Italics are mine

PBS's documentary on Ernest Hemingway

I usually love everything Ken Burns does so I eagerly watched his 3-part documentary (with Lynn Novick) on Ernest Hemingway, which I assume was made because we are coming close to the 60th anniversary of his suicide on July 2, 1961. Or maybe it was made because Hemingway remains a literary giant. I liked the documentary enough, especially the beginning (Paris, Spain, Martha Gellhorn) and the very end, when he struggles with alcoholism and a long descent into night. I wished there had been a little more about his writing and why it was so novel.

My main reservation about the movie was that I felt Burns/Novick pushed the concussion angle too much to explain Hemingway's deterioration. Unless someone kept a bit of Hemingway's brain somewhere to run tests, it seems really speculative to pin the blame on his psychosis and depression on a series of concussions. The man drank heavily for decades. That to me is much more likely to be the primary reason of his mental troubles. The pictures make him look far older than his 61 years - maybe closer to 71, frankly. Nonetheless, it was an interesting movie about a larger-than-life personality. 

Iconic Painter: "Alice Neel"

For some reason I had never heard about Alice Neel before I watched this DVD (and I love Abstract Expressionism), but I was taken aback by her masterful portraits and her complicated life. One of her kids died in infancy. Her husband took her baby girl to Cuba to introduce her to his parents in the hope they would give the family money, and didn't bring her back. (That girl, Isabella, committed suicide in 1982, two years before her mother's death.) And yet she emerged as one of the most original portrait artists of the twentieth century. Did trauma help her view the world differently, or was she naturally so inclined? The movie doesn't explain it, yet it provides a very good description of her life and work. Plus, New York City. No way I wasn't going to like this. Five stars, obviously.

Review of "Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty"

I bought this over a year ago and never got around to watching it until last weekend. I wasn't very familiar with Barber's work (or his life, for that matter) and always found other DVDs to watch instead of this one, from opera productions and documentaries about other artists to multiple versions of the Anna Karenina mini-seriesand blockbuster movies I didn't catch when they were playing in theaters. Now I wish I had paid attention to Barber earlier.

I remember enjoying the opera documentary The Opera House about the reopening of Lincoln Center in 1965 with a brand new opera Antony and Cleopatra conducted by Thomas Schippers. Schippers once was a rising star at the Metropolitan Opera and ended his career at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra before his untimely death of lung cancer at age 47 (his life was also rather unhappy because he had to hide his homosexuality, you can read the blog post I wrote about Schippers here).

In fact I wrote this blog post around the same time I purchased Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty so I must have been interested in learning more about Antony and Cleopatra's author, but when I started watching Absolute Beauty a few days ago I had completely forgotten he had authored what is now considered as an epic dud, although the documentary makes a good case the responsibility for the highly-publicized failure falls squarely on the shoulder of director Franco Zeffirelli, who doomed the production with his grandiose staging(Leontyne Pryce got stuck in a pyramid on opening night but kept singing) rather than due to a flaw of the opera itself. The documentary also argues that the opera got bad press because the media was out to get Barber after many years of unmitigated success, and he never wrote anything substantial after that.

Samuel Barber had a long-term relationship with Gian-Carlo Menotti, who also has a long-term relationship with Schippers. This might have been why the Menotti name sounded familiar, as I haven't seen any of the operas he composed. Barber and Menotti ultimately separated (Menotti was drawn to younger men, including Schippers), which forced Barber to sell the beloved home they had shared in the country and return to New York City, which made him ill at ease. In the end Menotti is only a footnote to history and Schippers hasn't fared that much better (although the recording I have of his conducting documents his talent) but Barber's music continues to awe audiences. Just the other day I witnessed a magnificent performance of his piano concerto by none other than Garrick Ohlsson, whose interpretation of Brahms I adore.

