Two masters, building with precious time

There are collaborations and there are collaborations. In the movies, as in the theatre, collaboration is usually something that occurs over a handful of hectic weeks, often between artists who just met. The result can be brilliant or banal, but it must be arrived at under duress. Time is money, and those who can’t become galvanized by pressure enter into a life in the movies or the theatre at their peril. That stage director André Gregory and playwright-actor Wallace Shawn have been able to collaborate on projects over much longer periods—most recently a period of 15 years!—is evidence of an uncommon devotion to the vagaries of long-term creative exchange. Okay, that and, most likely, some degree of privilege. But this privilege has not been squandered. On the contrary, their collaborations have resulted in some legendary theatrical experiences and three singular, spellbinding, rule-breaking works of cinema, all of which have been collected in André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films, Criterion’s inspired new multi-disc collection. Taken as a whole, these films not only chronicle the cinematic manifestations of Gregory and Shawn’s more than 40-year relationship; they also function as a testament to the still-untapped potential for the movies and the theatre to inform each other in aesthetic, formal and thematic terms and, perhaps most importantly, in their processes.

My Dinner With André (1981) has been around and been beloved for an awful long time now—can we all finally agree that a talky movie is not an inherently inferior thing? That listening can also provide cinematic rapture? I can’t think of a better rainy afternoon movie. Nor can I imagine many of Richard Linklater’s finest and most innovative films (Slacker, Waking Life, the Before… series) being made without this precedent. Directed by Louis Malle and written by Gregory and Shawn, who play “André Gregory” and “Wallace Shawn” respectively, Dinner unfolds almost entirely around a single table, occupied by two men and occasionally loomed over by a blinking waiter with an amusing resemblance to Samuel Beckett. Dinner is about dialogue, and thus a study in contrasts: between the opening shot of an oil barrel on an abandoned, dingy street and the refined restaurant where our characters meet, eat and converse; between the easy elegance of Gregory, speaking in mellifluous tones of strange experiences in exotic locales in search of transcendence, and the squat, chinless Shawn, dressed all in beige, mostly listening and posing questions as a way of managing his unease—until he finally reveals his mixture of fascination and contempt for what could be deemed as Gregory’s misguided mysticism, spurred by an apparent nervous breakdown.

Gregory tells of going to the Sahara with a Japanese monk; undertaking deeply ambiguous theatrical exercises with Jerzy Grotowski; tracking uncanny coincidences in old copies of Minotaur; the ostensibly fascist overtones of The Little Prince. Gregory compares a few too many things to Nazis and the Holocaust and over the course of this often very funny but also very serious film. He comes off as both a fool and a wise man. He seems above all to want to be present in the world, and the feeling of being present, of heightened senses, is exactly what Dinner offers. Every time I watch it at home I think I’m going to hit pause at some point, to watch it in parts—and every time I lose track of time and take it all in in a single uninterrupted viewing.

Where the source material for Dinner was its creators’ relationship and personal experiences, the next two films look to works from two of the 19^th century’s most canonical playwrights. Vanya on 42^nd Street (1994), also directed by Malle, transplants Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya to a crumbling Manhattan theatre long out of use, where Gregory and a group of actors—Shawn, Julianne Moore, Larry Pine, and others—invite us to a sort of open rehearsal for a project that they have been exploring, with no particular plan for production, for the preceding five years. The actors use only a handful of props and dress in their own clothes. Their transition from talking about their lives to performing the text—in an adaptation credited to David Mamet—is so seamless you might not notice they’ve started until they begin to call each other by names different from their own. These roles have been lived in. We are transported. “A hundred years from now, will they remember us with a kind word?” one characters asks. This film was made almost exactly 100 years after Chekhov wrote Uncle Vanya, and his characters, all of them stuck in the countryside, in marriages or longings or business agreements they find deeply dissatisfying, are simultaneously so specific and so universal. The camerawork is subtle, beautiful and fluid, a marriage of theatrical intimacy with cinematic intimacy, documentary immediacy with exquisite artifice.

A Master Builder (2014) is Shawn’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s strange, difficult, alluring Master Builder Solness, devleoped by Gregory and the cast over a decade and a half and finally translated to the screen by Jonathan Demme. (Malle died in 1995.) Shawn plays Solness, an aging, ferocious architect who, in Gregory and Shawn’s interpretation, is on his deathbed, visited by what we suppose is an apparition of a young woman (Lisa Joyce) who by turns seems worshipful and oddly threatening, a mischievous angel. She recounts for him an occasion ten years previous on which he erected a church in her town, climbed its spire, kissed her 12-year-old lips, and promised her that one day he would build castles in the sky for them to inhabit. Whether out of guilt, self-disgust, dementia or the story’s falseness, Solness has forgotten all of this, but then remembers it, or participates in the fantasy, as she tells it back to him. Meanwhile Solness denies a talented young assistant the praise he so deserves and requires so as to forward his own career. Solness placates his unhappy wife (Julie Haggarty), who seems to both resent his neglect and dread his demise. Employing tight close-ups, ostentatious zooms and sudden impressionistic cutaways to views from a moving car, Demme’s approach, though working with Vanya’s ace cinematographer Declan Quinn, is entirely different from those taken by Malle in the preceding films, yet it is extremely effective for this project, taut and tense, riveting even, despite the play’s endless ambiguities and lengthy conversations. Demme has described A Master Builder as a haunted house story, and this is ultimately how it feels, a medley of phantoms, palpable objects and places, and carnal experience.

