless either.) 

                                

Currently, I am watching (over and over, until it’s inevitably removed from YouTube) to Bernadette Peters’ version from the Kennedy Center production of Follies, which begins previews on Broadway August 7. She really walks the perfect line between the torch fantasy of the sequence and the character’s wretched ache. When she takes liberties with the music or seems to get emotional, it’s nothing that an expressive singer like Helen Morgan or a Billie Holliday wouldn’t do. She sings:

All afternoon,

Doing every little chore,

The thought of you stays bright

Sometimes I stand

In the middle of the floor,

And then, possibly more nakedly than it has ever been sung:

Not going left

Not going right

There is none of the nobility I attributed to Dorothy Collins, but a very palpable heartbreak. Peters wrings out every drop of monotony from I think about you, as though her recurring grief has ground her down into listlessness. When she wails You said you loved me, a look of sudden recognition haunts her face. She seems to realize that there is no Ben for her, that there never has been, that Ben never loved her, that he was only saying so. Thirty years have passed Sally by. If she accepts that all her sleepless nights were in vain, then what will she replace them with?

Netflix Recommendation: “The Triumph of the Will” (1935)

“It is a terrible film, paralyzingly dull, simpleminded, overlong and not even manipulative, because it is too clumsy to manipulate anyone but a true believer. It is not a great movie in the sense that the other films in this group are great, but it is great in the reputation it has and the shadow it casts.” – Roger Ebert

Any criticism of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda masterpiece must inevitably begin with a disclaimer. The Triumph of the Will records the Nuremberg Rally of 1934, where throngs of Nazi brownshirts assemble in devotion to their Führer. With contemporary eyes, it’s easy to see Riefenstahl’s supermen as the monstrous thugs they truly were: every word they bark is (now) tinged with a kind of apocalyptic subtext.

Condemnation, however, is not the name of the game. This is an unapologetically Fascist piece of work, but—considering its historical and cinematic influence—it would be foolish for any critic to write off on the grounds of moral outrage. As with any controversial work, The Triumph of the Will should be placed in its proper historical context. For every Otto Dix, whose work criticized the horrors of Nazism, there were hordes of Goebbels-sanctioned artists, celebrating the spirit of the Third Reich. The achievements of Riefenstahl are—to be sure—both despicable and breathtaking.

Her aim is to build Hitler (and the Nazi Party) into a figure of mythic proportions, rescuing Germany from economic downturn and the crippling embarrassment of military defeat. She is unafraid of hyperbole, referring to the “crucifixion” of Germany and the “assurance of peace” that Herr Hitler has brought to the Vaterland. She photographs him as a Wagnerian god, descending from the cloud-strewn heavens (by plane, of course) to tower over the indistinguishable ants that comprise the German population.

“The youth of our nation is shaped in your image.”

 In one particular sequence, at a Nazi Youth rally, Hitler is reflected in the crowd to which he speaks, not as a man, but as an emblem. The children’s faces are shot in close-up, eerily serious and full of the deranged fandom that followed all high-ranking Nazi officials. As Hitler speaks, urging the crowd to “absorb all that we expect of Germans,” it becomes clear that they are to become the goose-stepping example of a new steely and obedient country. A collective symbol.

And that, coincidentally, is the strength of Riefenstahl’s film.

In 2008, Ebert revised his opinion on The Triumph of the Will, claiming that he’d been “overlaid” by too much hype about the film’s supposed greatness. He searches for human touches, but finds none, and doubts that anyone—except a Nazi—would be swayed by it.

But isn’t that the whole point? In a nation where unity and obedience was of paramount importance, Riefenstahl gives us the crowds as a great faceless mass. To trumpet a return to old-fashioned ideals, she shows us Hitler greeting civilians dressed in traditional Bavarian garb; to restore faith in a once-confused government, she converts men into mythic figures; and, when everyone begins to wear the same solemn face, it’s plain that she’s found a filmic translation for totalitarianism.

The Nazi Party trafficked in symbols and not the humanity that Roger Ebert found lacking. The touches that might make Triumph more universally appealing would have failed to incite and inspire her target audience. Riefenstahl, a talented filmmaker servicing an evil cause, found a whole cinematic language to assist the Nazi cause. Ebert is right when he says that there are no attempts to humanize Hitler—and that can be a frustrating omission for a documentary. Nonetheless, Triumph is not really a documentary, is it? It is nothing short of propaganda and, owing to the rules of the genre, Hitler must be made into something transcendent.

Profane? Perhaps. But also further proof that art doesn’t simply belong to the noble.

 

Not Even Nominated: Gene Hackman in “The Conversation”

           

“I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of murder.”

