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.

           

"I like the idea of Hollywood being incestuous, an enclosed ecosystem of ideas, with no oxygen, no new blood, everything recirculating and getting weaker... It was pleasing as a metaphor for what’s wrong with studio filmmaking.": David Cronenberg on Maps to the Stars

Charting a constellation of has-beens, hangers-on and hopefuls, of celebrity Caligaris, doting agents and pre-pubescent divos, David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, written by Bruce Wagner, is a caustic tour of Tinseltown, overflowing with cruelty, avarice and panic. Yet it is not without pity. It’s depiction of Havana Segrand (a valiant Julianne Moore) pays equal attention to the middle-aged actress’ solipsism and genuine desperation. Above all, Maps transmits sympathy for the tormented children of Stanford Weiss (John Cusack), a motivational speaker and experimental therapist whose interrogatory methods would not be out of place among the clinicians in Cronenberg’s The Brood. Weiss’ daughter Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a pyromaniac returning from prolonged exile, and son Benji (Evan Bird), a child star and recovering addict, are both deeply disturbed and capable of viciousness, yet Maps closes on a note of solemn condolence for these star-crossed progeny who never had a chance.

Infused with fecund themes of institutionalized backstabbing, paranoid psychosis, persistent ghosts and bad biology, and delivered with a clipped, elliptical rhythm and precisely honed mise en scène, what impressed me most about Maps were the things that Cronenberg and his regular collaborators (cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, editor Ronald Sanders, composer Howard Shore) brought to Wagner’s script, which Cronenberg has been trying to make for over a decade. As for the script itself, the jokes are more brittle than funny, certain scenes whither before they properly begin, and certain twists seem forced (see the sudden, heavily telegraphed accidental execution of a household pet). Ideas feel over-worked, dialogue over-written. Here’s Robert Pattinson’s chauffer/aspiring actor-screenwriter: “I was thinking of converting [to Scientology]. Just as a career move.” That second line is explanatory, and sort of kills the joke.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that, for all my reservations, Maps held me spellbound. Few directors can captivate so consistently by simply taking someone else’s material and making it utterly their own. But few directors are as singular in their sensibility as Cronenberg, who’s rounding out a pretty great year, one that’s included a new film, a major retrospective and exhibition at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the publication of his excellent debut novel Consumed. So it was a great pleasure, as always, to speak with Cronenberg, one of my favourite living filmmakers (and a consistently engaged and intelligent interviewee), at a Toronto restaurant last week. I had to share him with two other journalists, but our talk, which I’ve edited down a great deal, was fluid and fun.

David Cronenberg

Our conversation begins when one of my colleagues says he interviewed Cusack, and that Cusack described Maps to the Stars as a fever dream.

David Cronenberg: That’s better than satire, which is the description most often used but one that Bruce and I object to. I think the meaning of satire has been diluted. People these days call anything that’s nasty and funny satire. But if you think of Jonathan Swift, of A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, those were real satire, real attacks on society employing fantastical elements. Maps is too realistic to be satire. Bruce claims that every conversation in the movie is something he’s heard, and I believe him. Yet there’s a sense in which everyone in Hollywood is in a fever dream, some state of high temperature, of agitation and anxiety. I think that’s an accurate appraisal.

JB: Perhaps something else that removes Maps from the realm of satire is the fact that its humour is undercut by desperation, sadness, rage and loneliness, something emphasized in the way you continually isolate characters in the frame, even in scenes with lots of dialogue.

DC: That’s exactly true. It’s the absurdity of the human condition that’s the source of the humour. When I was shooting, Julie Moore, being the intelligent, sensitive actress that she is, immediately saw what I was doing. She said, “I see you’re isolating us all. We’re all in our own little bubbles. I like the security of the frame on me.” She understood that it was a subtle way of suggesting that these people, though speaking to each other, are not really communicating. There are very few two-shots. Most audiences won’t notice that but they’ll feel it, that the characters never really seem to occupy the same space.

My other colleague asks if the film’s depiction of Hollywood has prompted objections within the industry.

