Archives for 2003

William Nicholson’s The Retreat From Moscow, starring Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow, and Ben Chaplin, opened Thursday at the Booth Theatre, and I reviewed it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the money graf:

Can a great performance save a lousy show? It depends on the show. The post-opening buzz on “The Boy From Oz,” for instance, is that Hugh Jackman is worth the price of the ticket, but I’d happily pay good cash money never to see that sugar-coated dud again, with or without the excellent Mr. Jackman. On the other hand, Eileen Atkins has definitely done the silk-purse trick at the Booth Theatre, albeit with a higher-quality sow’s ear. William Nicholson’s “The Retreat From Moscow,” which opened last night, is your standard-issue British domestic drama, all dolled up to look like a serious play, but Ms. Atkins tears into it as if it were Chekhov (which is pretty much what Mr. Nicholson wants you to think it is), and even though I wasn’t fooled for a second, it didn’t matter….you won’t find better acting on Broadway, or anywhere else. She is totally present, totally convincing, totally right.

As usual, no link, so to read the whole thing (which also includes my thoughts on Primary Stages’ production of A.R. Gurney’s Strictly Academic), buy a copy of this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, which is full of readable goodies.

Ah! What avails the classic bent,

And what the cultured word,

Against the undoctored incident

That actually occurred?

Rudyard Kipling, “The Benefactors”

OGIC and I tend to like the same movies. I can’t remember whether she was the one who first told me about Twilight, or vice versa.

I do feel I should point out, however, that we’ve been inadvertently drawing attention to the same actor, since Twilight and Support Your Local Sheriff, about which I recently posted, are both graced by the presence of James Garner, who belongs in the category of Famous but Underrated Artists. He’s been around forever, and everybody knows who he is from TV–my parents watched him in Maverick, I in The Rockford Files–but for reasons not entirely clear to me, he never quite had the film career he deserved. (One reason was that in Garner’s day, it was taken for granted that you couldn’t move from small screen to large. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.) Yet I can’t think of a better romantic comedian, not least because he has the gift of doubleness, the ability to be charming and suspect at the same time.

Cary Grant was like that, too, which reminds me to yield the floor briefly to the ever-relevant David Thomson, who reminds us that Garner was on TV

an hour a week for twenty-six weeks a year for ten years. That is the equivalent of well over one hundred movies–and if any actor could claim one hundred movies made with the wit, narrative speed, and good-natured ease of Maverick and Rockford Files he would be…Cary Grant?

If you don’t know what to do with yourself this weekend, you could do a whole lot worse than renting Twilight, Support Your Local Sheriff, and maybe Hour of the Gun (in which Garner plays Wyatt Earp completely straight) or Marlowe (not the best Raymond Chandler movie, but Garner is marvelous as Philip Marlowe) or even the film version of Maverick. You won’t be sorry.

I was going to point out the obvious flaw in amazon.com’s new book-searching feature, but Bookslut beat me to it:

Amazon.com has completed its newest sparkly addition. Now when you search for a keyword, it searches the text of 120,000 nonfiction books and offers them in your results. I’m sure this is handy in some way. I bet people all over are rejoicing. But all I know is that when I was searching for “curing pig” in an attempt to find the book “Curing the Pig” by Liza Granville, I got 6,454 results, none of the first page results being the book. When I searched for Liza Granville, I got 202 results, none of the first page results being the book. I had to type in the damn ISBN number to find it. I’m sure this is handy, but you can’t turn it off. It just clutters up simple searches, hiding what you’re really looking for. Wired, however, calls the move ingenious.

Amazon.com is also having a contest to see how their “Search Inside the Book” feature has changed your life. Do you think if I bitch and complain that the feature is not optional I’ll win a Segway?

Granted, it really is fun to search your own name, as BuzzMachine seems to have been the first to point out (and yes, that’s the very first thing I did). But it’s only fun once. So I really do hope amazon.com figures out quickly that “Search Inside the Book” needs an on-off switch. Like, say, tomorrow.

If you picked up your copy of The Wall Street Journal today, containing Terry’s stage review, then you can also read John Lippmann on the disappointing reception the adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain met with at the Toronto Film Festival last month, and the attendant nervous scurrying of its marketers at Miramax. By “disappointing,” I mean “mixed,” since Miramax sets the bar high for critical response to its movies–especially the ones it releases in Oscar-bait season.

If you don’t have the paper, here’s the gist of the piece:

But now, a week before the movie has opened, the buzz has pulled back from a surefire Best Picture Oscar nomination. The film’s engine began to sputter at the Toronto Film Festival last month, which has become a major showcase for films with Academy Award aspirations….the word out of Toronto for “Human Stain” was less than unqualified. While it won generally positive reviews from such critics as Roger Ebert, overall reaction fell short of a sure-fire awards contender. “Acting is fine, but never quite gels,” concluded trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter. Some reviewers found fault with the unlikely casting of Nicole Kidman as a cleaning woman and even more of the selection of Mr. Hopkins to play Coleman; Variety called the choice of Mr. Hopkins “problematic.”

