Archives for March 2005

“Before he came I also had read Henry James’ The Ambassadors. All the characters as usual talk H. James, so that I regard it rather as a prolonged analysis and description than as a drama. It brought up Paris to me; but more especially, by a kind of antagonism that it provoked, made me reflect, contrary to M

We like to think positive at About Last Night, so we don’t have a “Bottom Five” sidebar. But the worst movie I have seen in a long time is The Upside of Anger, which had an inexplicably easy time of it with the critics. It’s true that, as almost everyone reviewing it has noted, Joan Allen is a witty and engaging performer. But that’s not enough when a script is this terrible; in my book, Allen’s goodness should count against the movie rather than for it, making us wish for her better material. If I had known that the movie was written, directed, and acted in by the man responsible for the dismal HBO comedy The Mind of the Married Man, which aired a few years ago during the six months I had free HBO, I would have steered clear. Having failed this, I apply my efforts now to sparing you.

To a large degree, I hated this movie because I hated its characters. I didn’t like this sort of criticism when it was applied to Sideways recently by some of that movie’s detractors. But then I didn’t feel the charge stood up that Payne glossed over, okayed, or played as a mere joke, say, Miles’s pathetic thieving from his mother. On the contrary–when, at the truly painful end of that scene, she offers him as a gift what he has just stolen from her, it puts him in the worst possible light. Sure, the movie asks us to like Miles warts and all, and I did, but this scene is one instance of the writers not letting him off easy, and one reminder that some of his warts are more than just cosmetic. Another critique held that the movie glamorized the characters’ alcohol abuse by presenting the wine culture they’re steeped in as attractive. If it didn’t look at least externally attractive, though, would we have half so good an understanding of Miles and his problems–and his virtues? What do you want, a movie or a public service announcement?

In The Upside of Anger, there’s so little understanding of people on the writer-director Mike Binder’s part, I couldn’t help wondering: does this guy know any? The charmless ones in his movie are more akin to (affluent) bundles of symptoms and psychoses who occasionally spit out a cue to the audience to laugh or “ooh” or cry. Kevin Costner is something of an exception insofar as his presence in the movie has a casual quality, almost as if he had wandered in off a different set entirely. I’m by no means a Costner fan, and the figure he plays here is more or less stolen outright from Terms of Endearment, but his air of just hanging around provided some relief in a film that’s contrived everywhere else you look, and whose plot, even so, doesn’t always make logical sense.

This shell game of a movie pulls its first cheap trick early: In the first scene we’re shown the funeral of some unidentified person. Then we’re yanked three years into the past, left to wonder which of the characters will meet an untimely end and, in due course, served several red herrings. Ho-hum. Let ’em (as Hannibal Lecter once advised Francis Dolarhyde) kill them all. Save yourself: skip this movie.

“Maybe that was just it, he thought; maybe you just got to a point where everything around you was strange, where the world had changed sufficiently that you no longer fit in. None of the music sounded like music anymore. None of the dancing looked like dancing. The satin-and-powder fancy world that he saw in the movies–where was it? He had grown up expecting to inhabit that world, and now even the memory, the fancy of that world was disappearing from the earth and he had still not slept with Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck.”

Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

(We children of the seventies and beyond, of course, will experience this particular species of superannuation over the marketing industry’s cold, dead body.)

Friday again, and my drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal covers three Broadway openings, The Glass Menagerie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and All Shook Up. None passed my muster:

Two of the greatest American plays of the 20th century were revived on Broadway this week. Both feature familiar faces: Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Both were directed by Brits, David Leveaux and Anthony Page–and both productions are crash-and-burn disasters.

By far the worse of the two is “The Glass Menagerie,” now playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, for which Mr. Leveaux (“Fiddler on the Roof”) wins the Eurotrash Award of 2005 by inserting a spectacularly gratuitous subtext into Williams’ fragile tale of a dysfunctional family caught in the choking web of genteel poverty. Did it ever occur to you, even for a millisecond, that the shy, crippled Laura Wingfield (Sarah Paulson) might want to have sex with her sensitive brother Tom (Mr. Slater)? No? Well, it did to Mr. Leveaux…

Similarly misguided things are happening at the Longacre Theatre, but at least Mr. Page’s version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” spares us the interfering touches beloved of so many postmodern directors. His blunder was a simpler one, if no less devastating: He cast Bill Irwin as George, the small-time college professor whose marriage to Martha (Ms. Turner), the boss’ drunken daughter, has turned him into a monster of passive aggression. I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Irwin’s great gifts as the tragic clown of such self-written extravaganzas as “The Regard of Flight,” but his flip, flat readings of George’s blood-soaked quips are as far off the mark in one direction as Mr. Slater’s regular-guy Tom Wingfield is in the other….