Criterion’s supplements are especially superlative—and too numerous to list here. Most are interviews outlining the extremely interesting development processes that I’ve only mentioned here. But I think my favourite is a conversation between Gregory, Shawn and Fran Lebowitz, touching on topics such as the truth and myth of “playing yourself,” the importance of small theatre, how the past is never really past, and working on something long enough to explore every cliché and then throw it away.

           

Chewing scenery, human flesh

Her name is Clarice, which seems like a masterstroke of foresight on the part of novelist Thomas Harris—once you hear Anthony Hopkins utter this name, with customized twang, putting equal weight on both syllables, hovering over the slipperiness of the final consonant, you realize why there are some movie character names you never forget. Which, needless to say, goes double for Dr. Hannibal—rhymes with “cannibal”—Lecter, one of two psycho-killers who feature prominently in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), directed by Jonathan Demme and adapted by Ted Tally from Harris’ eponymous bestseller. Clarice (Jodie Foster), is about to graduate from FBI school. This smart, disciplined young woman trying to make it in a world of condescending older men, is our heroine. But Hannibal (Hopkins) is not her antagonist. He becomes an intimate ally.

Clarice is sent to a Baltimore maximum security prison/luxury dungeon where she’s aggressively hit on by a warden with big hair (Anthony Heald), gets some nutcase’s splooge flung at her face—easily the most disgusting moment in a movie riddled with disgusting moments—and has her first meeting with Hannibal, an encounter that in the most perverse way possible feels like the start of a love story—one without any touching. Hannibal is a psychiatrist put away for eating his patients. While ostensibly helping the feds to catch another killer—dubbed Buffalo Bill for his penchant for skinning victims—he and Clarice develop a quasi-therapist-patient relationship. Despite Clarice’s efforts, the tables never turn. Hannibal reads her like a book, spotting her vulnerable points. But he’s also the only man in the movie who respects her.

Hopkins is all high theatre, mesmerizing, no blinking, a lot of Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), maybe a little Joel Grey in Cabaret (1972) too. His timing’s immaculate, frequently going for the laughs while somehow never compromising the integrity of this wildly artificial yet totally coherent character. Foster is also remarkable. She was still young enough to convey innocence, or rather, an overachiever’s spunk. She’s acting hard and it shows, but that eagerness perfectly fits with the character.

What I most loved about revisiting Silence of the Lambs for the first time in years was my realization that, despite the presence of esteemed stars and the multiple Oscars it eventually garnered, it really isn’t a “prestige” picture. Demme’s coverage isn’t especially glossy or sweeping; it’s solid meat-and-potatoes directing. The story is in many ways—mostly very good ways—utterly trashy, and the movie adheres to the source material’s tone. Really, it’s almost a (very expensive) B-movie, and the cameo from Roger Corman—the producer of Demme’s early exploitation flicks Caged Heat (1974) and Fighting Mad (1976)—seems like a sly acknowledgment of this. How refreshing to see a Best Picture-winner that doesn’t seem calculated or compromised by a desperate need to win Best Picture. On the contrary, Silence of the Lambs is first and foremost deeply creepy, character-driven entertainment. That’s why we’re still captivated more than two decades later. 

      

TIFF '11: We we came from

My first report from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival is coming shamefully late. My only excuse is that I’ve been traveling, sort of all over the place—Tijuana, San Diego, Denver—and not every stop was strictly voluntary. Yet this sense of steady movement was not inappropriate for what constituted one of yesterday’s highlights, the Mavericks session at the Princess of Wales Theatre that included the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys, followed by an onstage discussion between programmer Thom Powers, Demme and Young, whose endearingly dry humour and utterly relaxed demeanor charmed the hell out of everybody.


Neil Young Journeys is both a concert movie and a road movie. It shifts between pleasingly unfussy coverage of Young’s pair of recent solo performances at Massey Hall—just a few blocks away from the Princess—and Young’s journey in a Crown Victoria from Omemee (“...a town in North Ontario...”), where he spent part of his childhood, to Toronto for the show. Along the way are amusing recollections of youth, like the one about the kid named Goof who gave Young a nickel to eat tar or tell an old lady she had a fat ass, some very pretty scenery, and Young’s confession that, despite his career-long obsession with maximum sound quality, the car is still his preferred place to listen to music.