Of course, me being me, I had to compensate my long neglect of Barber by sudden, extensive interest in his life and work. It helped that the documentary was fascinating, with plenty of documents of the time such as photographs and insightful interviews of music experts ranging from Leonard Slatkin to Barber biographer Barbara Heyman. Perhaps it was fortunate that I didn't watch the Barber documentary back in November 2018 when I first purchased, as I would probably have purchased the first edition of Barber's bio at the time, but a second edition was published just last month, building upon new archival documents. Just to finish talking about the documentary, the first half is mostly spent talking about his music (starting with the song cycle Dover Beach but also commenting on  his best-known work Adagio for Strings), showing musicians rehearsing his music, recording them discuss his music. It was very insightful. At the halfway point, the focus shifts and starts including more details on Barber's personal life. I found it fascinating how every music critic pilloried him when Antony and Cleopatra failed in spectacular fashion, as if they had all wanted to cut him down to size. I also enjoyed the insight of his biographer Barbara Heyman, based on a note of his that she found, that he was as modernist as he could get away with it, without sacrificing tonality and basically audience appeal (which does not mean his work is easy listening fare, because it definitely is not, but it is nice not to have to listen to Schoenberg-like atonal works.) I also liked her comment that he only wrote one of everything (one violin concerto, one piano concerto, etc) because he felt he had said exactly all that he wanted to say using that instrument in his first try. Heyman came across as extremely knowledgeable about Barber.    

So I bought 4 CDs of Barber and his bio. (I wasn't kidding when I was writing about my sudden extensive interest...) The bio arrived a few days ago, it is a superb book of high quality with reproductions of part of Barber's scores. I can't wait to delve into it. The Barber recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is also excellent, the violin concerto in particular took my breath away. As for the other recordings, they just arrived and so I haven't had a chance to decide what I think about them yet, but I love having multiple recordings of the same piece to listen to the nuances brought in by each conductor and compare them. Thirty-nine years after his death, Barber remains a giant of American music and the documentary Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty is a valuable companion to anyone interested in learning more about his talent. 

 

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Review of "Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures"

I've wanted to watch the documentary Look at the pictures on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe ever since I finished reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, about young creative gay men in Chicago falling victims to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. A few days ago I finally found the time. Mapplethorpe, of course, died of AIDS in 1989 at age 42 after a meteoric rise as the bad boy of photography, best known for highly controversial pictures that led to charges of obscenity when the Corcoran Institute of Art organized a retrospective of his work after he died. You can get a sense of what the pictures represent by reading Mapplethorpe's Wikipedia page. Basically, he liked to photograph taboo subjects that were sure to provoke consternation and outrage wherever they were shown. A senator yelled: "Look at the pictures!" when making his point that Mapplethorpe's pictures had no place in museums; hence, the title of the DVD. Did Mapplethorpe make art? Were his photographs obscene? Or pornographic?

One thing that struck me in the documentary was how ambitious Mapplethorpe was. He actually was never interested in photography as a youngster but started to make collages and wanted to make the images his own instead of using some from gay magazines, and only bought a camera when hiring a photographer for those purposes became too expensive. From the start Mapplethorpe wanted to be famous, and he understood that to achieve the level of fame he sought he had to shock viewers. (Being self-taught as a photographer, he couldn't hope to impress the crowds with his technical knowledge.) One of his lovers explains on camera that to be in Mapplethorpe's circle one had to be rich or famous or provide him with sex. He didn't seem to have many interests beside taking photographs to create his own legend, doing drugs and picking up men in gay bars. Later, perhaps because the shock of his first nude photographs may have worn off, he developed an "obsession" (in the words of one of the people interviewed for the film) with the black male organ. His last few lovers were all African American, which was sure to rile the crowds and give him maximum media coverage, in parallel with the anxiety and the anger surfacing about the AIDS epidemic. (He also made portraits of the beau monde, because he was keen on becoming extremely rich and charged exorbitant prices for those.) The part of the documentary about the last exhibition of his own work that he was able to attend before he died reminded me of the scene in the art gallery for the exhibition opening in Makkai's Great Believers, but it was moving in Makkai's book because she had really made us care about her protagonist, Yale. When I reached that point in Mapplethorpe's documentary, his troubled personality had destroyed any hint of sympathy I could have had for him.    