As for All Shook Up, well…

Think of it as an exercise in commodities trading. The jokes are strictly from Bob Hope’s 1955 reject pile (“Hey, you’re wearin’ blue suede shoes!” “Nobody step on ’em”). The dances, mysteriously credited to two different choreographers, are as memorable as a stump speech by Michael Dukakis. Stephen Oremus’ musical arrangements are loud and anonymous….

The rest of “All Shook Up” is theme-park trash, a Broadway musical for people who don’t like musicals, or Broadway. Or music. If you found “Mamma Mia!” too intellectually demanding, you’ve come to the right place.

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing–and there’s plenty more where that came from–pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal and look me up in the “Weekend Journal” section. Or go here, pull out your credit card, and start clicking.

“I think the reason gamblers habitually gamble is to lose. Because they know they have to lose, it’s the law of averages. I’m not talking about bookies or gentlemen gamblers. I’m talking about the compulsive, neurotic gambler. Pain is what he’s searching for. The emotion of pain. It’s much greater than the emotion of pleasure. Bigger, larger, stronger. Therefore more interesting.”

Walter Matthau (quoted in Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, Matthau: A Life)

“‘She still has no taste, thank God,’ Ethel thought, comfortingly, but the truth was that Amanda was too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need good taste. Good taste was the consolation of people who had nothing else, people like her own self, Ethel thought, inferiority feelings leaping back at her like great barn dogs trying to be pets.”

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O’Connor didn’t know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. “We had a busy morning!” she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes. I’d never seen her in person, and was surprised by how short she was. Charismatic, too: she’s engaging, energetic, and has amazing eyes, dark and snapping.

The oath she administered is the one specified in Section 3331 of the United States Code:

An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

I’d never taken an oath remotely like that–in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever taken any oath before today–and as I repeated the words after Justice O’Connor, I suddenly realized that my voice was on the verge of cracking. Maybe it was because I’d looked up and seen my brother standing just fifteen feet away, snapping a picture. On the other hand, it wasn’t the first time in the past couple of days that my emotions had been engaged so strongly. Under Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, public sessions of the National Council on the Arts always begin with a performance of an appropriate piece of music, and today we heard the finale of Walter Piston’s Fourth Symphony in a recording conducted by Gerard Schwarz, who was seated next to me. My eyes filled with tears as I listened, the same way they’d grown moist the day before as we watched a video clip of Ethan Stiefel and Alessandra Ferri dancing the pas de deux from Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. That’s one of the biggest differences between a meeting of the National Council on the Arts and one of, say, the board of directors of Citibank. Great art has a way of slipping in under the radar and filling you with extraordinary sensations.

As soon as Justice O’Connor finished swearing us in, she smiled and said, “Now, go do a good job!” To which Jim Ballinger (who knows her) instantly responded, “You, too!” That brought down the house, and the four of us went back to work.

I could tell you all sorts of other things about today’s meeting, but I’ll pass on just one detail. Gordon Davidson, the outgoing artistic director of Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, just finished serving a term as a member of the NCA. He had to miss his final meeting, so he came to our first one to say his goodbyes, which consisted of an elegant little speech in which he said something which struck me so forcibly that I scribbled it down on my notepad: “I liked being here because I love asking questions. I think the best art asks the best questions.” Me, too.

Chairman Gioia gaveled the proceedings to a close at noon, after which my brother and I said our goodbyes, jumped into a cab, went back to his hotel, changed clothes, caught a Tourmobile bus in front of the National Air and Space Museum, and spent the rest of the day looking at monuments. This is my brother’s first trip to Washington, and it’s been ages since I last did any tourist-type stuff here. I’d forgotten how stirring an impression the Lincoln Memorial makes, even when it’s full of noisy tourists. Once again, I caught myself choking up as I read the so-familiar words carved into the wall: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Washington has a way of doing that to you, too.