In the same decade that brought us the Watergate scandal — and effectively destroyed any illusions we might have had about the limits of our own privacy — Harry Caul is the most dexterous and inventive surveillance expert in America. (He once bugged the crooked president of a Teamster Union, while the guy was fishing in the middle of the ocean.) But Harry cannot rest on his laurels. Success, in his chosen profession, has made him cagey, withdrawn and almost morbidly solitary. He spends his days in a crowded workshop, listening to playback of other people’s conversation, and after that he retreats to his lonely cell of an apartment, where he plays the saxophone along with grainy jazz records. Spying, it seems, has put a vast distance between Harry and the rest of the world, but it has also granted him an eerie clairvoyance. (His last name, Caul, points to the thin membrane that sometimes covers an infant’s face at childbirth and is thought to lend psychic ability.) Harry knows what everyone else does not. There is no such thing as secrecy. Someone can always be listening in.    

The Conversation is a masterpiece of 1970s cinema. Francis Ford Coppola, at his height, between the two Godfather films, is working with all the themes that would become indelible trademarks of the era: anti-authoritarianism, the plight of the marginalized, and the paranoia that had, by then, seeped irreversibly into the country’s marrow. Harry Caul, the film’s main character, is an absolutely paranoiac. People “have been hurt,” he says, because of the work he does. In fact, they’ve been killed, and Harry — a devout Catholic — carries the sins of his past like a shroud and, simultaneously, rationalizes them away. He does not like to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain, but he has no moral qualms about disrupting anyone’s privacy. He is a study in contradiction.

His latest job finds him tracking a young couple, and though he does not know why, he has reason to suspect that they will be murdered. What follows is Harry’s morbid fixation on the contents of a recording, some shady dealings with some shady characters, and a desperate race to uncover the truth.

That’s some high stakes drama, but leave it to a master of understatement like Hackman to never let the violins shriek too loudly. Harry’s paranoia is quiet — simmering — and the obsession that grips him, does so gradually, in tiny increments throughout the film. The suspicion that grips Harry is never placed too squarely in the foreground. We see Harry’s need for female affection (and his simultaneous withdrawal from it,) the great repression that keeps him muted, and the well of anger that he barely ever dips down into.

This is the power of any Hackman performance. Expecting the unexpected. He ignores all of the tired traits you might find in a character synopsis, and does his exploration elsewhere. In the hands of a lesser actor, Harry Caul would be a bundle of nervous tics, constantly looking over his shoulder, showing us paranoia instead of inspiring it within us. Hackman is so terrific at mining a character’s other depths. Look again at his great villain roles (Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, Lex Luthor in Superman) and you’ll see that they’re never merely villainous. They’re alternately seductive and foppish, motivated by very real forces, and oftentimes, more beguiling than the heroes they face. Even as the enemy, Hackman is an inviting screen presence. Cast any other actor in The Birdcage, and you’d have a snarling, cigar-chomping, neo-conservative on your hands. 

This is all to say that Hackman’s reserve matches perfectly the tense quietude of Coppola’s mise-en-scène. Harry could have been a Cassandra for the computer age, shouting breathlessly about wiretapping and foretelling all the indignities of the Patriot Act. But this is the ambivalent seventies, folks. When he finds himself one door away from a gruesome murder, and later, when the truth is more nefarious than even he could have imagined, he can only watch — a voyeur till the end, taking in all the icky particulars and refusing to answer back. 

(Gene Hackman was nominated for a BAFTA Film Award and a Golden Globe for Best Actor - Drama. He won prizes from the National Board of Review and the Sant Jordi Awards.) 

Movie Review: The Tree of Life

        

Words can’t really do justice to a work of art of this scale, but I shall feebly try to relay a couple thoughts in the hopes that I can direct you toward your local cineplex. I saw Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life this evening, discouraged by that pretentious trailer, but heartened by a Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival. Into 138 brisk minutes, Malick packs the creation of the universe, the shared history of a nuclear family, all the tender power shifts that unite and detach that family, and an imagined rapture, where the generations meet on a sun-drenched beach. In terms of ambition, scale, grandiosity, and power, The Tree of Life stands unparalleled. It is one of the great movies of the decade.   