I will remember of Mapplethorpe that, once his career took off, he became very vain and self-centered. Everything was about him and furthering his mystique. When the name of his little brother, also a photographer, was listed in an exhibition catalog ahead of his because his brother's name was Edward and his was Robert's, he threw a fit and asked him to change his last name. When he learned his last lover had tested negative for AIDS his first reaction (after years of picking up random gay men in bars, often multiple times a day, in addition to his more committed relationships) was to pound the pillow with his fist and exclaim "Then why do I have it?" His own lawyer mentioned he was not interested in donating his money to other people after his death and created a foundation to further increase his fame, so he would never be forgotten. Similarly, he told an ex-lover to tell "everything" to Patricia Morrisroe, whom he had selected to write his biography, so that he could remain famous in death. The man was a jerk, certainly, but he had a talent to shock and a willingness to go where no one else had dared go before.

Last year the Guggenheim Museum in New York City presented a retrospective of his work for the 30th anniversary of his death. The New York Times critic argued that Mapplethorpe's once-taboo images "have lost their power to shock and feed into outworn stereotypes." What a sad coda for a life spent trying to stand out.

Read more about Robert Mapplethorpe here.

"Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins"

 I didn't get a chance to see "Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins" back when it was showing at the Magnolia in the fall, so I ended up watching it on video on the anniversary of her death. I had forgotten which day she died, but not a number of people I follow on Twitter, because it was also the last day of the impeachment hearings and my Twitter-friends felt very strongly that she would have had some choice words for the Republican Senators. Frankly, the movie is a mixed bag: we are treated to a lot of video snippets of Molly delivering one of her funny one-liners in her made-up Southern drawl she adopted when she moved to Texas and of more video snippets of well-known journalists uttering vapid perorations about her (as well as people from her inner circle providing more useful perspectives), but it is very hard to get a sense of who she was as a person, especially in the first half of the movie.

At the halfway mark she touches upon the hate mail and death threats she received over the years and I became more impressed with her because she truly had a thick skin and she did a thankless job because she believed in it. I wish the movie had discussed her personal life more to give her a sense of who she was. For instance, her college boyfriend Henry "Hank" Holland, Jr was killed in a motorcycle accident and some say that is why she never married, but the biography I read of her also suggests she would not have come into her own if "Hank" had lived. They were the poster children of the WASP society.

 Not following a traditional path for the times is what allowed Molly Ivins the freedom to speak her mind in her columns. We do learn more about her in the second half of the documentary; mainly we learn she developed a gigantic problem with alcohol that required an intervention and a trip to detox (two bottles a day, assuming the interviewee was not exaggerating), and we are also told about the battle against breast cancer she fought for seven years and ultimately lost. 

Back when I spent my sabbatical in Cambridge, my theater teacher was starring in Red Hot Patriot: The Kickass Wit of Molly Ivins so this also reminds me of that wonderful year and Massachusetts and studying theater. I find Ivins' persona as a made-up good ol' girl from Texas rather tiring after a while, but she did what she had to do to get her message across. In the end what strikes me is her profound loneliness, although the members of her inner circle, when interviewed so many years later, seemed to genuinely care about her. 

The second half of the movie is definitely better than the first, so my final rating is four stars out of five.

Review of "Max Lorenz: Wagner's Mastersinger and Hitler's Siegfried"

I recently came across this 54-min documentary about the life of German tenor Max Lorenz (1901-1975), who was recognized as one of the best heldentenors of his generation. The DVD is out of print but I was able to fetch a used copy in excellent condition on Amazon at a great price (the last reasonably-priced copy, in fact). The movie is also accompanied of a 74-minute CD of musical excerpts of Lorenz singing Siegfried. The movie soundtrack, of course, is full of Lorenz's performances too. I've known about Lorenz ever since I started researching that novel I'm finishing about a French opera singer during World War II, loosely inspired by the life of French soprano Germaine Lubin, who sang Isolde at Bayreuth in 1939 opposite, you guessed it, Max Lorenz. Yet, I didn't expect to find a documentary about him.

For those of you who have stumbled upon this blog post at random, it helps to know that Bayreuth in those days was a Hitler stronghold. The festival boss, Winifred Wagner, Richard's daughter-in-law, and Adolf Hitler himself were close friends, linked by their love of opera. I didn't know that Lorenz had much of a story worth telling, but in fact he had, as a homosexual with a Jewish wife whom he fiercely protected. The documentary contains several movie-worthy moments such as the time where Winifred Wagner was ordered not to employ Lorenz again because he had been caught in a compromising situation with a young man, situation that ultimately led to a lawsuit, but Winifred Wagner refused to let him go, and the time where Nazis came to arrest her and her mother while Lorenz, who had been assured they'd be protected, was not at home, and Lorenz's wife dialed a special number the wife of Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had given her in case of emergencies, and after ten minutes the soldiers were ordered out of the house. 

