Category Archives: Drama

***Summer House with Swimming Pool

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swimming pool, swimmer

(photo: alobos life, creative commons license)

By Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett – Having greatly admired Dutch writer Herman Koch’s European best-seller The Dinner, I was delighted to find this more recent novel. The two have much in common: a first-person narration by men who turn out to be not entirely reliable, an unfolding tragic event whose full scope is only gradually revealed; and the grounding of the story in the hyper-intense relationships of a nuclear family, where every secret evokes the possibility of catastrophe.

The narrator of The Dinner was quite likeable, at least at first, his chameleon colors revealed only bit by bit. In this novel, Koch’s narrator, Dutch general physician Marc Schlosser, shows his disgruntlement cards early on. Married with two preteen/early teen daughters, his feelings about women are entirely retrograde: “I looked at her (a just-met woman) the way every man looks at a woman who enters his field of vision for the first time. Could you do it with her? I asked myself, looking her deep in the eyes. Yes, was the response.” Or, “Any father would rather have a son than a daughter.” Or, “I laughed . . . the sooner you laugh during a conversation with a woman, the better. They’re not used to it, women, to making people laugh. They think they’re not funny. They’re right, usually.”

Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

Yet, Marc is not more charitable toward the men he encounters, truth be told, or toward any of his patients, whom he even fantasizes about killing. Why Marc is so dissatisfied is never quite clear. Is he just a curmudgeon in the wrong profession? Did he take too seriously the lectures of his amoral medical school professor?

A luckless new patient is the famous actor Ralph Meier, a past-middle-age womanizer attracted to Marc’s wife Caroline. Marc, in turn, is attracted to Ralph’s younger wife Judith, and his attention seems to be reciprocated. Entangling the families further are Marc’s daughters’ growing relationships with Ralph’s slightly older sons.

At a minor early summer social event the four members of each family come together in a powerful way, which leads to an invitation to visit the Meier family at their summer house in some unspecified seaside destination. Marc, his eye on Judith, shamelessly manipulates his family’s vacation itinerary, while denying his intent, to ensure the encounter happens. The conflicting personalities, the muddled motives of Marc, and the ingestion of too much alcohol create a decidedly unhappy holiday from which hardly anyone will emerge unscathed.

The novel contains a couple of critically weak plot points (which I won’t divulge) that mar its believability. I’m not the only reader to find that Summer House suffers by comparison with the diabolical genius of The Dinner, with New York Times reviewer Lionel Shriver calling this follow-up “inexplicably careless.” Read The Dinner instead.

*****Clockers

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The Wire

Larry Gilliard, Jr., as D’Angelo Barksdale, second from right, on his perch, running his game in The Wire

By Richard Price – When I read Richard Price’s new crime novel The Whites earlier this year, I knew I needed to loop around and read his 1992 classic, widely considered his “best.” It really is knock-your-socks-off. In alternating chapters, it adopts the point of view of Strike, a young crack dealer in the housing projects of fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and homicide detective Rocco Klein.

Strike is a lower-level dealer who wants to get out of it, but without even a high school education, he can’t see any other path forward. Rocco is a seen-it-all investigator working in the county prosecutor’s office. What brings these two together is the murder confession by Strike’s straight-arrow brother Victor. Strike was supposed to make the hit, and didn’t, but he doesn’t think Victor did it either, and he wants to save his brother whatever way he can. Rocco figures Strike for the shooter, but can’t get Victor to change his story.

It’s a story about poor people, mostly black, and lost fathers, in which a few heroic mothers struggle to maintain family order. Strike’s cocaine- and crack-fueled world (he himself never uses the product) is under constant yet ineffectual harassment by federal, state, and local police, housing police, and narcotics officers. The homicide detectives, who are a little higher on the law enforcement pecking order, are less frequent visitors to this milieu. They have their own agenda and sometimes cooperate with the other authorities, and sometimes not. Strike can never be sure where loyalties lie, even those of his own runners (the “clockers,” because the drug market operates 24/7), who may ally with rival drug lords at any time. He certainly can’t trust Rocco, who is always playing games of his own.

What makes the book so powerful are the deep portraits of the characters. Both the main players are both strong and weak, the reader likes and loathes them in almost equal measure. Supporting characters—Rocco’s partner Mazilli and Strike’s boss Rodney, especially—are fully drawn and absolutely believable. The writing, including the characters’ dialog, is pitch-perfect.