Do all of its parts add up to make a tidy whole? Absolutely not. Malick’s film works in the way great collage does: as a series of compelling images that hold the viewer’s attention, even in the face of occasional disparity. We move from the surrealistic—little boys swimming through the front door of an underwater house, mother floating through the air, then shut up in a glass coffin like a princess—to the literal—boys breaking windows, exploding frogs with toy rockets—to the cosmic—asteroids colliding with Earth, lava spewing furiously, prehistoric creatures swimming through the oceans. This succession of snapshots (often too short to be called ‘vignettes’) builds and creates a portrait of the O’Brien family (led by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, as father and mother). Setting this narrative, with its keen interpretation of all the icky and gorgeous shockwaves that shudder through any family, against the whole creation of the universe seems a bit reaching at first—but proves winning. Malick finds the sacred in the mundane. Through his lens, a summer evening playing with the garden hose is as monumental as the whole of the Ice Age (and has just as many far-reaching, cataclysmic effects.) With a winding chain of images, he suggests that God—I can’t believe I’m saying this—is in the details, that the universal is the particular and that innocence is something that erodes over time.

From a dramatic standpoint, I’m not sure that the sections of film set in the present day—with Sean Penn as the harried, grown-up version of the main character—work at all. They seem ill-defined somehow in their depiction of middle-aged malaise—or resurging childhood trauma—or whatever they’re meant to be getting at. Visually speaking, however, the film is near-flawless. As designed by Jack Fisk and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, each shot is so brilliantly composed, so rich with color and light, that all 138 minutes feel like a walk through the most awesome rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Which is not to say that The Tree of Life is all shellac and no guts. The depiction of the central family—where Mother is Grace, Father is bullish Nature, and the children are a thrashing, uneasy mix of the two—is so cannily executed. Freed of the usual dramatic scaffolding, I can’t think of a film since Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence that so astutely captured the family unit as it really is—a five-limbed beast, constantly blossoming and fighting against itself.

Pitt, an actor who has always waffled between effortless charisma (see: Thelma & Louise) and overtly self-conscious acting (see: Twelve Monkeys, the final scene of Seven), has never been better than he is here. He conveys a deep fatherly love, without sacrificing any of the character’s monstrousness and pomposity. It’s the film’s most complex role and Pitt’s deepest, richest characterization to date.

The other major performance comes from Hunter McCracken, an unaffected child actor who suggests all the impotent rage that comes with childhood. Malick perhaps puts too fine a point on this, having Young Jack explain in voice-over something to the effect of: “I can’t be what I want to be, so I become what I hate.” I wish he hadn’t written those lines. Jack’s plight is all too plain. He does not possess the delicate grace of his mother. He will never be an artist like his father. Those gifts—seemingly the best of both worlds—have passed on to his younger brother, who we already know will die at nineteen. When Jack destroys his brother’s painting, we see his existential dilemma plainly enough, without voice-over. Jealousy, rage, panic, and total dejection pass wordlessly across McCracken’s face. He will never be the best of his parents and so, he feels doomed to be the worst. It’s an overwhelming moment of small-scale clarity—and the force of it rings throughout the cosmos.

Netflix Recommendation: “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958)

As I write more for the blogosphere — which, incidentally, is a lot of fun — I’m deciding what I want to use this space for. So, bear with me. I’ve spent the last two years in an MFA program, writing endlessly about myself, and now I’m thinking it’s movie time. I see a ton each week; I’m a huge Oscar revisionist; and I like to think I know what I’m talking about. So there you have it. Mission statement.

A lot of friends ask me for Netflix recommendations, so I thought this might be a good place to do some of those.

The Long, Hot Summer was released in 1958, the same year as the woefully overrated, nonsensical film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — and the similarities don’t stop there. Paul Newman stars in both, taking his dreamy blue eyes and architectural biceps south of the Mason Dixon Line. Questions of inheritance, favoritism between fathers and sons, and stifled sexual frustrations provide the basic dramatic conflicts, and both films are Frankenstein monster adaptations of greater works by two of the most influential Southern writers of the 20th century: William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.

Is The Long, Hot Summer a perfect film? No. In fact, it’s stitched together with some very loose binding materials. From scene to scene, it’s difficult to decide what the characters’ motivations are, and the conclusion gets wrapped up so neatly (and joyfully) that you’d think you were watching Miracle on 34th Street and not a Southern-fried potboiler. 

So why recommend it? I don’t believe in perfect movies, though I can think of a few that come close, and for all the head-scratching I did during The Long, Hot Summer, it’s still noteworthy for a few reasons.

1) This marks Newman’s first collaboration with director Martin Ritt and they are, quite frankly, a match made in heaven. Ritt keeps the film boiling with tension, so that Newman’s glaring, minimal style really packs a wallop. You can even see the beginnings of the callous, antihero Hud, which would go on to be the great product of their partnership.

