Branagh's MacBeth, the Park Ave Armory, and the Joys of Pretending to Not be Here

The best moment was probably the first. I stood with my assigned clan (Caithness) at the imposing wooden doors to the main Drill Hall at the Park Ave Armory. A hooded figure blocked our way. He bellowed, "What clan is this?" We shouted "Caithness!" none of us quite knowing how to pronounce it (I may have shouted "Katniss"). The door opened, our clan leader beckoned, we entered the hall, and then were in another world. The floor was a stone path in an immense open field, lit by shadows and fog — a heath, a moor, whatever you call it. The hooded figure walked in front of us briskly with a torch and we followed. Ahead of us — a henge of stone, a stonehenge. The outside boundary for the traverse stage of Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth. The path diverted, and we went up the stairs of the bleachers to our seats.

New York, for better and worse, is such a distinctive place. Most New York theatre doesn't worry about this, or otherwise embraces the city's natural environment. When in a theatre we feel the familiar: we know where we are down to the cross street, we know what's expected of us, we recognize these people ("...actors," we say, and sigh). But the Armory is such a unique location — a building the size of a city block — that it doesn't feel like the city anymore. There just aren't expanses like this. And so, entering the drill hall can feel like entering another world.

The actual stage took up about half the space of the Armory, with the other half making up that ever-impressive heath. The audience sat on bleachers on either side of a narrow lane of mud. On one end of the lane, a stone chapel with gleaming cross. On the other, the henge, where the witches vamp and levitate. My clan sat in the worst possible place, as high up and to the right as you could go without falling over the wooden slats to your death. But then, my clan has always been known for frugality.

The pit of rainy mud, the assigned clans, the complimentary drinks, all gave the affair a Medieval Times feel (though sadly we had to leave the wine outside). And that seemed strangely appropriate. After all, Shakespeare's theater wasn't the pristine, elderly-accessible place it is today. He was all for spectacle and roaring, ale, fights, lewdness. A Macbeth where we could cheer and gasp and shudder and get splattered in stage blood would be kind of wonderful.

He's having Wild Wild West flashbacks

But that was not this production. After all the to-do with the clans and the talk of immersive theater, once we sat down in our assigned spots on the bleachers we were simply an audience again. There we were, quiet, awkwardly shuffling in our seats, straining to get a better view over the heads of the people in front of us, all very visible to the people on the other bleachers, and we to them. The transverse stage, like it or not, makes everyone a part of the show. A slightly bored part of the show.

But even before this I noticed problems. Prior to the show we were supposed to meet with our clans in some of the lovely side rooms at the armory. (Mine was right by the complimentary wine table, which made me know I was among kin.) But besides all of us standing in the same room, there was little solidarity. And the usher assigned to act as clan leader and get us ready to move to the drill hall wasn't exactly playing up his role, and for good reason: the more into character he got, the more the Park ave crowd chuckled and sipped their wine and made snarky comments. So, maybe this is not the venue for immersive theater? Or, is caustic irony just a fact of the theatregoing audience today? Breaking down resistance to mystery is one of the hardest parts of putting on a show, and it is doubly hard when you're asking your audience to do more than they usually expect to do. Sleep No More solved this with masks — because maybe behind a mask people less feel the urge to be an asshole.

The production itself held few surprises. I'd never seen Branagh on stage before, but on stage he was little different from his many Shakespeare films. Branagh's a fine actor but a limited one, and there is precious little difference between his Henry V and his Benedick, his Hamlet and his Berowne. He is also often guilty of a very bad habit which extends to entire casts when he directs. He delights in the music of Shakespeare's language, crafting every syllable to great effect as he delivers word after word in a sonorous cascade of verbiage. Meanwhile conveying precisely none of the meaning. A common failing, sure, but of late there have been so many wonderful local Shakespeare productions that put great thought into both the music and the meaning, so it's a bit disappointing to see a throwback like Branagh again, declaiming and posturing. Particularly disappointing was the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, which was beautifully delivered but immensely unmoving. The weighty silence he left before the speech actually spoke far more than he ended up saying. Which is certainly not the fault of the writing.

Oddly, it was in the fourth act that most lagged. Here is where Macbeth largely disappears and we get a wider sense of the world and the effects of his tyranny. Richard Coyle's MacDuff had the gruff gravitas to carry his scenes, but there was a focus lacking here that pointed toward what was largely missing in the show. Macbeth needs to be so big that his absence is almost a joy. Here, he was hardly missed.

Macbeth, of course, is so well-written that it would take a supreme effort to make a bad version of it and this was by no means a bad version. And maybe my spot in the nosebleeds took me too far from the action for the actors to have much resonance — the people up front were so close to the fight scenes that you feared for their lives at times. If we had felt less like an audience and more like a clan, yelling and cheering on our chosen representatives, then maybe the sheer force of all these people could have imbued the stage with more heft. But the fact of such a big set demands a bigness of character that was lacking here. Sure the cast was enormous and the fights were epic and the henge was imposing and Alex Kingston always looks good in a red dress. But the humans in it were kind of small.