DC: The film hasn’t screened yet in Hollywood, but I’m curious to see what happens there. I had a studio head come up to me in Cannes, after we’d screened. He embraced me, and said, “Your movie scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t sleep last night. The next morning I went to a party at the Hotel du Cap, and all I could see were scenes from your movie.” I don’t think there’ll be backlash. Most of the movie people who’ve seen it say, “That’s my life.” History of Violence is the closest I’ve ever come to making a studio picture, but, believe me, I’ve seen and heard things as absurd and extreme as anything in Maps.

JB: You’ve mentioned the importance of shooting in the States, but you shot Cosmopolis, which is such an emphatically New York narrative, entirely in Toronto, creating an idea of New York. Could Maps not have been made here, creating an idea of Los Angeles?

DC: No. Because of the veracity of it. It’s almost a docudrama. Whereas Cosmopolis was such an innately surreal, conceptual film. You hope that there’s human reality in Cosmopolis, but it’s buried deep. It’s very stylized. I wouldn’t have wanted to shoot in New York. It would have been too real.

JB: A situation not unlike Naked Lunch.

DC: Right. We couldn't shoot in Morocco because of the Gulf War, but I thought, this isn’t Morocco—this is Interzone. So a stylized, drug-addled version of Morocco that could be created in Toronto was actually better. No so with Maps. You really need to shoot in the iconic Hollywood spots. At one point I said, “I’m not doing any shots that don’t have palm trees.” [Laughs]

JB: Now that you’ve spent several years writing your first novel, giving yourself the opportunity to sculpt characters entirely on the page, has that changed how you direct actors?

DC: I don’t know yet. I was writing Consumed between movies. Which is difficult, by the way. I’d rather not do that again. Likewise it’s impossible for me to know if I would have written a novel the same way had I never directed a film. In writing the book I was very much wanting to visualize the space the characters were in, how they moved around a room, how they were physically. That was very important to me—and it felt like directing. Certainly more like directing than screenwriting, where you don’t do any of that. Screenplays are a pared-down, weird kind of writing where your prose style doesn’t matter. All that matters is dialogue and narrative structure. Yet I think I always had a very visual sense of bodies and how they occupy space and relate to each other. I think that came before I made movies.

My colleague, the one who interviewed Cusack, now talks about interviewing Pattinson. He says Pattinson told him that Cronenberg might be retiring from movies.

DC: I tempt fate or the Devil or whatever by saying this may be my last movie. I thought maybe Cosmopolis was going to be my last. Why? I’ve no idea. Maps? I had lots of fun doing it, lots of energy. You worry, “Am I getting too old? Is this too stressful?” Abbas Kiarostami, who’s the same age as me, says it’s too hard, that he can’t do it anymore. He’d rather just do his photographs. And he got me thinking that maybe I’ll do that too. I’ll just write novels. But then my accountant says no, I can’t afford to retire. You can’t make as much money writing novels, unless you’re Stephen King. So where do I find myself now? I don’t have a rule that says I’m not making more movies, but it would have to be something very seductive to keep me from writing my second novel. Because that’s what I’m doing right now.

JB: I’m relieved to hear that, because something I like about your later work is this interesting tension between the material, which for the most part hasn’t been obviously “Cronenbergian,” and what we might construe as a “Cronenbergian” approach to it—the way you make it your own. With Maps, one thing that struck me as very in keeping with your interests in this sense of biological determinism, this classical notion of incest as a catalyst for tragedy.

DC: Incest wasn’t the major attraction for me, though it makes perfect sense that you’d see that. As you say, it has resonances of Greek tragedy, and also modern genetic tragedy. We know now why incest is not a good idea. Culturally there’s resistance to incest, but occasionally a culture can overcome that. That was the case with the Egyptians, where a royal’s blood was so special that they couldn’t possibly mate with a commoner, and thus had to marry a sibling or cousin to keep the bloodline pure. They overcame the taboo and suffered for it, because there was a lot of genetic weakness in the succession of Egyptian royals. So it’s good trope. I like the idea of Hollywood being incestuous, an enclosed ecosystem of ideas, with no oxygen, no new blood, everything recirculating and getting weaker, as we see with sequel after sequel after sequel. It was pleasing as a metaphor for what’s wrong with studio filmmaking.