2) Orson Welles shows up, in one of those awful fake noses that he was so fond of, to play Big Daddy Pollitt — er, sorry, wrong movie — Will Varner, the wealthiest landowner in town. Caked in bronzer and grotesquely overweight, he barnstorms his way through his dialogue in a countrified accent. (He conjures up images of Foghorn Leghorn, pan-roasted for 45 mins at 350 degrees.) It’s a startling juxtaposition: the Actor’s Studio realism of Newman and Woodward next to the classically-trained and notoriously insecure Welles, who seems to be playing Lear and Colonel Sanders all at once. But although it’s jarring in the first few minutes, the film settles into a easy groove in its last act, where the battling styles come to compliment one another. (Maybe this had something to do with Martin Ritt, who was forever known afterward as the man who tamed Orson Welles. During filming, he drove Welles into the middle of a swamp, kicked him out of the car, and forced him to find his own way back.)

3) Newman and Woodward. Though their flirtation began backstage at Broadway’s Picnic, this is the power-couple’s first film together. I still think that Rachel, Rachel stands as their most towering piece of shared celluloid (Newman as director; Woodward as leading lady) — but, boy, do these two radiate heat. It’s the fault (or maybe the strength?) of the screenplay that their getting-together never seems destined, because their shared scenes crackle with sexual energy.   

4) In addition to the big three, Lee Remick has a fun cameo as Woodward’s chatty, oversexed sister-in-law and Angela Lansbury shows up for no real reason. (Though she does shoo a wild horse out of her house with a broom.)

Not Even Nominated: Ally Sheedy and Patricia Clarkson in “High Art”

“I’m Greta. I live for Lucy. I mean, I live here, with Lucy.”

Deservedly, Ally Sheedy got the lion’s share of attention for this breakthrough debut by Lisa Cholodenko. It’s the kind of revisionary performance that galvanizes you, often before you sit down to watch the movie. (“What?! That chick from Short Circuit is playing a heroin-addicted LESBIAN?! I haven’t been this excited since Mary Tyler Moore got bitchy in Ordinary People!”) I re-watched the film recently, and she is just as good as I remembered.

Sheedy is all cheekbones and smeary eye makeup as Lucy, the cagey, reclusive artist who spends days squabbling with her mother (the unsinkable Tammy Grimes) and nights holed up in her louche drug den. She begins a flirtation with her downstairs neighbor, Syd (Radha Mitchell), the assistant editor at chic photo rag called Frame. And the seduction begins, charged with the intrigue of a con-game. Is Syd after Lucy’s genius, sure that it will advance her flagging magazine career? Or is Lucy desperate for a way out of her dead-eyed demimonde?

That’s a long setup to explain Patricia Clarkson’s performance as Greta, a washed-up glamour puss, so let’s just say she’s very worth escaping from. Barely coherent in a slurry German accent, Greta snorts heroin in public restrooms, name-checks her old pal Fassbinder every chance she gets, and can barely stay awake during meals. She represents all the decadence into which Lucy has sequestered herself, and at the same time, she embodies her worst nightmares. Greta has been abandoned in every sense of the word, separated by the circles of artists she once held so dear.

“I don’t know. Maybe I will just go to China. I like China. We had fabulous…Opium there.”

In the years since High Art, Clarkson has established herself as the millennial Agnes Moorehead, a consummate supporting actress whose best characters (The Station Agent, Far From Heaven, Pieces of April, Dogville) are instantly recognizable to us because they all dwell within the real world. High Art is perhaps the most far-out addition to her filmography. Greta is so loss in a haze of her own decadence, so loopy, and so mordantly funny. It’s not until her last scene that you realize the quiet power of Patricia Clarkson’s performance. For a moment, she allows the layers of delusion to evaporate and Greta attacks Lucy with an honesty that’s gone missing from this dance of sexual dependency. Turns out, the listless druggie knows all of her lover’s faults and limitations.

“You are so spoiled. You are spoiled. And selfish. And you think the whole fucking world revolves around you. You’re a dilettante, that’s what you are, Lucy. You never work for anything!”  

In the end, the great artist is powerless. The bloodsuckers that surround her — Greta and Syd, chief among them — are the only effectual characters. Clarkson goes back to masking Greta’s burst of self-awareness and persuades Lucy to take another trip down the rabbit hole with her. The outcome, as yet to be determined, plays out in Sheedy’s raccoon eyes: she’s lost forever.

They both are. 

(Ally Sheedy won Best Actress prizes from the Independent Spirit Awards, the LA Film Critics Association Awards, the National Society of Film Critics Awards, and was nominated for the Chicago Film Critics Association Award and the Chlotrudis Award.)

(Patricia Clarkson was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a Chlotrudis Award.)