Price was one of the writers for the best-tv-ever series [!!], The Wire, and reading this book after seeing the show, I certainly saw echoes of some of its notable characters: D’Angelo sitting on his perch in the projects, managing a team of young runners; Omar, the invincible hit-man cut down by a child; Officer Thomas Hauc, the violent and racist enforcer. Spike Lee made it into a movie in 1995 starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and Delroy Lindo.

Even though the narcotics picture has changed in the past 23 years, this remains a riveting book because of the strength of its story and the social dysfunctions it lays bare, which are still, by and large, unresolved.

Phoenix

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Phoenix, Nina HossWhat is identity? Is it who we are or who others think we are? A scenario capable of stripping people of their selfhood greater than the Holocaust is hard to imagine, and German filmmaker Christian Petzold puts his protagonist Nelly, played with great subtlety by Nina Hoss, in that predicament in Phoenix (trailer). A Jewish former cabaret singer, she’s somehow survived the concentration camp and is determined to return to Berlin to find her husband Johnny among the piled-up post-war debris and psychological ruin. Her stalwart friend Lene doesn’t trust Johnny, but Nelly won’t be deterred.

She was horribly disfigured by her concentration camp experience and, aided by Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), undergoes extensive reconstructive surgery, pleading for the Swiss doctor to return her face to exactly the way it looked before, though he warns her that may be impossible. In Berlin, still bearing the bruises of her extensive plastic surgery, she re-encounters Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). His belief that Nelly is dead is so strong, he ignores signs that this woman, who calls herself “Esther” (“There aren’t too many Esthers left,” he says), and his wife are one and the same.

In her job, Lene finds people among the dislocated and helps them get them to Palestine. She plans for them both to go there, a future she believes in whole-heartedly, but which interests Nelly not at all. The endless poring over the lists of the murdered takes its toll, and Lene finally says she feels more kinship “with our dead than with the living.”

Johnny wants Nelly to masquerade as his wife to gain the fortune she’s inherited after the deaths of her entire family. This leaves her with the mind-bending quandary of pretending to be someone pretending to be who she really is. In truth, neither of them can “see” the other.

Based on a somewhat simplified version of the French novel Return from the Ashes, it’s a story about the crumbling of trust and how illusions—Nelly’s and Johnny’s equally—blind us to reality. A powerful film whose conclusion is a shattering confrontation with the truth. Excellent performances by Hoss, Zehrfeld, and Kunzendorf. Kurt Weill’s haunting “Speak Low” is heard throughout in different versions.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating an unequivocal 99%! Viewers 81%.

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Song for the Disappeared

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Song for the Disappeared

Vivia Font & Christina Nieves in “Song for the Disappeared”

This new 90-minute play promised to dramatize several of my painful reads of the past year regarding the vulnerability of people caught, often through no fault of their own, in the ultra-violent wars of the Mexican narco-cartels. These issues have been painfully explored in both fiction (The Cartel) and non-fiction (Down by the River) exposés reviewed here.

Song for the Disappeared, by Tanya Saracho, probes the problem of fractured loyalties and the inability of even the wealthy to distance themselves from the consequences of operating within a totally broken system. The family patriarch is an honorable man, apparently, but his uprightness provides him and his family no protection; his recently returned daughter has pursued her literary aims, but only her naiveté allowed her to believe her novel about a narcotraficante family would be regarded as fiction; her ex-fiancé, now the father’s only trusted aide, has turned to religion for protection; and the father’s young wife, viewed by the others as a complete airhead, has her own demons.

When the play begins, the family heir Javier has disappeared. The family reunites at its remote Texas ranch, where everyone’s vulnerabilities are exposed, and no one is sure how to proceed or what will come next. Their struggles are symbolized in the actions of the younger daughter, slightly deranged and struggling to save the smallest and most vulnerable creatures she finds. Meanwhile, the wild dogs circle every more closely.

The all-Latino cast in the Passage Theatre production does a fine job. Even in Passage’s tiny venue, it is an engaging theatrical event, directed by Alex Correia. On stage until October 25.

Baby Doll–McCarter Theatre’s Season Opener

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Baby Doll, Tennessee Williams, McCarter Theatre

Hoffman and McDermott in Baby Doll

Perhaps Tennessee Williams and comedy don’t usually share your same mind-space, but here is a comedy-drama rather neglected in the back of his vast repository of work. Princeton’s McCarter Theatre (link includes a behind the scenes video) has found it, resurrected it, and mounted it in an exciting production on view through October 11.