JB: So what was the major attraction?

DC: Bruce Wagner. His dialogue, his characters, the madness that’s so convincing. Very rare to find a script with that much power just jumping off the page. And, as always, I had to feel that no one else could do it, or would do it. And that was certainly the case with Maps. [Laughs] Bruce couldn’t find anybody else to do it.

                        

If only I could make it better with just my mind

The sheer existence of this third adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel is a baffling phenomenon—as difficult to explain as the blood that's somehow drawn from a porcelain Jesus by the titular telekinetic teen. The film’s being hyped as more faithful to the source material, as though that meant anything. King himself stated his own confusion as to why Screen Gems/MGM would pursue the project when the original Brian De Palma-directed Carrie (1976), featuring a genius lead performance from Sissy Spacek, was so good. Conceding that it would at least be fun to cast, King suggested Lindsay Lohan as Carrie. Which would be ridiculous. But trust me, ridiculous would be vastly preferable to this new Carrie, which is dull and pointless.

Shorting out fluorescents and exploding her high school principal’s water cooler within the first ten minutes, our new Carrie (Chloë Grace Moretz) displays her special abilities—spurred by her menstrual cycle’s belated inauguration—early and flamboyantly. Relentlessly teased by her peers and chastised daily by her mentally ill religious zealot mother (Julianne Moore), Carrie is a hapless outcast even in her own home. As with old Carrie, new Carrie tracks its heroine’s fleeting illusion of social acceptance, public humiliation and eventual climatic vengeance. Strangely, while new Carrie more or less follows the same narrative trajectory as old Carrie, its ostensible heroine barely registers as a presence; this time around, it seems like Sue (Gabriella Wilde)—the girl who feels bad and convinces her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom as repentance—is actually the protagonist. Too bad Sue is also boring.

This is partly due to the miscasting of Moretz, who seems unable to navigate Carrie’s emotional journey. She offers the same slack-jawed, wounded expression in scene after scene, switching to an unconvincing demented smile during her reign of terror. Where Spacek’s Carrie was a tormented, naïve yet intelligent girl on the cusp of womanly self-actualization, Moretz’s Carrie reads as mere victim, so withdrawn as to be opaque and nearly impossible to empathize with. Butt empathy she gets, from boring Sue, from Billy (Alex Russell), Sue’s boyfriend, and from Miss Desjardin (Judy Greer), the gym teacher. The performances from Russell, whose posturing is endearingly hilarious, and Greer, who deftly plays her ever scene for laughs, are easily the best things in the movie. The scene where Billy teaches Carrie to slow-dance is sweet.

There are reasons why a 21st century Carrie could have been relevant, such as the story’s potential engagement with rising concerns over bullying, especially via the internet, or Carrie’s mom’s alliance with the religious right. But, aside from an video of a terrified Carrie being uploaded onto YouTube—an act of very little consequence to the story—new Carrie might as well have been set in 1976. Its paucity of fresh ideas is kind of astounding, as is the absence of any envelope-pushing for a young audience accustomed to more gore and degradation. (No, you won’t see Moretz’s “dirty pillows.”) Spacek’s Carrie was far scarier and De Palma’s version was far more sensationalistic and sexualized, right down to the all-but-explicit homosexuality of the gym teacher. Even the special effects in old Carrie are more effective than the limpid, ultra-phony CG on display here. Watching so much lazy craft on display here—the uninspired coverage, the cuts that don’t match—you get the impression that director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, Stop-Loss) just gave up. The film was originally slated for a March release and the delay seems to have been prompted by reshoots to make the final result even stupider. As in art, so in life: Pierce got bullied. And now everybody has to pay.  

              

Sex and the synthetic girl(s)

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