The documentary also has breathtaking pictures of the Semperoper in Dresden and the Vienna State Opera, where Lorenz made his debut (followed by appearances at the Metropolitan Opera), and of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth. The end of Lorenz's life made me a bit sad. He knew he had scaled great heights he could never reach again and after his wife's passing he seemed very lonely. But he left such a mark on the opera world that he is still remembered today, and he also came across as a man of integrity who dared be himself at a time where that was far from accepted and did his utmost to protect the people dear to him when they were in danger. After the war Lorenz became an Austrian citizen, died in Salzburg and is interred in Vienna.  

Anna Karenina: Vivien Leigh vs Greta Garbo

I was sure I was going to prefer the Vivien Leigh version, but in the end, the Greta Garbo movie wins hands down. Greta Garbo showed far more range as an actress, especially as happy and in love with Fredric March/Count Vronsky. Her broad smile lit up the screen, while Vivien Leigh comes across as posturing and making faces of perhaps hoping for love but she is not capable of looking absolutely happy. Leigh is known to have had some deep mental troubles offscreen, and after watching a couple of her movies (Gone With The Wind of course, Hamilton Woman, Waterloo Bridge and this one) I have to say she comes across as a bit limited in the range of her acting. Garbo was a superstar for a reason. Given her reputation as a recluse after she retired early from the movies, I didn't expect her to convey so much emotion on screen, but what a magnificent job she did. 

The Garbo movie is also better for matters unrelated to Garbo: the scenes are better cut, better filmed, changes in minor plot points are better chosen. Let's commend the now quite forgotten Clarence Brown for his incredible work as a director. (Brown's films have received 38 Academy Award nominations and directed Joan Crawford 6 times and Greta Garbo 7.) First off, the Leigh movie begins with the same scene as in the novel, Anna Karenina's brother sleeping on the couch because his wife decided she would no longer put up with his infidelities. But the Garbo movie starts with the scene where a regiment of Russian officers including Vronsky play a party game where they have to down three shots of vodka and crawl under a long table and repeat until they pass out drunk, and Vronsky wins. A 1935 movie that starts with a scene like that has spunk. The use of lighting and framing is far superior in the Garbo movie, and (spoiler alert) at the end Vronsky enlists in a regiment going to fight the Turk-Serbian war, he argues with Anna when she finds out, she goes to the train station to say proper goodbye to him and she finds him chatting with a young lady his mother brought, whom Anna had also noticed when she went to the opera with Vronsky. So she never says good bye to him and then throws herself under a train. The expression on Garbo's face when she looks at the train passing by before she jumps is breathtaking. The last scene shows Vronsky talking about his guilt at the way he handled their last conversation (he never finds out she went to the train station). In the Leigh movie, Vronsky goes to see his mother in Moscow, Anna takes the train after him, and then at a stop she stands in front of the train so she gets run over when the train leaves the station. The last scene is her lying dead on the tracks, looking as beautiful as ever, after the train has run her over. 

My only reservation about the Garbo movie is that the Karenin character is so caricatural one has to wonder why she ever accepted to marry him, while in the Leigh movie there is some level of affection between Karenin and Karenina and one can imagine that Anna Karenina was once like Kitty, marrying someone although she wasn't in love with him because she thought he could offer other things such as stability, having a child, and then becoming dreadfully bored and dissatisfied with her life. As Vronsky, Fredric March demonstrates why he was one of the leading men of his generation, but Kieron Moore in the Leigh movie also excels as a younger Vronsky besotted with Anna. 

Both movies are very good, but Garbo's is one notch above Leigh's. 

Review of "Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture"

The other day I watched this documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor Louis Sullivan, who designed several of the most noteworthy skyscrapers in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. I was going to write "who had such an impact on the Chicago skyline" or something of that order, but the truth is, Sullivan - who had been so convinced as a teenager that he was bound to great things - never achieved the impact he thought should have been his. First of all, he had a credential problem. He dropped out of MIT after only one year to go and study at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he promptly quit as well, but he was fortunate to have Dankmar Adler take him under his wing and make his partner at his architecture firm, Adler & Sullivan. He drew art-deco plans for some very visible buildings in Chicago, showing great artistry and craftsmanship in the details of the ornamentation on the facades such as the Auditorium Building in Chicago.