The play, Baby Doll, was always a mashup. It began with two one-acts (“27 Wagons Full of Cotton” and one with a title something like “The Dinner Nobody Wanted”). It was turned into a script for a 1956 Elia Kazan movie starring Caroll Baker, Karl Malden, an Elie Wallach in his first movie role. That version went through many Kazan-initiated revisions and excited much Church opposition for its racy content—tame today compared to prime time tv. Williams later wrote a full-length stage play based on the screenplay, Tiger Tail, that had a short Broadway run in 1999. But generally, the project lay neglected.

Recently, it was retranslated and revived in France by Pierre Laville, and when McCarter’s Emily Mann read Laville’s version, she saw great potential. She and Laville share “adapted for the stage” credits, as further work had to be done by Mann to reflect American perspectives, particularly regarding race relations in Mississippi in the early 1950s. Miraculously, two weeks before rehearsals began, Mann discovered in Princeton University’s Firestone Library the original movie script by Williams, as he wrote it before Kazan’s “help.” More revisions ensued.

“Baby Doll” is a 19-year-old beauty, married to a much older man, Archie Lee Meighan and living in a falling-apart plantation house (handsome stage set). Baby Doll thought she was not “ready for marriage” at age 18. Although the wedding took place then, it is yet to be consummated (she still sleeps in her crib), according to the deal she, Archie Lee, and her father made before his death. The waiting—which is to end in two more days when Baby Doll turns 20—is driving Archie crazy. He both loves and lusts after her, feelings she does not return.

Archie Lee is nearly destitute, having lost his cotton gin business to the nearby Syndicate plantation, and Baby Doll is furious that the house’s furniture is repossessed. When the Syndicate’s gin is destroyed in a not-so-mysterious fire, the young plant manager, handsome Silva Vacarro, pays the Meighans a visit, bringing with him 27 wagons full of cotton for Archie’s gin. When Archie leaves to take care of the cotton, Silva—an Italian and exotic in those parts—tries to trick Baby Doll into revealing her husband’s role in the fire, and, as New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood says, “we can practically see her little mind clicking along a few beats behind her tongue.”

The comedy in the play comes not from Neil Simon-style one-liners, but out of the human absurdities of normal, everyday action and impulse. In a post-show discussion, the actors said Mann insists they play their lines straight; playing for laughs would cheapen the effect. That earnestness is what makes the four characters—Baby Doll (Susannah Hoffman), Archie Lee (Robert Joy), Silva (Dylan McDermott), and Baby Doll’s Aunt Rose Comfort (Patricia Conolly)—so believable. While you’re chuckling, your heart is twisting. The play ends on a bit of a Scarlett O’Hara moment, with Baby Doll’s resolution to let tomorrow take care of itself.

Veteran actor Patricia Conolly talked about some of the similarities between the elderly, half-deaf, semi-oblivious maiden aunt she plays here and other Williams characters she’s portrayed. Such women live on the edges of family and society, and they must make enormous effort to “get along,” even with the most demanding hosts (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” Blanche DuBois says.) Otherwise, as Aunt Rose Comfort puts the problem, they “have no place to go.” (Aunt Rose is a secondary character who manages to put a monkey wrench in situations fairly often, being where she shouldn’t be or not being where she should be. And, if you’ve ever had an elderly relative who’s become hard-of-hearing, you’ll know Williams got it right: she hears what she wants to hear!)

At only 90 minutes, Baby Doll is not as complex as Williams’s Big 3: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie, but it’s well worth adding to your Williams experience.

The End of the Tour

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End of the Tour, David Foster Wallace, Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel

Jesse Eisenberg & Jason Segel

In 1996 David Foster Wallace’s 1079-page novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene like a rocket. The publisher’s marketing efforts meant the book was everywhere, but the man himself—shy, full of self-doubt, not wanting to be trapped into any literary poseur moments and seeing them as inevitable—was difficult to read. This movie (trailer) uses a tyro journalist’s eye to probe Wallace during an intense five days of interviewing toward the end of the Infinite Jest book tour.

As a tryout writer for Rolling Stone, reporter David Lipsky had begged for the assignment to write a profile of Wallace, which ultimately the magazine never published. But the tapes survived, and after Wallace’s suicide in 2008 they became the basis for Lipsky’s 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which fed David Margulies screenplay. The plot of the movie is minimal; instead, it’s a deep exploration of character. It may just be two guys talking, but I found it tectonic.

