Archives for November 3, 2003

Eve Tushnet
has some brief but interesting remarks on Grosse Pointe Blank, a movie that she (and I) liked very much. (Don’t get Our Girl started on John Cusack!)

Ballet Alert has a nice thread on Edward Gorey’s legendary obsession with New York City Ballet. The last posting, signed “RG,” is by my colleague Robert Greskovic, dance critic of The Wall Street Journal and author of Ballet 101, the best introductory book about ballet ever written. He knew Gorey quite well–insofar as he was knowable.

My Stupid Dog reports on the Kennedy Center premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Bounce. I can’t see the show until it opens on Broadway because I have to review it in its final form for the Journal, so I’m green with envy.

“Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

The New York Times had an interesting story on Sunday about The Producers, which is still turning a profit every week, but a much smaller one than when the show was new:

Its box office grosses, which set record highs–more than $1.2 million per week–in its first year, have fallen about 20 percent in the last 12 months. It now ranks below newer shows like “Hairspray” and “Mamma Mia!” as well as “The Lion King,” the 1997 Disney phenomenon whose success some believed “The Producers” might emulate. Worse, in a supremely status-conscious metropolis, the show is now an easy ticket. “The Producers” has not regularly sold out since the beginning of the year, despite a bout of new television advertising.

I’m not surprised, nor should you be. As I wrote here back in July, Mel Brooks’ Borscht-belt style of anything-for-a-laugh humor is the last gasp of a dying comic language:

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.

With six months’ worth of Wall Street Journal drama columns under my belt, I feel even more confident in saying that we won’t be seeing many more shows like The Producers. If you seek the future of musical comedy on Broadway, look to Avenue Q. It’s smaller, hipper, faster, snarkier. And–yes–better.

Damn you, OGIC, for being smarter than me. I wrote a print-media review of Mystic River (the piece hasn’t run yet, but will be posted in the right-hand column in the next week or so), and I didn’t say one thing about Laura Linney, whom I adore and admire without reserve and whose small but staggering bit at the end of the film deserved all the praise you gave it. What’s more, it does change the total effect of Mystic River…but did I mention it? Nooooooooo.

OGIC and I blogged compulsively on Friday and over the weekend, so if you were too busy dressing up as a sexy ketchup bottle (or recovering from a post-Halloween hangover) to visit us, keep on scrolling until your fingers go numb. Among other things, you’ll find postings on:

Maud rules! (Even if she is only three and a half feet tall.)

I’ve been meaning to post something about Mystic River, which I finally caught about a week ago. You may have read Terry’s comments, which centered on the problematic score. Speaking strictly as a layman in all matters musical, I can still loudly echo Terry’s feelings about that damned score. It was a scourge. It was a menace. It chewed up and spat out whole scenes.

Apart from the music, I found Mystic River most impressive as a portrait of the insular South Boston neighborhood where it is set, but not entirely satisfying as drama–until its surprising last two scenes. Sean Penn’s lavishly praised performance as Jimmy struck me as way overbearing; the madder his character gets, the more screen acreage he seems to take up, and the flatter the story becomes. Its panoramic view of a troubled community over two generations telescopes into a narrower and narrower study of a single character with a single, hypertrophied dimension.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie did keep me engrossed. But by the time the brutal climax had detonated, I was weary, glad to have it done with, and ready to go home. But it was then that Mystic River unfurled two unforeseeable concluding scenes that changed–not everything, but a great deal. Jimmy’s wife (Laura Linney) saunters into the first of these scenes, a serene and satisfied Lady Macbeth, and steals the movie in about five minutes.

Finally dropping her guard, Linney’s character delivers a quietly chilling monologue that yanks Jimmy’s personal trials back into the context of the neighborhood and its remorseless tribal ethos. Her speech changes some of what we think we know, not about the murder mystery but about the force field in which the murder has been committed and revenged. A previous scene with her father, for instance, takes on new significance; we’re forced to reevaluate a couple of minor characters as more than goofball sidekicks; and Jimmy’s blazing anger (if not Penn’s performance) clicks into place, newly plausible and sympathetic. The scene recasts things in a way that makes the movie, for my money, all of a sudden ten times more interesting.

The last scene continues to track Jimmy’s wife. By now the camera can barely take its eye off her. Her silent confrontation with the other major female character (Marcia Gay Harden) is another haunting moment that beats anything in the first 90% of the film for sheer suggestiveness. After all the fixation on male angst, male bonding and male rivalry, the women emerge from the background and make the movie whole. It’s not so much that earlier scenes don’t deliver any feeling, but that these last scenes don’t deliver it in blunt blows. More like electric pinpricks.

I’m of two minds about this turn so late in the story. I thought at first that it seemed tacked on and unprepared for; but Laura Linney’s character is conspicuously unreadable in earlier scenes, and the revelation of her character and loyalties enriches the drama to a degree that probably wouldn’t be matched if it weren’t sprung as a late semi-surprise. But it may be too easily missed in the shadow of all the fireworks leading up to it, since it is so much subtler than any of the movie’s other revelations and arrives so late. These last scenes are so subtle, in fact, that even now I worry I’m reading too much into them. But I don’t think so–or at the very least I don’t want to think so, since they transformed the movie, for me, into something not just well made but haunting and memorable.

I just found in my e-mailbox the following press release:

Due to impending construction on West 43rd Street, “URINETOWN: The Musical,” the winner of three 2002 Tony Awards, will have to leave Henry Miller’s Theater.