Award Season Ramp-up '09 pt2

Wherein the author continues to watch as many award-season movies as possible, jotting thoughts down as soon after viewing as he can.



An Education is sweet and full of texture, it brought to life both the drab and the excitement of 60s Britain without really choosing sides: The drab is also comfortable and cozy. The exciting is also shady, strange. It's somehow wrong, wrong in ways you can't quite explain other than that it's not comfortable or cozy. That David is also somehow wrong we know right from the start, and as we and Jenny learn more about him the wrongness gets clearer and clearer until it's blatant, inarguable. But he was always wrong, and the movie handles this well, he never becomes any less or more than he is right there at the beginning. Only Jenny is changing.

The movie loses ground only when Jenny starts to become the voice of authorial arguments, delivering speeches to blank-faced adults who could very well offer a counter-argument but never do. Maybe that's the point though, she has to learn on her own, the adults in her life are of no help, not unless she wants their help. These other roles really make the movie though. Her father is played brilliantly by Alfred Molina, he exudes care and love and worry even while yelling, you just want to give him a hug every time he talks. Emma Thompson as the school headmistress is exactly the opposite, she never needs to show that she cares. She's only in a few short scenes and mostly on the quiet end of a Jenny-speech, but just in not arguing with Jenny she makes probably the strongest argument in the movie. These two performances balance the story, a cartoonish portrayal of either would have ruined it from the start.

Also excellent was Rosamund Pike as the trophy-girlfriend Helen, who manages to be dumb yet sweet without being too dumb or too sweet. Again, a cartoonish portrayal would have killed it.




Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Herzog movies generally take place in a world somewhere between the realities and the delusions of his main characters, and in this movie even the obvious fantasies: iguanas, break-dancing souls, etc, don't mark a clear line between reality and unreality. They're real to Nicholas Cage, and that's all that really matters. As the plot gets increasingly convoluted and nonsensical you might start to wonder if we're all tipping into fantasy-land with him. But no, turns out it's no more or less real than it ever was.

And Cage's performance is so strange, mostly because he's clearly wrong for the part. He walks around hunched over in suits too big for him, moving like he's fifty pounds heavier than he is, yelling like he has a voice for yelling. (He doesn't have a voice for yelling. He sounds more like a frustrated English professor than a professional, no matter what movie he's in.)

But Cage is fabulous at being miscast, I can't think of any other actor who so deliberately seeks out roles he is completely wrong for. If this movie were another Harvey Keitel vehicle you could imagine the Lieutenant as being actually frightening, actually loathesome, actually at times courageous and at times charming. With Cage, we have a character who is none of those things. He's nothing at all really, just confused and in pain, and the movie is better off for it.

The point of the movie seems to be that there's things out there (reptiles, water) that disaster lets in and once they're in they take hold and get stronger and stronger until at the end you're drowning in them.

Cage's question at the end is "Do fish dream?" Herzog's answer seems to be "Yes, they dream this movie."



Bright Star is a well-needed reminder that poetry, as it is in the first line we hear of Keats, is a joy, cut of the same cloth as a walk in flowered fields or throwing pebbles in a lake or sitting in front of an open window on a windy day — though more than a hundred years have almost convinced us that these things aren't enough, as if there were something that was more of life than these simple, fleeting moments. In the movie, Mr. Brown is an annoying, heavy-handed reminder of what poetry shouldn't be: vain, self-serving, cynical, serious, witty in the service of pettiness, "modern" in the service of fear. Though he's a reminder of what a poet has to deal with you often he's far too despicable to have as much screen time as he does. Keats however is portrayed as playful first and melancholy second, a welcome departure from the brooding Byronic figure you come to expect from movies about poets. Movies in general aren't keen on geniuses, they'd much rather focus on common people in uncommon circumstances, public figures — genius is too private a thing to translate well to a medium that is public at every stage of production and consumption. Intimacy in a film is a difficult and necessary illusion, which is why the love story is practically the definition of film: A love between two people is both private, between each other, and public, seen by each other. It is the smallest unit of intimacy that can be put to film.

The production is very lush and surprisingly intimate, and manages the difficult task of making a period piece not look like a set piece. Some shots have the heaviness of a painting, and though this takes you out of the story a little it also reminds you of what you're in. The movie is brimming with poetry, in the dialogue as well as the visuals.

It all turns to misery of course, and Campion is a Romantic enough to embrace the misery as much as the joy. Everything may turn to misery in time, and everyone may die, but in those bright moments of not-misery there is a promise and a hope that misery might never return. The young sister Toots is a heartbreaking reminder of this as she banishes autumn from her garden. In some world, she succeeds.

As for the love story, it's strange. The courtship is short and full of jousts and lots of silences, and you get the sense that the most they know of each other are those silences, that they are filling those silences with dreams of each other. Like love was a dream they were wishing each other into, and in so faling in love themselves. You never once suspect in the end that they actually know each other, or even themselves (they're so young!). And in that sense it's a very honest love story, and a very true one. And very powerful.