Director James Ponsoldt has brought nuanced, intelligent performances from his two main actors—Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as reporter David Lipsky. Lipsky is a novelist himself, with a so-so book to his credit. Wallace has reached the heights, and what would it take for Lipsky to scramble up there too? Jealousy and admiration are at war within him and, confronted with Wallace’s occasional oddness, one manifestation of which is the attempt to be Super-Regular Guy—owning dogs, eating junk food, obsessively watching television—he isn’t sure what to feel. You see it on his face.

Is Lipsky friend or foe? He’s not above snooping around Wallace’s house or chatting up his friends to nail his story. Lipsky rightly makes Wallace nervous, the tape recorder makes him nervous; he amuses, he evades, he delivers a punch of a line, he feints. When the going gets too rough, Lipsky falls back on saying, “You agreed to the interview,” and Wallace climbs back in the saddle, as if saying to himself, just finish this awful ride, then back to the peace and solitude necessary actually to write. In the meantime, he is, as A. O. Scott said in his New York Times review, “playing the role of a writer in someone else’s fantasy.”

The movie’s opening scene delivers the fact of the suicide, which by design looms over all that follows, in the long flashback to a dozen years earlier and the failed interview. You can’t help but interpret every statement of Wallace’s through that lens. The depression is clear. He’s been treated for it and for alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. The two Davids walk on the snow-covered farm fields of Wallace’s Illinois home and talk about how beautiful it is, but it is bleak, and even in as jam-packed an environment as the Mall of America Wallace’s conversation focuses on the emptiness at the heart of life. Yet his gentle humor infuses almost every exchange, and Lipsky can be wickedly funny too.

Wallace can’t help but feel great ambivalence toward Lipsky; he recognizes Lipsky’s envy and his hero-worship, and both are troubling. He felt a truth inside himself, but he finds it almost impossible to capture and isn’t sure he has, saying, “The more people think you’re really great, the bigger your fear of being a fraud is.” Infinite Jest was a widely praised literary success, but not to Wallace himself.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%, audiences, 89%.

farm, snow, winter

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)

Ricki and the Flash

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Meryl Streep, Ricki and the FlashShe was Julia Child. She was Margaret Thatcher. She was Mamma Mia. And now Meryl Streep is Ricki Rendazzo, aging, nearly bankrupt rock singer living uneasily with a big consequential choice she made along the way—career over family (trailer). Her band, The Flash, plays the modest Salt Well bar in Tarzana, California, but they rock it. We already knew Streep could sing, and for this film she spent six months learning how to play guitar, coached by Neil Young (video). Ricki’s lead guitarist Greg is played by Rick Springfield, and you can feel his longing to be more to her, if she’d let him.

Back home in Indiana, her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) is dealing with their daughter Julie, abandoned by her two-timing husband, now depressed, and suicidal. He calls Linda—Ricki is her stage name—to let her know, and she scrapes together enough money to fly back to see what she can do. Precious little, it appears—a classic case of too little, many years too late. Mother and daughter struggle to reconnect, and it isn’t easy or even certain. Julie is played beautifully by Streep’s real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer. (In profile, the two have exactly the same nose.)

Some excruciatingly wonderful scenes, including a fancy-restaurant “family dinner” with all three of Ricki’s kids, where accusations are the main course. Julie’s seething glare could burn holes in a flimsier construction than Ricki. The pain and even humor of the situation are so sharp, you know no matter who gets the check, they’ve already paid.

And, here’s something unexpected. The parents act like grown-ups. Pete, his second wife Maureen (Audra McDonald), even Ricki and Greg—show business types of whom not much is expected, perhaps—show what they’re made of when it really matters.

Director Jonathan Demme keeps the film moving with no unnecessary drag and made the great choice of putting lifelong musicians in the band, including Funkadelic keyboarder Bernie Worrell, bassist Rick Rosas, and drummer Joe Vitale. They performed all the movie’s songs live and with no overdubs—Springfield calls this brave of Streep, especially. Academy Award-winner Diablo Cody wrote the script.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 62%, audiences 55%. I thought audiences would be kinder to it than the critics. The big complaint seems to be the script is predictable, but since there are only what, six plots . . .? it may in retrospect be predictable, but I didn’t especially feel that while I was watching, and it was never that corollary of predictable, boring! As Glenn Kenny says in his mostly positive review (didn’t like the ending) for RogerEbert.com, “One of the nicer things about the movie is how it avoids overt clichés while still partaking of convention.”

Mr. Holmes

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Ian McKellen, Mr. Holmes, Sherlock

Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes

In Mr. Holmes (trailer), it’s post-war England, and the elderly Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen), lives on a remote property on the Sussex coast. He tends his bees and shuns detecting, ever since the tragic conclusion of his last case some 35 years earlier. But he’s bothered by John Watson’s account of the case and a movie about it, both of which got the wrong end of the stick.