Why do I find this not surprising? First, because there is something depressingly predictable, almost automatic, about the rush to film a high-buzz book like Roth’s. It is inconceivable to Hollywood that there might be stories that have already found their most fitting form as books, and can be neither improved upon nor done justice to as movies. (I realize that the very idea that this, rather than profitability, is a guiding interest in Hollywood is absurdly naive.) Second, because I very recently read The Human Stain, guessing that I would probably end up seeing the movie and wishing to have an unadulterated experience of a book that came highly recommended from many quarters.

I finished the novel with mixed feelings, about which more in a later post. For now I’ll just say that what strengths it has are not narrative, nor even really descriptive–to name two qualities that can make a novel genuinely ripe for screen adaptation. It is unfailingly smart and has at its core a fascinating and lifelike character study. But for all the extraordinary events in it, the novel struck me as more than a little inert. More than it narrates or describes, The Human Stain expounds and diagnoses; the less charitable verb, and the one that occurred to me repeatedly as I read it, would be “lectures.” Not, alas, an eminently filmable mode.

On the other hand, not having cared for the book actually gives me half a hope that I will like the movie. After investing scarce and valuable pleasure-reading time in the venture, I’m almost sure to go see it. It doesn’t hurt that the director, Robert Benton, brilliantly wrote and directed one of my favorites, Twilight, a modest little picture with an unbelievable cast. Since it is a trickier thing (though by no means an impossibility) for a movie to lecture than for a book to, it could just be that the process of dramatizing and illustrating this material will have breathed some life into it.

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve performed a bit of subtitle-augmentation surgery on this blog, and also added Our Girl in Chicago’s bio to the top module of the right-hand column. All this is nothing more than official acknowledgment of the perfectly obvious fact that “About Last Night” is written by two people. (The headlines of posts written by me start with “TT,” while Our Girl’s posts start with “OGIC.”)

I could tell you some stories about my adorable co-blogger, but I’ll refrain, since she prefers to be shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Nevertheless, the fact that she introduced me to Exile in Guyville should speak volumes to the cognoscenti….and she can cook, too!

Anyway, Our Girl is a peach, and way smart. And really good at this. And a welcome addition to “About Last Night.”

Jennifer Howard’s Washington Post review of Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls is written with more conviction than any reviews I’ve seen of a very attention-getting book. She’s politely underwhelmed by it–I mean, if you consider this polite:

[Freudenberger] excels at evoking the wistfulness that’s a poetic version of low-grade depression.

But what’s most remarkable about this review is neither Howard’s critical acumen nor the persuasive way she pegs the stories as New Yorker Lite. The real news is here:

Some publishing history: The story “Lucky Girls” first appeared in the New Yorker‘s Summer 2001 “Debut Fiction” issue. This splash earned Freudenberger some nice buzz and the envy of many other twentysomething writers, but that’s another story. Check any of your favorite literary blogs for the details.

In the same week that found the New York Times tech section looking down skeptically at the blogosphere from on high, asking “more fizzle than sizzle?” Howard takes blogs’ existence, and her readers’ familiarity with them, completely for granted. This sounds to me like a new level of absorption into a mainstream cultural discourse whose center is gravitating away from the print media more quickly than many corners of the print media would like to admit.

When I read the above I had two instant reactions: Wow, she and her editors didn’t even feel the need to explain that it’s short for “web log”; and, more tellingly: Hey, no links? Which goes to show not just what my reading habits have become, but why blogs are gaining ground.

Banana Oil (bless him) reports that the first season of A&E’s now-cancelled Nero Wolfe, very closely based on Rex Stout’s much-loved detective stories, is now available on DVD. I wrote about the series in National Review shortly before it got the axe:

In addition to co-producing the series and directing several episodes, Timothy Hutton plays Archie Goodwin, and I can’t see how anyone could do a better job. Not only does he catch Archie’s snap-brim Thirties tone with sharp-eared precision, but he also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the dapper detective-narrator I’ve been envisioning all these years. No sooner did Hutton make his first entrance in The Golden Spiders than he melded completely with the Archie of my mind’s eye. I can no longer read a Stout novel without seeing him, or hearing his voice.

Still, Archie could have wandered out of any number of screwball comedies, whereas Nero Wolfe is a far more complicated proposition. Weighing in at a seventh of a ton, he is a tireless talker endowed with a touch of Johnsonian genius. (It is no small tribute to Stout’s own brainpower that he was capable of making that characterization plausible.) At the same time, he is chronically lazy and neurotic to the highest degree, so much so that he refuses to leave his home on business, preferring to sit at his desk or tend his orchids. Like Sherlock Holmes, the predecessor on whom he was obviously modeled, Wolfe is a misogynist who will have nothing to do with women socially–food, not sex, is his sensual outlet–though every once in a while he gives off a faint but perceptible flicker of interest in one of the pretty ladies who pass through his office.

Maury Chaykin has doubtless immersed himself in the Wolfe novels, for he brings to his interpretation of the part both a detailed knowledge of what Stout wrote and an unexpectedly personal touch of insight. He plays Wolfe as a fearful genius, an aesthete turned hermit who has withdrawn from the world (and from the opposite sex) in order to shield himself against…what? Stout never answers that question, giving Chaykin plenty of room to maneuver, which he uses with enviable skill. His Nero Wolfe is gluttonous, blustery, petulant, even a bit dandyish–but he peers out at his clients through the haunted eyes of a man who knows too much.

You can order it here. And should. And when you do, take a look at Kari Matchett and tell me if she’s not the jolie-est jolie laide you ever did see.