Also, that cat should win best cat acting by a cat in a non-cat movie.




What was surprising about Inglourious Basterds is not that it's bad — and it is bad, very bad, "What were you thinking?" type bad &mdsash; but that it's poorly made. We don't expect a Tarantino movie to be drab, his characters lifeless and their motivations a mystery. We expect explosive wit and familiar throwbacks. We expect larger-than-life characters pitted against each other in a ridiculous and ultimately satisfying orgy of genre tropes. But the only larger-than-life characters in this unsatisfying movie are The Nazis and The Jews, the individuals are almost nondescript. His Nazis are luxuriously evil, slippery and smarmy and nasty, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. If only he cared nearly as much for his so-called-protagonists, but to call them cookie-cutter would be an insult to creative bakers. The only one of any interest is Brad Pitt's Aldo, who is clearly not Jewish. The rest are so well summed up by their nicknames ("The Bear Jew," etc) they don't even need to have lines (and many don't).

But the names Nazi and Jew are red herrings, this movie would more honestly (and far less offensively) be set on Mars, with some evil Martian Socialist Party hunting down ethnic barsoomians or something. But the fact that the movie makes no sense (and the movie makes absolutely no sense) is secondary, we could forgive even that if it were in the least bit interesting. The script is set up as a series of verbal confrontations, some of them twenty or thirty minutes long, and an ordinary director would play these heated conversations as a buildup of tension, putting off the release until the last possible moment until it explodes, generally in gunfire. Instead, Terantino has these scenes play out normally, as if nothing were happening at all. The audience knows something is at stake, the characters know something is at stake, yet no one acts as if something is at stake — giving an overall impression of watching boring people talk about boring things which something interesting just might be happening somewhere else. Like having to sit through a discussion of hog futures on the deck of the Titanic. And because there's no tension when the release comes it feels less like a climax and more like a "What just happened?"

The problem here is clearly that Tarantino has developed a sort of auteur's arrogance, he expects us to believe whatever he tells us. He says this crack commando team has killed so many Nazis behind enemy lines that even Hitler is afraid, we're supposed to believe him (even though all this Nazi-killing supposedly happens in the jump cut between the "Let's kill Nazis" scene and the "Hitler is afraid" scene). He says Eli Roth is somehow fearsome, we're supposed to believe him. He says that movies can end the war, we're supposed to believe them. Sure none of it makes any sense, but he doesn't seem to even lift a finger to try to convince us, which is both lazy and unforgivable.

The joy of Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs was in things we've seen already, familiar themes and tropes and body movements and dialogue, for what is "genre" but something the audience already believes without you having to tell them? Inglourious Basterds is a departure from that. Things are still familiar, god knows he doesn't have an original bone in his body. But they don't feel familiar. They feel rather shoddy.

Award Season Ramp-up Round-Up '09, part1

Every year around this time I try to see as many best-of-year films as possible, that way when Oscar night finally comes around I have that much more to be aggravated about. Generally I don't document it as best as I could, but this year I've decided to make the effort to get it all down, generally as soon after I see the movie as possible.

I've already seen Public Enemies and Avatar. So here we go!




THE HURT LOCKER
Fantastically realistic (or realistic-seeming, who knows if it's even remotely actually-realistic). So much so that little bits that didn't seem realistic stood out more, even a single canned sound effect was enough to jar me out of it for a second. Also unconvincing, that tendency for any squad in any action movie to be immediately qualified for any operation, no matter if more experienced troops are probably waiting by (Miami Vice-itis). The glimmerings of a plot thankfully they petered out, as if to say: here's the sort of movie you're expecting to see, but this isn't that movie.

There are no superior officers to be found, there are no consequences beyond the physical damage to the squad (almost entirely from themselves and each other), and there is no enemy -- everyone is treated equally as an enemy, allies, friendlies, squadmates. And it's an interesting consequence of a bomb squad that there really is no enemy: there's only it, and you, and what you do or do not do to it. It has no will or plan or purpose.

So war is a bomb, and the bomb is a drug, and the soldiers are addicts and they either see it and quit or they keep at it. The only way to view James is as an addict, and as an addict he serves a necessary purpose in the war, a purpse that the movie clearly admires. But this purpose is not a moral one, he doesn't save lives or make things safe for his countryment -- the more he cares the worse he is at his job. He can't actually make a difference. His purpose is as inexplicable as the bomb's.

Avatar is the triumph of a gamer, an ultimate gamer's fantasy where the gameworld becomes more important than real life. Hurt Locker is nearly identical in that regard, they're about addicts who give into their addiction. And for all its brutality, Hurt Locker still glorifies the addiction. But that's the question, isn't it? Is James really being "All he can be"? Or has war made him less than he could have been? All we really know is that when he's in the suit he's all that he is.

Interesting that we've been talking about how '00s movies are specifically amoral, their exemplary heroes aren't anti-heroes (who do wrong things for the right reasons), they're the opposite: they have the wrong reasons and whether their actions are good or not is entirely up to chance or circumstance.

We'll see if it continues with Bad Lieutenant.