Yet, his ideas did not gain the followership he had hoped for, The Chicago Exhibition of 1893 in "The White City" drew his outrage because he had hoped to define a uniquely American style (as he did for his contribution to the exhibition) but the other architects had aligned themselves on a bland European, Beaux-Arts style. Sullivan's career faded after that, experiencing only a brief resurgence when he was asked to draw plans for a number of small-town banks, stunning in their vanguard design although they must have looked like eyesore to some of the residents. One element I liked in this movie is that sometimes failure comes through no fault of the protagonist and even talented people may not always recover from bad luck, in spite of their great contributions to their profession.

In fact, a 1986 New York Times review of a biography of Sullivan's had the headline: "Genius was not enough." Here is an excerpt from the first paragraph: "One of the masters of the late 19th-century Chicago School of skyscraper architecture, Sullivan was acclaimed in his halcyon days as one of the world's greatest architectural designers. Yet by the time his life ended, he had slipped into poverty and neglect. In this long awaited biography, the historian Robert Twombly explores the architect's rise and fall with thoroughness and sensitivity."

Interestingly, Sullivan married only late (at age 44) and that marriage only lasted a couple of years. The movie says that nothing remains that could document the relationship he had with his wife. Sullivan doesn't seem to have had any hobby besides architecture. The NYT review summarizes some of Twombly's ideas on the topic, which to me sounded like a stretch. (Basically he thinks that Sullivan was a closeted homosexual and that the facades of his buildings reflect his ideas on male-ness and female-ness.) Maybe Sullivan just didn't like people that much. The movie doesn't suggest he had a rich social life. The movie, in fact, steers clear from any discussion of his personal life except for the brief mention of his wife, which is probably the best approach to take here. In the end, we should focus on his legacy, his buildings, his contribution to American architecture. You can see some of his work in this Dwell feature on Adler & Sullivan.

What advice can Sullivan's life provide to talented Millenials hoping to change the world? First, the obvious awareness that they may achieve great things and yet not have an always-ascending career trajectory, that in fact their career may nosedive after their great achievements, and that they should be willing to take on lesser assignments if that happens. But second, the fact that Sullivan didn't compromise for his art, didn't sugar-coat it in an attempt to win contracts away from his competitors (a few of whom are mentioned in the movie). True originality comes at a price. Breakthrough thinkers and innovators may not be recognized or praised during their lifetime. In fact they may be ignored or ridiculed, and the story doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. Many of the buildings Adler & Sullivan had designed in Chicago were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s, so we cannot take comfort in the thought that his work lived on after he passed. (Only 30 of his buildings are said to remain today, out of almost ten times as many.)

Many Millenials have been taught that they could achieve anything, that they could change their circumstances with enough positive thinking and grit. They can certainly strive for that - not trying will not help - but things are more complicated than that. The most we're ready to accept as a society when it comes to failure is that some entrepreneurs may fail many times before they succeed. But guess what? Some entrepreneurs fail many times and never succeed. And some entrepreneurs may succeed once and then fail - a galling thought for people who once had fame and wealth within reach and saw it slip away, condemned to remember their days of glory but never to experience them again. To Sullivan's credit, though, he took the job of drawing plans for small-town bank branches very seriously and never seemed to believe it was beneath him. He used it to express his vision of American architecture, and perhaps travelers pay more attention to those buildings when they arrive in those small towns than to the Sullivan buildings in Chicago, in a neighborhood so rich with magnificent buildings from all kinds of architecture firms. 

Next I want to watch Philip Johnson: Diary of an eccentric architect and read Johnson's biography by Dallas resident Mark Lamster, which is a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. For some other posts of mine on architecture, you can read this on Frank Lloyd Wright, this on Fallingwater (a house he designed in Pennsylvania) and that on Eero Saarinen, whose Kresge Auditorium at MIT I so loved.   

