Category: Film & Theater

Good night and good luck

… What follows is not about that precisely – the 2005 movie, the expression that gave the title, but George Clooney has been on my mind of late, and said movie is not only one of my favorite Clooney films, but I also became aware a short while ago that he is to produce and star in a Broadway adaptation next spring – the twenty year interim reflected in him this time playing the Murrow role. This was very surprising to me because I have never associated Mr. Clooney with the stage, but as I remember it the fixed interior (TV studio) and dialogue does indeed lend itself to that medium.

But this is not about the biz, but something else in which Clooney has, quite extraordinarily, not played an insignificant role. Others, with names like Pelosi and Obama, have of course played more significant roles.

On Sunday, at about 2:00 in the afternoon Eastern Time, Pres. Joe Biden withdrew from seeking (the seemingly assured) Democratic nomination for US President. This came after weeks of mounting discontent amongst the ranks of the party; from the foot soldiers, to the officers – elected and not, to the money sources. I will not re-litigate the arguments parlayed in the sad saga of a man in decline, and in denial, of the ravages age brings with it, or of its tragic pinnacle in a humiliating television debate with Trump.

Clooney? As an influential Democrat, a major fund raiser, he wrote an opinion piece – sorry, ‘guest essay‘ – for the NYT making a case that Biden should leave the race – and one of the first to publicly do so. One could ask: well, what has HE got to lose? But, still … A big star in a supporting role – most just wouldn’t touch it. Yes, I am an unabashed fan – seriously dating from the early ER days – but in recent times I have been more impressed by his presence on the theater of real life, albeit of the highest Niveau. (See, for instance, in a role reversal of the marital solidarity norm, his ‘standing by his … what? partner?’, after Amal Clooney was harshly criticized for her work for the ICC in respect to potential crimes – by both parties – during the Gaza conflict.)

As I write, following an immediate endorsement by Biden, and an ensuing closing of ranks, the Vice President Kamala Harris is now all but the presumptive Democratic nominee. Can a Black woman do what an eminently qualified white woman could not: be elected President of the United States of America, and do so against the same opponent?

By the way, did I mention the bizarre assassination attempt perpetrated against that person the previous week? I thought not. I will return to this.

In these days, as in his own, Ed Murrow’s sign off is more wish than promise, and luck an unreliable quantity.

‘They’re teaching me’: Greg Doran on staging Shakespeare’s unloved Two Gents with students | Theatre | The Guardian

The theatre director, now teaching at Oxford after years running the RSC, thinks The Two Gentlemen of Verona is perfect for a young cast to argue over. We go into rehearsals
— Read on www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/may/10/student-production-two-gentlemen-of-verona-oxford-greg-doran

Listening to Greg Doran on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning alerted me to his visiting professorship at Oxford and the Playhouse production. The above Guardian piece by Michael Billington informs on this and other aspects of Doran’s life post-RSC, and takes us inside rehearsals of the diverse student production of one of Shakespeare’s least performed (and ‘problematic’ says Billington) works. A terrific read.

What’s in a name

RSC production – Garrick Theatre, London, 2023

With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!

Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.

I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.

Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.

Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.

And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.

A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.

Shades of the past

As I said I would here, to provide some company through the lonely nights of winter, I have restarted my lapsed Netflix account. And, Rebecca Hall’s film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s Passing was indeed one of my first treats unto myself.

There have been any number of reviews around the place in the last month or so, but I particularly like this one from Imani Perry for Harper’s Bazaar. Amongst other things, it defends the film against some of the criticism of casting. Perry’s counter argument in some ways presumes the immediate reaction that I too had; that is, it a stretch to imagine that either Tessa Thompson (who plays Irene) or Ruth Negga (as Claire) could have got away with passing as white in 1920’s America. But on reflection, I get the point Perry makes. Perhaps only the obviousness of the performers Blackness, allows the viewer to embrace the Black gaze and to, for instance, imagine the risk Irene is taking when she seeks refuge from the sweltering day in that ritzy hotel restaurant, or to contemplate the nerve and concentration required in Claire’s deception of her racist husband. In both cases the tension is tangible, and the player’s gestures and the subtle movements of camera and lighting enhance the atmosphere of a shared experience.