No car stereo has anything on the sound system at the Princess however, which Young tweaked so that we listened to Journeys at 96 kilohertz—the first time in history a film was exhibited so thunderously. Given his subject, Demme most often smartly opts to hold images a long while rather than try to impose excitement through a lot of needless cutting. So we get extended shots of Young’s little beak of an upper lip perched on the edge of his harmonica and the tear in the pinch of his beat-up white fedora, or, just as memorably, Young’s face as seen through a psychedelically lit gob of spit clinging to his microphone micro-cam. The songs were mainly culled from Young recent Daniel Lanois-produced Le Noise and from his breakthrough period of 40 years ago. Young’s murder ballad ‘Down By the River’ ends with a wonderfully spooky and hushed “There is no reason for you to hide...” There’s a stirring rendition of ‘After the Gold Rush’ performed on pump organ and harmonica, and an industrial-strength ‘Ohio’ on a Les Paul. The show ends with a terrifically feedback-operatic ‘Walk With Me.’ But among the newer material the song that made the biggest impression on me was ‘You Never Call’—a song that cries out to be covered by Willie Nelson—in which Young repeats a line that evokes death as “the ultimate vacation with no back pain,” and spots a dead friend’s car in the parking lot outside a hockey game.

The onstage Q&A was a little too brief. It featured a very funny story from Demme about how he and Young first met, the happy revelation that Young is writing a memoir, and one-too-many old schoolchums in the audience who just wanted to say hi. Still, the atmosphere was palpably affectionate, imbued with the feeling that each of us has a road of differing lengths behind us, and we were all of us sharing a very memorable stop.

Here comes the ride: Rachel Getting Married is a careening tour of family collisions

Right off, the timing seems precarious: on the cusp of her big sister’s wedding day, Kym (Anne Hathaway) is picked up from rehab, chain smoking, nervously catty, clearly feeling jinxed by the pressure not to fuck everything up. Emma (Anisa George), the maid of honour, keeps telling Kym that it’s not all about her, and you soon want to swat Emma and tell her it’s not all about brownie points with the bride either. But Kym is self-absorbed, by nature of the 12-step recovery process if not also simply by nature. In her family narrative she has been designated as both the hurricane and its eye. The speech she improvises at the rehearsal dinner keeps swerving so uneasily into colossal public embarrassment without quite tipping over as to be a kind of feat of suspense. The feeling here of being almost out of control is beautifully controlled by Hathaway, by director Jonathan Demme, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with his stability-crashing handheld camera, and by everyone else in the room for this scene, sitting there trying not to let the panic show. It’s a brilliantly measured early set piece and a sort of emotional weather report on what’s to come.

So we’ve got two sisters, the crazy one and the titular, reasonable one (Rosemarie DeWitt), getting married and getting a PhD in psychology, and leery of being upstaged for the umpteenth time. We’ve got two divorced parents, the outgoing, worrying, slightly manic but clearly loving father (Bill Irwin) and the quietly radiant but finally remote mother (Deborah Winger), the former champing at the bit to welcome Kym home and make nice with everyone, the latter amiable but comfortably outside of the proceedings, as ultimately bottled up as her ex is potentially hysterical. And we’ve got an absent family member, too, a third sibling long dead yet seemingly lingering everywhere they turn—the wedding is to be held in the family house. For everything to be truly resolved by the end of Rachel Getting Married Hathaway would have to no longer be the star, and Winger would have to let go of more backed up vitriol than the movie’s compact timeline and fearsome integrity could probably bear. But tidy resolutions are antithetical to Rachel Getting Married. Women punch each other in the face here, but that's only the start of a conversation to be continued in the future. As written by Jenny Lumet, the abundant humour and familiar narrative devices—I use that adjective in both senses—get us settled into our seats, but the sensitively observed details that bring this story rushing to unruly life are anything but settling.

Hathaway’s Kym seems resentful above all of her own neediness, her large, dark eyes holding an inner turmoil that’s trying to keep up appearances under scrutiny. DeWitt’s Rachel is at once lovely and righteous and eager to descend from her typical stance as moral superior to be the selfish one for once. Her calm is so well-practiced she can barely escape it. The pair's ongoing exchange of roles is the dramatic meat of the story, with Irwin touchingly scrambling to support both at once, and Winger coolly resigned to stand behind the line she’s drawn between her and both daughters. It's a casting coup, to be sure, her hiding nature so perfectly dove-tails into that of Winger the actress and one-time Hollywood siren. 

As for the others, of which there are many, lively supporting players among them, they fall beautifully in line with Demme's rigorous ensemble design. I don’t know whether or not Lumet’s script had Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio), Rachel’s fiancé, be a musician, or had the guest list be brimming with countless other wildly diverse and enormously talented musicians, but, if it wasn’t actually his idea, I’ll bet Demme—director of Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold—felt right at home with this very shrewd conceit. There is no underscoring, instead, diegetic music fills Rachel Getting Married, with everyone from Demme’s guitar playing teenage son to Robyn Hitchcock seemingly always playing or rehearsing somewhere within earshot of the action, creating a stirring, sometimes humorous counterpoint to whatever’s happening. Music gives an aesthetic unity to the story that helps support its necessary loose ends, and when, after a harrowing detour, the party finally starts, the whole movie just surrenders to it, filling up on movement and colour and celebratory gestures. Demme knows we’ve all earned it by that point, the characters and the audience, and the sense of release is tremendous, if fleeting, and always slightly tempered by cutaways to Anne, so well-behaved as to break your heart a little. The next morning comes, a lot has changed, but changes take time to work themselves out, so the note we part on is calmer, bittersweet, and deeply satisfying.