Hamlet: Laurence Olivier vs Kenneth Branagh

Among Shakespeare's tragedies Hamlet usually leaves me cold. I love Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Henry IV (Part 1 more than Part 2, like most people), Henry V, Anthony and Cleopatra, but Hamlet and King Lear are two plays that have long failed to move me in any meaningful fashion, except complete and crushing boredom in a lackluster Globe production of King Lear back in Boston in 2015. (I also saw Hamlet in 2011 at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and frankly have no memory of it.) But after watching a very good production of Hamlet at Shakespeare Dallas a few days ago, I decided to finally watch the Hamlet DVD starring Kenneth Branagh I had bought some time ago, and true to myself, I couldn't resist getting the video of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet for comparison. 

Before I go on, I want to give a special mention to my go-to book on all things Shakespeare, Shakespeare after all, by Marjorie Garber, which has a chapter on each Shakespeare play. Quoting the book's description on Amazon.com: "A brilliant and companionable tour through all thirty-eight plays, Shakespeare After All is the perfect introduction to the bard by one of the country’s foremost authorities on his life and work". I bought it a few years back at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd and Broadway on the Upper West Side (of course I mean New York City) and it has stayed with me ever since. Garber starts her chapter on Hamlet by commenting on how many expressions we find in it have passed into common language and I have had the same feeling.

I am partial to Laurence Olivier, since I adore his Richard III and enjoy his Henry V (although when it comes to Henry V, no one comes close to rivaling Tom Hiddleston's performance in my book), and I also treasure black-and-white movies from the 1930 and 1940s, so it will come as no surprise that his Hamlet handily wins the contest for me, in spite of the creepiness of having 40-year-old bleached-blonde Olivier play Hamlet while 29-year-old Eileen Herlie reprise the role of his mother Gertrude, which she had also played on stage. (The creepiness hits a high when Gertrude kisses her own son on the lips several times in Act I Scene 2. As a side note, after those Shakespearean debuts, Heirle spent 32 years in the cast of the soap opera All My Children. I suppose people pay their bills however they can, and soap operas might have been a more lucrative source of income for her than theater. Yet, one cannot escape the thought that her talent might have been better served elsewhere.)

I particularly loved the use of light, shadow and framing, always striking in Olivier's movies. The bit about Rosencrantz and Guilderstern is cut, unfortunately, as are other bits to keep the movie's length at two hours and a half, which at times gives the movie a chopped feel, but many parts were spellbinding throughout, from Hamlet's interaction with the Ghost to his discovery that Ophelia is dead at the cemetery and to both Hamlet and Laertes being pulled into actions beyond their control, Laertes being used as a pawn by the King, Hamlet being forced by the King to take part in a duel, lust for power throwing the kingdom in disarray, as well as the moment Gertrude understands the drink is poisoned and drinks it to save her son. I've never cared much about the play, but I couldn't stop watching this movie.

In the past, I have always found the plot very contrived, especially the play within the play (curiously, the use of a ghost as a plot device doesn't bother me at all), although one has to give Shakespeare kudos for the idea of meta theater. I've also never cared much for the Hamlet-Ophelia romance. Watching Olivier's Hamlet, I found myself truly enjoying the play for the first time, perhaps because the production values of the movie are high without being lavish as in the Branagh DVD, so one gets the impression that each set could be a theater set, except that the camera seamlessly follows the actors from a set to the next.

Now, to be fair to the Branagh DVD, I felt it had better ensemble acting, while the Olivier movie is plainly an instrument to showcase Olivier's acting. For instance, in the Branagh DVD, the scene where Polonius announces to the King and Queen he might have found out the reason of Hamlet's trouble is a textbook case of great acting, the actors feeding off each other's response as if they had never heard those lines before. Branagh's version of Hamlet also keeps Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. At four hours, though, I have to admit I found it too long. In fact since it comes in 2 DVDs and the length of the first DVD was 2 1/2 hours, I initially thought it was the whole play and the second DVD contained extras. Shakespeare's time was very different from ours and maybe it made sense back then to have 4-hour-long plays as entertainment, but I just have too many things to do (including fun things, I'm not just talking about work - simply, I'm talking about doing and creating things instead of consuming them, in particular TV watching) to put up with 4 hours of Hamlet.

