BACK STAGE WEST

January 16, 2003      

        

THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

 

by Rob Kendt

                 

It's been noted that two of last year's Best Picture contenders, Chicago and The Hours, were helmed by directors who come from the theatre--Rob Marshall and Stephen Daldry, respectively--but the film with the most theatrical tone I've seen recently, strangely enough, is Gangs of New York. Indeed, Scorsese's new pet project is practically operatic in its scope and feeling; for all its grime and blood, it has the simultaneously heightened and foreshortened unrealism of a film made on a few big sets with a bunch of actors dressed in period clothes declaiming accented speeches with big historical themes. There are even some surprising moments of pixilation and frame-cramming excess reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann, though no one could mistake Scorsese's heavy-spirited passion play for Luhrmann's antic pop carnivals.

 

The result is an ungainly film that has its share of tacky, absurd, grueling, or risible moments--it does feel at times like Scorsese's folly, his Heaven's Gate, and it is hard to imagine either Academy voters or a wide audience embracing it--but it nevertheless somehow hangs together right to the end; it has a genuinely compelling ardor and energy in nearly every frame. I ended up admiring the film, despite telltale traces of bloat and tuck, because, unlike so many would-be sweeping epics that start out on solid, familiar ground only to fall apart by their final third, Gangs starts out all over the place and seems to gather force, to take its shape as its hurtles to its apocalyptic climax. And no one gives apocalypse more terrible conviction than this obsessive former seminarian. There's just no getting around it: Scorsese is most at home, most on fire with inspiration, when he's dramatizing blood-letting violence--fist to face, knife to gut, point-blank gun to head. Scorsese's devotion to violence as spiritual purgative, as narrative engine, as literally gut-wrenching catharsis, borders on the religious, and as such it's almost awe-inspiring.

 

Much has already been written about Daniel Day-Lewis' meticulous performance as Bill the Butcher--it's broad but sharp, like one of those cleavers he brandishes--but, while not putting too fine a point on it, props must go to Leonardo DiCaprio for holding his own in a thanklessly reactive Hamlet role; in the bravura midnight-oil scene in which an insomniac Bill regales his young charge with a rambling, flag-wrapped monologue about the necessity of ruling through force and its terrible price, Day-Lewis is brilliant, but it's the anguished DiCaprio who absorbs and reflects Day-Lewis' grim gleam. Moments like these place Gangs near the territory of a masterwork, or at the very least the work of a master.

 

I can't say the same about either Antwone Fisher or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the directing debuts of actors Denzel Washington and George Clooney. Both are based on autobiographical material, both feature their director-stars in unflashy supporting roles, and both are deft, creditable efforts (also known in my household as "rentals"). Fisher is quite gripping and rewarding, actually; it's a straight-up empowerment fable with buckets of heart and all the TV-movie virtues and villains in place, and the script is often more obvious and wish-fulfilling than required, but as a director Washington shows the same qualities that make him among our best living actors: bracing clarity, confidence, class, and, most crucially, the seemingly effortless layering-in of lived experience. Fisher moves with deceptive ease through its unflinching depiction of social pathologies--its shorthand sketches of a whole matrix of class, race, poverty, crime, and malaise reverberate with awful truth--but the moment that moved me the most was a simple scene, shaped and shot with impeccable empathy, of a modest second-date heart-to-heart between the leads Derek Luke and Joy Bryant, newcomers hand-picked with the savvy yet entirely uncynical calculation that these sweet, unformed youths would break our hearts. Clooney's film about the self-loathing shmuck savant Chuck Barris is, like Clooney himself, a cool piece of work, with an ebulliently smarmy performance by Sam Rockwell in the lead. But Clooney mistakes stylization for point of view, largely missing the film's opportunities for real narrative transgression--for the kind of mind-bend you'd expect from such a wildly unreliable narrator as Barris (a strategy more fully realized in screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's other recent release, Adaptation.). That Rutger Hauer, in a disconcerting cameo as a German hitman, apparently improvised his own dialogue--psycho-philosophy about the lonely brotherhood of killers--is not a surprise. The whole film plays like an improvisation on themes of insignificance, decadence, pop culture, the Cold War. It could be called Catch Me If You Care.