Now we’re back in our hotel room, worn out from walking and preparing for what I sincerely hope will be a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’ll be visiting Arlington National Cemetery, the National Archives, and whatever else sounds good, weather permitting. I’ll be returning to New York on Saturday, and I expect to be more worn out still–and inordinately happy. It’s been an extraordinary week, in all sorts of ways….

One last thing: Dana introduced me this morning as “a critic, biographer, and blogger,” adding that I’m “the first blogger ever to serve on the National Council on the Arts.” How about that?

Henry James isn’t famed for making people laugh, but when he’s guarding his turf an evil sense of humor can rear its toothy head. For example, in the sections of his famous “Art of Fiction” essay where he is responding directly to Walter Besant’s lecture of the same name, James is hilariously withering (and Besant’s philistinism well deserves it). And in “The Death of the Lion,” previously discussed by me here, he takes on literary journalism as personified by the comically monstrous Mr. Morrow, who shows up with a notebook one afternoon at the home of the reclusive author Neil Paraday. Also on the scene is the story’s narrator, a critic who considers himself above mere literary fashion and who here interposes himself between the voracious would-be reporter and his reluctant quarry.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw that his momentum was irresistible. “I was confident that I should be the first in the field,” he declared. “A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday’s surroundings.”

“I hadn’t the least idea of it,” said Paraday, as if he had been told he had been snoring.

“I find he has not read the article in The Empire,” Mr. Morrow remarked to me. “That’s so very interesting–it’s something to start with,” he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little garden. As a “surrounding” I felt that I myself had already been taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. “I represent,” our visitor continued, “a syndicate of influential journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public–whose publics, I may say–are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday’s line of thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of the art he so brilliantly practises. Besides my connection with the syndicate just mentioned, I hold a particular commission from The Tatler, whose most prominent department, ‘Smatter and Chatter’–I daresay you’ve often enjoyed it–attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a representative of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the author of ‘Obsessions.’ She expressed herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible even to herself.”

…Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitor’s last words were in my ear, I presently inquired with gloomy irrelevance whether Guy Walsingham were a woman.

“Oh yes, a mere pseudonym; but convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude. ‘Obsessions, by Miss So-and-So,’ would look a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into ‘Obsessions’?” Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.

Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he had not heard the question: a manifestation that appeared to suit the cheerful Mr. Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a man of resources–he only needed to be on the spot. He had pocketed the whole poor place while Paraday and I were woolgathering, and I could imagine that he had already got his “heads.” His system, at any rate, was justified by the inevitability with which I replied, to save my friend the trouble: “Dear, no; he hasn’t read it. He doesn’t read such things!” I unwarily added.

“Things that are too far over the fence, eh?” I was indeed a godsend to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it determined the appearance of his notebook, which, however, he at first kept slightly behind him, as the dentist, approaching his victim, keeps his horrible forceps. “Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties–I see!” And, thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly gazing at the promulgation of this inepititude. “There’s no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question–raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham–of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I have an appointment, precisely in connection with it, next week, with Dora Forbes, the author of ‘The Other Way Round,’ which everybody is talking about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at ‘The Other Way Round’?…Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the same as Guy Walsingham’s, that the larger latitude has simply got to come. He holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word from Mr. Paraday–from the point of view of his sex, you know–would go right round the globe. He takes the line that we haven’t got to face it?”

I was bewildered; it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes. My interlocutor’s pen was poised, my private responsibility great. I simply sat staring, however, and only found presence of mind to say: “Is this Miss Forbes a gentleman?”

Mr. Morrow hesitated an instant, smiling: “It wouldn’t be ‘Miss’–there’s a wife!”

“I mean, is she a man?”

“The wife?”–Mr. Morrow, for a moment, was as confused as myself. But when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person he informed me, with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that this was the “pen-name” of an indubitable male–he had a big red moustache. “He only assumes a feminine personality because the ladies are such popular favorites. A great deal of interest is felt in this assumption, and there’s every prospect of its being widely imitated.”

Who’s on first? Of course, the narrator is being skewered here, too, for his pompous, principled disengagement from fashion–absurd as that fashion may be. The narrator is exposed by the prim horror with which he regards Morrow, Morrow principally by his own speeches. If Morrow never opened his mouth, we might well find him sympathetic just by virtue of how effortlessly he moves our priggish narrator to overblown similes involving barges and dentists. We don’t have to trust the author’s or narrator’s assertion that both of these men are ridiculous–James has each character manage to damn himself, just by being himself.