THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

For years people have asked me, Why doesn't Back Stage West have film reviews? As this question typically came from writers or columnists--who clearly just wanted the free movie passes and the chance to bloviate in print about the latest Adam Sandler opus--I didn't take it to represent a serious readership demand. And I've always felt that Los Angeles, above all places, has more than enough outlets for film criticism and movie publicity--and the huge, inky gray zone in which the two inevitably meet--and did not need yet another, least of all in an actor's paper, where information about film and television shows that are still hiring will always trump any reflections about the product once it's in the projector.

Well, one lives to revise one's thinking--indeed, I can think of few challenges in life I relish more than the slow, clarifying process of changing my mind, or having it changed--and I've gradually rethought this no-film-review policy. Quite simply, it has come to seem to me perverse, blinkered, even dishonest not to talk about films critically in a Hollywood trade paper. To ignore the main products of this town's driving industry is to ignore the elephants--and the gazelles, and the vultures, and the stink bugs--in the living room.

For regular readers of my Wicked Stage column, fear not: This means no diminution of my interest in covering Southland stages--indeed, I find that the connections between the local theatre scene and the film industry are criminally underreported and unnoticed (especially, it sometimes seems, among members of either scene). I don't pretend that one validates the other, or feeds the other, or mimics the other--it's always more complicated than that--but neither can I pretend that even the most dedicated theatre makers in this town just make and care about theatre.

So, with throat properly cleared, I forthwith launch the newly expanded mission of my column, now christened The Wicked Stage and The Gag Reel. In this space, weekly, I will continue to muse and murmur about the business of show, with every regard to message but none to medium. And, since there's little on the boards this early in January, I'll start with some impressions of the past year on film.

One thing you can say about 2002: It was a better year than most to bloviate about Adam Sandler's latest opus, since he starred in a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, a man universally recognized as a Film Artist, as opposed to those anonymous schlubs who marked time in the director's chair for Big Daddy or Mr. Deeds. Indeed the hushed tones people use to discuss the maker of Boogie Nights and Magnolia would make you think they were discussing the enigmatic star chef at a monosyllabic eatery on Sunset Boulevard rather than the guy who made unglamorous lugs like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly into art-house stars. The thing that strikes me about Punch-Drunk Love, which I enjoyed far more than it seemed to deserve (especially Jon Brion's tetchy score), is that, in retrospect, it set the tone for a number of other films that came out last year: strangely retro, surface-to-air contraptions that work like elaborate put-ons, occasionally releasing some pockets of genuine feeling from beneath their hermetically arty bubbles. Punch-Drunk Love--with its willful quirks, long takes, sharp cuts, studied production design, and queasily yearning ironic tone--did reach fitfully beyond its surface satisfactions, even as I occasionally felt, as I often feel with Steven Soderbergh's work, that I'm watching a big-budget student film.

Anderson looks like a crass crowd pleaser next to the pristine formalism of Todd Haynes' over-stuffed, over-praised weepie Far From Heaven, which is such a thoroughgoing put-on that I think Haynes is ultimately putting himself on. If Anderson hails from the "production" side of the film-school stylists, Haynes is a critical studies guy all the way. He's one of those cinema wonks who's looked at Douglas Sirk's interminable 1950s melodramas and read all their hidden psycho-sexual codes--which, I admit, makes better entertainment than following the moldy stories of those old films--and now, in an obsessively accomplished homage, has both reproduced those films' color codes and done a little amateur decoding for us. Whaddaya know--they're all about sexual, racial, and socioeconomic repression! It's an angle that never fails with the art-house crowd, which loves nothing more than to watch the bourgeoisie squirm in--and, if possible, soil--their straitjackets. The intentionally flat-footed script manages some moments of heartbreak--mainly due to the performances of Julianne Moore, Dennis Haysbert, and above all a stunning Dennis Quaid--but the result is closer to Stanley Kramer than Sirk. It's a conservative's liberal problem picture. As one wag has already written, it seems to be campaigning for Best Picture of 1957.

Spielberg's carefree Catch Me If You Can is enjoyable piffle with the supreme virtue of confidence, both in its characterization and its narrative sleight of hand, though it also feels like a wind-up toy, from its Saul Bass-like opening credits (they're by Agnes Deygas) to its fetishization of 1960s stewardess chic. But it's gratifying to be in the hands of a storyteller so in control of his craft--every scene is an offhanded set piece--and heartening to see Christopher Walken cast sympathetically (even if Jeff Nathanson's script leaves him high and dry).

Adaptation. is an elaborate put-on of a different order--not in its stylization but in its very conception, looping around within itself like an ontological Slinky, and it has the perfect cast for its contortions: Nicolas Cage, back in wacky form after too many years as an action-figure stiff, bringing fresh comic shades and nuances to every hesitation and flash of his sad, weird eyes; Meryl Streep, proving again that she should do at least a comedy a year, doctor's orders, and Chris Cooper, in a performance apparently sculpted in the editing room--but what brilliant, mercurial raw material he gave them to work with. If this one is also a little student-filmish, that felt just about right; I don't mean to infer anything about the lifestyle choices of director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman, but if Woody Allen smoked a lot of dope, Adaptation. looks like the kind of stoned, self-flagellating, so-funny-it's-serious-and-vice-versa movie he'd make.

The most fun I had at the movies lately, once I realized what hit me, was at Chicago, which director Rob Marshall and writer Bill Condon have successfully turned into a kind of meta-musical, something like a tap-happy love child of Dennis Potter and Bob Fosse. What's most striking about Marshall and Condon's conception--staging Kander and Ebb's nearly nonstop musical numbers in some alternate imaginative reality--is that this alternate reality, in which all the characters strut a brightly lit stage before an eerily disembodied audience, starts to feel like the film's true setting, with the flashes to the "real" 1920s Chicago (really just an assembly of shorthand period touches) as the aberrations. It's an exhilarating balancing act that almost made me like the material better; it remains a heartless, tightly constructed blast of kewpie-doll cynicism, buoyed by an ebullient, seemingly effortless if generic jazz-baby score. I don't claim to care about such things, but it looks like an Oscar winner to me.

Destined, perhaps, for less attention--it's not meta- or ironic, and it's certainly not a put-on--is Roman Polanski's The Pianist, as straightforward and powerful a film as he's ever made. Actually its first hour is less powerful than grinding, depicting the Nazis' invasion of Warsaw and their inexorable clampdown on its 350,000-plus Jews with cold-eyed horror. Like the opening of The Deer Hunter, this is a prelude that feels too long--just about too long enough--before it proves to have been essential for the harrowing journey that follows, in which Adrien Brody, in a shattering performance as real-life pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, ducks and hides and runs for his life. It's here where it all clicks: Polanski, a connoisseur of solitary paranoia, haunted by confinement, is able to sustain the perversity, and the forward momentum, of a story about a man desperately trying to avoid action, to keep still, to escape notice. There are moments painfully reminiscent of silent comedy--a shuffling, starving Szpilman forages for food, narrowly misses discovery, or happens to have a front-row seat for crucial gunfights--but they're suffused with a kind of primal dread that can't be faked. It's as beautifully attenuated in its suspense and release as Bresson's magnificent 1956 A Man Escaped--another survivor's film made with the clear eyes of a man who was there and lived to tell.