Between stretches of mentoring his housekeeper’s young son Roger in the details of managing an apiary, avoiding his housekeeper (played to a “T” by Laura Linney), who is apprehensive his declining physical state and advancing dementia will soon be too much for her to handle, trying unproven botanical memory aids, and enjoying terrific view of Seven Sisters white cliffs, Holmes has taken pen in hand to write his own record of that final case. Its details are elusive and come back to him only in fits and starts.

The movie is based on a 2005 literary mystery by Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind, which “is not a detective story; it’s a work of literary fiction, and as such it’s much more interested in the mysteries Holmes can never solve,” said Salon reviewer Laura Miller.

Director Bill Condon obtained fine performances by McKellen and Linney, as well as the strong supporting cast, including Roger Allam (who plays Holmes’s doctor), Milo Parker (Roger), Hattie Moraham (as the principal in his last case), and Hiroyuki Sanada (who provides Holmes some of his botanicals, but issues his own challenge to the aging detective). Late in life, that challenge teaches Holmes an important lesson.

For my taste there was too much aging and not enough mystery. Perhaps Monsters and Critics’ Ron Wilkinson captured the problem when he wrote, “A charming but fatally slow exposition.” Too, more should have been done cosmetically to differentiate the 93-year-old Holmes from the flashbacks of him at age 58.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 87%; audiences, 78%.

A Most Violent Year

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Oscar Isaac, A Most Violent YearMissed this December 2014 crime drama (trailer) in theaters, but finally had a chance to watch it on the small screen. Oscar Isaac, who was quite likable in Inside Llewyn Davis and even stronger here, does a fine job as Abel Morales, head of a New York City heating oil company; Jessica Chastain, always good, plays his wife. Morales’s trucks are being hijacked and his drivers beaten up by—who?—shady competitors, ambitious freelancers, organized crime? With his drivers and sales people at risk, the default of everyone around him is to arm themselves (which makes for some pretty scary scenarios in city traffic), but Morales resists.

He wants to remain an upstanding businessman, to keep taking the high road despite the growing chaos around him. This includes a lengthy and apparently stalled investigation by the city prosecutor (David Oyelowo) of financial sins in the heating oil industry and Morales’s company in particular. Morales is aided in his endeavors by the somewhat ambiguous character of his lawyer (Albert Brooks) who has the patience for long negotiations. As one protracted land acquisition looks about to successfully conclude, the other difficulties piling up put it out of reach again.

What was solid about this movie was that the business dealings seemed plausible and important, not just made up in the usual Hollywood way. The film was written and directed by J. C. Chandor, and in our cynical epoch of anti-heroes, he’s made Morales someone you want to see succeed. “There’s less violence that you would expect, given the film’s title, but the scenes of moral suspense prove just as breathtaking as the episodes of physical jeopardy,” said Jason Best in Movie Talk.

The plot took unexpected turns until the final resolution, and, whatever, viewers have many chances to see the most beautiful (and magically dirt-shedding) camel-hair coat ever!

Nice Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating of 90%; audiences 70%. The film garnered numerous awards and award nominations, as did the acting and directing.

Boychoir

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Boychoir

(photo: Myles Aronowitz for Mongrel Media)

This movie (trailer), released in 2015, had a brief run recently at Princeton’s nonprofit movie theater. It’s the story of the fictional “National Boychoir School” and features the singing of students from the local, real-life American Boychoir School. ABS has fallen on hard financial times, and if it needed an infomercial to stimulate a really big donation, this is it.

The movie stars Dustin Hoffman, Kathy Bates, Debra Winger, and Eddie Izzard in the adult roles, but director François Girard and writer Ben Ripley demand little of their talents. The story dwells mostly on the boys, and one particular boy (Garrett Wareing)—a misfit who arrives at the school unable even to read music, yet such a vocal prodigy that . . . yes, you can guess the rest. When the credits rolled and it turned out the movie had some affiliation with the Hallmark Hall of Fame, that was one of the least surprising moments in a string of non-surprises.

Leaving aside its dramatic shortcomings, the creators’ generosity with the music lifts the whole production. Actual ABS students are used in the production, according to the news story linked above, and director Girard said of the school, “It was extraordinary to see them at work. What they accomplish goes way beyond music.” A good movie for kids and a pleasant, if unchallenging interlude for grownups, too.

Predictably, this is one that audiences liked better (73%) than the critics (61%), according to Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

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