 

¥ Mixed blessings: A recent L.A. Times article quoted producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron--the folks who've managed the dubious distinction of turning musicals like Gypsy and Annie and Cinderella into flabby, unevenly cast TV-movie events--as saying they wouldn't consider remaking musicals that had already been perfectly realized on film; their unfortunate example was The Sound of Music, that enduring crime against culture. The same article announced their plans to make a Fiddler on the Roof with Victor Garber as Tevye. That casting choice is bad enough, but hello--Norman Jewison's 1971 film of Fiddler remains among the only stage musicals done justice on the screen. (The others are Oliver!, Cabaret, Hedwig, and, to the extent that Yul Brynner's performance is preserved, The King and I; all the other good film musicals, as is the conventional wisdom, were created expressly for the screen). Am I being too hard on Zadan and Meron? Well, their next project is a new Music Man with Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth, and based on an advance CD it's a crisp, clean, and deadly dull rendition (it will air Sunday, Feb. 16, on ABC). Meredith Willson's Americana score is a true gem, but without the requisite sass and brass it's corn with no pop. I'm willing to admit that Broderick's deliciously subversive smirk on-screen may go a long way; we'll have to wait and see. I'm also willing to grant that if this new Music Man is any improvement over the silly, tasteless 1962 film, which even the marvelous Robert Preston couldn't rise above, that will be something. To give credit where it's due, Zadan and Meron are also responsible for 2001's highly watchable Judy Garland telepic with Judy Davis, and are among the executive producers of the new Chicago film, which just may be practically perfect in every way.

 

¥ I'm looking forward to finally getting around to seeing Peter Nieves' Cringe, the third installment in the Evidence Room's three "Hollywood" plays, which ran in rep last fall and are now reopening with some script and cast changes. Though our critic didn't like Cringe, I'm hoping I like it better than the other two plays in rep, which I did see: Justin Tanner's Hot Property and Michael Sargent's Hollywood Burning. The first is a so-so rewrite of one of the few Tanner plays that left me cold in its original 1995 Cast Theatre incarnation (as Intervention, with French Stewart), while the second is a disappointingly straight-faced fan-boy valentine to the transgression of Paul Morrissey and Kenneth Anger that never has the charge of real daring itself, despite a fierce, fearless lead turn by the incomparable Tom FitzpatrickÉ Bailiwick Arts Center of Chicago will present a 25-minute sample of a new musical, Dr. Sex, described as a "fun show about the Kinsey report," on Monday, Jan. 27 at the Disney/ASCAP workshop. Artistic director David Zak will hold local auditions for four men and four women, 20-30s, on Saturday morning, Jan. 25, who will rehearse through the weekend and present it on Monday. You can reach him at DGZak@aol.com for detailsÉ Jeannine Frank, the local impresario of "parlor performances" by cabaret artists and other entertainers, is looking to book "singing Darwinian scholar" Richard Milner for some engagements in Southern California. He'll be performing his one-man musical Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert--described by Time Out/New York as "a witty and erudite blend of Stephen Jay Gould and Tom Lehrer"--in Northern California and is available in the L.A. area Mar. 23-28 for parties, academic meetings, church picnics, etc. Frank can be reached at frankent1@ juno.comÉ Pinafore!, Mark Savage's queering of Gilbert and Sullivan, which ran with great success at the Celebration Theatre in 2001, is headed for Chicago, and last year's movement-based show La Gioconda, which ran at Stages Theatre Center, is seriously going after a New York run. Meanwhile the Celebration is gearing up for Naked Will, in which playwright Blair Fell explores the possibility that Shakespeare's sonnets were written for the young male muse Willie Hughes. Celebration artistic director Derek Charles Livingston, who last helmed Insurrection: Holding History, will direct.