While Olivier had cut maybe a little too much of the part about the itinerant theater troupe, Branagh keeps too much of it, and then imposes on us ridiculous flashbacks of Hamlet and Ophelia sleeping together, apparently to suitably titillate the 1995 viewer. (There is no way Ophelia would have let that happen. She is from a good family and knows she would have had zero chance of having Hamlet marry her then.) Kate Winslet does make a better Ophelia than Jean Simmons, who later became a star (she was only 19 when she starred in Olivier's movie and it shows), although Simmons does an outstanding job in the madness scene - the scene where she puts flowers in her hair and sings to herself. Winslet is shown in a straitjacket, and the movie of many irrelevant or ridiculous flashbacks doesn't even show her floating away in the meadow. The sets on the Branagh movie are sumptuous, and Branagh keeps the bit about the conflict with Norway that is erased from the Olivier movie, which casts the protagonists in a very different light: how irresponsible of them to indulge in those internecine battles when danger is looming. Overall the Olivier movie, spare and with its stunning use of light, is a better version of Hamlet. I just wish Gertrude hadn't been 11 years younger than her son and hadn't kissed him on the mouth. That was just creepy. Thankfully it happens only in one scene and as the movie progresses the viewer is completely engrossed in the action. The cuts each lead made only shed important light into what Olivier and Branagh viewed as the essence of the play. For Olivier it is clearly a family drama about power and revenge. Branagh puts Hamlet in a bigger picture of conflict with another country, adding a layer of betrayal.

Perhaps one day someone will hit the sweet spot and provide a  3 1/4 - hour movie version of Hamlet that perfectly balances all its elements. But no movie will ever capture the feeling of watching the play on stage. To get a sense of the behind-the-scenes work that goes on in preparing a production, Discovering Hamlet featuring Derek Jacobi and Kenneth Branagh provides a good introduction to the world of theater. 

Review of "Cold War"

This could have been a masterpiece. Instead, the movie consists of a lot of disjoint scenes with plenty of gaps in-between so that we never relate to the main two protagonists and their so-called love story. First of all, let me say I really wanted to love this movie. I love black-and-white movies, and this one seemed to have all the ingredients for success in the foreign film genre. Second, I have to point out that perhaps the movie has been heavily edited to fit within one hour and thirty minutes, and so there is a possibility that the sorry state of the final product is not the filmmaker's fault. This being said, it should be clear by this point in my review that I'm flabbergasted by the positive reviews this movie has received and that I'm frankly going to pan it, so brace yourselves. (Warning: this review contains spoilers.)

The story is as follows. In 1949, a young blond-haired woman arrives for an audition at a new dance company in Poland, which is going to teach folk dance so that the students can go and dance on stage all over Poland and amaze their fellow citizens. The rehearsal pianist, who is about twenty years older than her and in a relationship with the school director (who is his age), decides that the young woman "has something", although we're told her female companion had the better voice. What she has, of course, is an attractive body, and he soon cheats on his partner with the young woman. We're never told of the school director's reaction at the betrayal. In fact, she never appears in the movie again, although she was a great character with principles (she didn't want her students to sing songs praising Communism and Stalin because she wants to stick to authentic folk art, but she is overruled). So this is the timeless story of a man and a woman of similar age are in a couple until the man hits a midlife crisis and cheats on the woman with a much younger woman. And in itself I'm not against that story line (I know plenty of women of the age of that school director who turn out to be bitter when they lose their looks and take out their anger and envy on younger women, including women only barely younger than them, so it's a little easy to pity her just because she's the wronged woman.) But we're never told what the man finds in the younger woman, really, or what she finds in him. What draws them together? He keeps telling others she's the woman of his life. She never says that about him. In fact he seems more like a case of raging hormones who is attracted by her freedom. It turns out he is drawn to freedom a lot more than she is.

So when the folk art troupe goes to Berlin, he tries to convince the young woman to follow him but he waits in vain by the checkpoint to West Berlin because she prefers to stay behind with the company manager, entertaining some Communist hotshots. The man becomes pianist in a jazz bar. Now I know enough about the defections of Bolshoi dancers to the West during the Cold War to be aware of the consequences of a defection for the people left behind. Do you think you will be shown such consequences in this movie? Think again. In fact you won't be shown anything that would cast Communism under a bad light. No shortage of food, no breadlines, just everything very rosy with the folk art troupe entertaining their countrymen. This also made it difficult to relate to the man's defection to the West. It wasn't clear what he was fleeing. He counted among the people who were doing rather well under the system because the troupe was being used for propaganda purposes. So what drives him to leave everything behind? Midlife crisis, I suppose.