Like Perry, I was very much convinced by Rebecca Hall’s artistic decision to shoot Passing in black-and-white. Monochromatic mixes to various degrees have become not uncommon in contemporary film and photography; so much so, that one wonders sometimes to what end – to seduce with misplaced nostalgia, to just kind of “look old”? But here, it makes sense in two very important ways: realistically, in terms of the period in which the story is set and symbolically for the stark opposites and all the grey areas in-between suggested by the tonality. And, in both these cases, conjured is powerful imagery of America’s social and racial divide – then and now. The ‘look’ is completed by an intelligent cinematography that follows and gently brushes the characters; there is a blurriness around the edges that blends intimacy and ambiguity – lives and situations not quite focused, out of reach.

In passing…

may I remind myself to reactivate my paused Netflix account! My morning peruse of The New York Times alerts me to the coming soon (Nov. 10) of Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing which I wrote about at the beginning of the year.

In her excellent NYT piece, Alexandra Kleeman not only offers a wonderful portrait of Rebecca Hall – the privileged and complicated biography that so informed her film making, the difficulties of financing and maintaining her artistic integrity – but also revisits her own first encounters with Larsen’s novel and reflects upon her own multi-racial heritage. Kleeman’s appreciation of the monochromatic aesthetic and the grey areas in-between where truth resides is about the best thing about film I have read in a long time.

Unbeknownst to me in the months since the film was previewed at Sundance, there has been an enormous amount of banter, especially surrounding the social and historical phenomena of “passing” and how it should be portrayed, and the various degrees of “colorism” that remain prevalent in society and reflected in Hollywood (or vice versa!), and the casting choices that are (or are not) made accordingly.

Surely, I will have more to say after seeing Hall’s film.

Another way of seeing

There are few works of contemporary fiction that have left their mark as profoundly as Colson Whitehead’s 2016 best-selling, prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. A magically realised narrative, a tour de force that takes the reader on an uncompromising journey amongst souls, alive and dead and and in the murky depths in-between; through their suffering and degradation; on a restless search for absolution for sins not committed and some dignified resolution, and to be granted sanctuary; a place to call their own, a place to rest without fear or sacrifice – even when it be the final.

In only three sittings I have brought to a conclusion Barry Jenkins’ brilliant adaptation of the novel. Presented as a ten part series on Amazon Prime, I would have to say that this is a format very well-suited for such an intellectually and viscerally powerful work, and I am not sure it could be easily pared down to feature film length. (I really wasn’t looking to sign up for another streaming service, but the chatter of late had become so intense and the temptation too great.)

Admittedly, some of the opening scenes are discomforting, even threaten to overwhelm with their brutality, but there is this one undeniable reality – the barbarity of slavery – that must be confronted before the layers are stripped back to lay bare the soul of the characters – in whatever world they inhabit and wherever their journeys may lead. The alert viewer will recognise early that Jenkins is operating on multiple planes of narrative filmmaking; not just that of a stark, unadulterated realism, but that which blends tangible human experience with the emotional response and psychological mechanisms without which those experiences could not possibly be endured – memories and dreams; as alive as the cotton boll, as the whip, as the next to be lynched, but holding the promise of a way to freedom.

Another outstanding aspect of the series is the haunting soundtrack from Nicholas Britell that accompanies most every frame; conjuring an extraordinary atmosphere of foreboding, of unrelenting disquietude, of an unresolved tension between the living and the dead. As a taster, a guest essay by Scott Woods – excellent read – in today’s New York Times led me to the following on Vimeo (fifty odd minutes, so give it time); Barry Jenkins visual homage to his extended cast is augmented by Britell’s musical composition. (And, here is a wonderful NYT Magazine piece on Britell, and a close up on his collaborative creative process with Jenkins. )

Starring a cast of many from Barry Jenkin’s “The Underground Railroad, and with score by Nicholas Britell

On the Vimeo site is an informal and insightful text written by Barry Jenkins; describing the circumstances under which the accompanying film evolved during the greater film-making process. An act of seeing, and with the black gaze, a tribute to his players and the histories of all their shared ancestors. A gesture of gratitude, of respect, of love.