Then one day he meets the woman again in Paris. Now, she's with someone. He too. They go their separate ways. Then the movie skips ahead to Yugoslavia, it seems, although it wasn't quite clear at first where the action was taking place. The young woman is still performing for the folk art troupe. The handsome pianist with his raging hormones goes and sees her. The company manager sees him. What do you know, two serious-looking men arrive at the theater during the performance and kidnap him. But thankfully things don't become any hard for him because they put him in a train that isn't going to send him back to Warsaw as the Poles wanted but instead will go to Zagreb and then Paris. Yes, it was quite obvious that the Poles would try to get him back after the humiliation of his defection, and he was just dumb to try to see the woman again. Thankfully he doesn't have to fight very hard to escape danger. There are so many "fade to black" transitions in that movie following by a new scene several months or years later that it was hard to care about the characters. 

Then the young blond woman shows up unannounced in Paris in the recording studio where the handsome pianist is working and they record an album together so that she can be famous. Now she's married (to an Italian, which allowed her to get out legally, although we also don't quite know why she would want to leave Poland, having missed her chance with the handsome rehearsal pianist), but we never see her husband. Clearly she doesn't have a lot of feelings for men. She gets into a relationship with the rehearsal pianist but they never seem to get along particularly well together. She even says at a party that she misses Poland. What does she miss about it, we never know. She stabbed her father with a knife because, in her words, he mistook her for her mother, and she doesn't seem to have any friends. But, lo and behold, she picks up her things and leaves Democratic France to return to Communist Poland. Frankly I didn't believe that turning point for a moment. Now, I'm aware of people who had escaped the Communist block and decided to return because they couldn't adjust to life in exile (the stories I'm thinking about are in East Germany), but my understanding is that people who did that had left families behind and they were clearly ill adjusted in their new country. The woman has a published record and artistic success. She comes across as dumb and spoiled when she throws the copy of the record that the handsome pianist offers her into a fountain in Paris. Even more nonsensical is that our pianist with raging hormones chooses to return to Poland to be with her, when they've never seemed to be in love but rather in lust the whole time. 

And what happens then? We see the young woman visit a labor camp and, surprise, the handsome pianist is in a camp for fifteen years. His hands have been injured so he can't play the piano anymore. Do you think we'd be given a hint about how he feels, whether he feels it was worth it to run after that woman? Think again. But the spoiled blond woman announces she's going to get him out. Fade to black. In the next scene, many years later, the blond woman sings some songs with a Hispanic theme, she's in a couple with the manager of the folk art troupe, they have a son together (about two years old), and yes our handsome pianist has been freed. How remains a mystery. It would have been good to show the woman struggle a little, have obstacles thrown in her way, something to make us care about her. But whatever these two decide, they achieve. The woman seems drunk and after her performance asks the handsome pianist to take her away from there. She shows absolutely no interest in her son. In the end the two of them return to the abandoned church near the folk art school, perform their own wedding ceremony with no witnesses, take sleeping pills and go and sit on a bench at the bus stop, presumably to wait for death. Do they regret not staying in Paris? Or are they just two selfish two-dimensional characters who do whatever they feel like and have everything miraculously happen in those many "fade to black" moments? Perhaps the ending could have involved them doing something for other people, but they're clearly too self-absorbed to care.  

The best part of the movie was Jeanne Balibar's cameo as Juliette. Twenty-five years ago back in Paris I adored the work of Jeanne Balibar and the rest of Arnaud Despleschin crew (Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, etc). I particularly liked Balibar because she was pursuing brilliant literary studies at Normale Sup until she decided to go into theater, joined the Cours Florent and saw her career skyrocket. I've always felt sorry she decided to focus on singing more than acting after her first few movies. 

The movie did raise some questions for me, which is the sign of a not completely terrible movie. Those questions had to do with: what is home? Is it Poland or France for our protagonists? Perhaps I would have cared more about the story if the movie had been longer, with more scenes to fill in the blanks, and I'll be curious to learn if any scenes had been cut. As is, my advice is: don't bother.