[…]we have sought to give embodiment to the souls of our ancestors frozen in the tactful but inadequate descriptor “enslaved,” a phrase that speaks only to what was done to them, not to who they were nor what they did. My ancestors – midwives and blacksmiths, agrarians and healers; builders and spiritualists, yearn’ers and doers – seen here as embodied by this wonderful cast of principal and background actors, did so very much. […]

Barry Jenkins, Vimeo

Jenkins may well think that should he never make another film, he has left some work of substance in his stead – I read this the other day – and, of course, that is so, but after watching and thinking about The Underground Railroad, I await, and with confidence, the realisation of that which is yet to come.

More than nostalgia

In these frenetic days, in which so much stuff, and so much more unsavoury stuff, is endlessly being thrown around, The New York Times has resorted to viral videos and the nostalgia of the urban snowball fight of yore. Not exactly today’s weapon of choice on the streets of Lyon or anywhere else I would suggest. So were my first thoughts…

Auguste & Louis Lumière: Snowball Fight (1897)

But, the author of the article, Sam Anderson, manages to retrieve his piece from my harsh verdict; both with some very nice observations and imagined narrative of the content, but more importantly with his reflections on our complicated relationship with the past and our exaggerated sense of the importance and uniqueness of our present.

…On an intellectual level, we all understand that historical people were basically just like us. […]They were anxious and unsure, bored and silly. Nothing that would happen in their lifetimes had happened yet. The ocean of time was crashing fresh waves, nonstop, against the rocks of their days. And like us they stood there, gasping in the cold spray, wondering what people of the past were like.

[…] to watch this snowball fight, to see these people so alive, is a precious gift of perspective. We are them. They are us. We, too, will disappear. […] We are not unique. We move in the historical flow. The current moment will melt away like snow crust on a moustache…

Sam Anderson, in “The New York Times Magazine“, Nov. 5 2020

The original black and white version included in the Lumière catalogue can be found here. On a technical level, the colorisation and a smoothing process makes the participants, indeed, look more like us – which of course they really did. This was something I actually thought about quite a lot a couple of years ago on seeing some excerpts from Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary film he made in remembrance of the end of the First World War, and in which he took archive footage from the time and, with all the technical wizardry available to him, transformed the subjects from blurred images of long ago to (mostly) young men who one may very well come across today – on the bus, at the pub or football, or most anywhere. I remember thinking, irrespective of the objections raised by purists, the familiar visages that were exposed with such technical finesse do create a powerful bridge between all the years of the century passed. Again – they were just like us! Beyond that of community and comradeship, there is little comparison between the respective fights on the winter streets of Lyon and on the fields and in the trenches of the Somme, but what they do share, are the threads of time that bind each inextricably with our present and all the presents to come.

A monster and his maker

In the last days, I have savoured the theatrical treat (via YouTube livestream) of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and his monster creation (a tour de force by both as both in my opinion!) in Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theatre (UK) adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Here is Michael Billington’s original Guardian review.) Without this pest that is upon us, would such a privilege be granted? Perhaps not. You see, I do look for things positive [sic] to take from this crisis.

Firstly, as I have previously stated, I am interested in the process of adaptation from one medium to another, and in this instance it works very well indeed; perhaps, because the reduced plot form (for instance, the omission of the framed narrative) and character tableau does not mitigate the precepts of rationalist thought and the limitations of science being explored in the original work, nor the questions posed of the conflict between the enlightened individual and a humane social order. As with the novel, this stage version can be best appreciated as a composite – as a philosophical treatise masquerading as an entertainment in a gothic tradition.

Illustration by Theodor von Holst frontispiece 1831 edition

On reflection, I must also say that Shelley’s classic tale first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the Prometheus additive being particularly telling), captivates still, and when considering a range of Lektüre for these daunting days, it is one, with its relativisation of our place in the greater natural order of things, that is well worth returning to. Not to mention, it being just a wonderfully well told story!