Discussing "The Tempest"

Welcome to the latest installment of the occasional collaboration between Tim Brayton, of the invaluable film blog Antagony and Ecstasy (no, I'm not exactly sure what the title means either) and myself, on the subject of film/theatre crossovers. Today's subject is Julie Taymor's film version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with Helen Mirren, cast across gender lines as Prospera. The film has died a quick death at the box office--by its second week of release in Chicago, it was playing once a day at one movie theatre in the entire Chicagoland area, and now it seems to have disappeared entirely.

We'll explore in a little while whether it deserves this fate, but first, let's discuss the source material, William Shakespeare's play, for a bit. Tim, want to start us off there?


Tim: I know we don't agree, as I'm sure you'll point out, but I rather like the play. It's undoubtedly lesser Shakespeare, but I'd still rank it among the 24 or so of his 38 plays that I think are more excellent than not.

It's largely un-dramatic: a exiled duke/magician assembles all of the people who've wronged him on an island, toys with them, and then reveals himself and takes his title back. And that's part of what I like about it. It's a play largely about the joy of creating things for the sake of it. Four centuries of criticism have made it a cliche that the main character, Prospero, "is" William Shakespeare, but I think that's such a durable idea only because it fits so obviously well: The Tempest is about a man who controls the fates of everyone around him entirely, "writing" the events that happen to them (recall that this was one of the few Shakespearean plays with no known source for its story).

With Hamlet, King Lear, the Henriad, and so many other plays behind him, I like to suppose that the Shakespeare of 1610 didn't feel like he had anything left to prove with drama, and so set himself to a single piece of pure fancy. It's about magic and spectacle, and it is magical and spectacular, and that's it - a Jacobean precursor to a Michael Bay film, perhaps. But much more appealing than that.


Zev: I'll go on the record as saying that The Tempest is one of my least favorites of Shakespeare's plays. (I've never read Timon of Athens or The Two Gentlemen of Verona, so the bottom of my personal ranking is Cymbeline.) Even if it's not among Shakespeare's very worst, it certainly seems to command a critical respect and frequency of production way out of proportion to its quality. The Tempest may be better than something like Titus Andronicus, but as trashy as Titus is, at least it keeps the audience riveted. (Incidentally, Titus was Taymor's first film, and is one of the best filmed Shakespeares ever.) It's all too easy for an audience's attention to drift away from The Tempest.

I think our differing opinions on the play come down to something fundamental in our perspectives: narrative and storytelling are of much more importance to me than they are to you. And The Tempest's narrative is, frankly, a mess. Compare Twelfth Night, where the loss of a single scene would cause the whole plot to collapse, with the flabby storytelling on display in The Tempest, where whole swathes of the play could be cut without any effect.

The play also suffers from insipid lovers, unfunny clowns, and unthreatening villains. There are really only three characters of significant interest: Prospero, the sorcerer, Ariel, his androgynous sprite of a servant, and Caliban, the "savage" who was born on the island and is now kept by Prospero as another servant.

This isn't to say the play is a total loss. The language is among Shakespeare's most beautiful, there's an opportunity for some wondrous staging, and strong acting can make even the weaker material work. (And if Prospero is played by a beloved actor near the end of his career, as is often the case, little else matters.) It's certainly possible for The Tempest to be good. But has Taymor managed this?


Tim: Certainly, The Tempest has little enough concrete drama to it that it seems to attract all sorts of weird and experimental readings: without even glancing at its many stage versions in the last few decades, I can immediately point to the '50s sci-fi picture Forbidden Planet and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books as two versions that do things very different from any "standard" version of the play. It was for this reason that I was especially excited for Taymor's vision: as you've mentioned, Titus was a masterpiece, largely because she took a fairly stupid piece of nastiness, and made it into one of the most fascinating commentaries on the impulse towards fascism that I think I've ever seen.

And since the first thing we all learned about Taymor's Tempest was the casting of Helen Mirren as Prospero - I'm sorry, Prospera - it seemed like something pretty great was in the offing. After all, one of the few things explicit about the play is its patriarchalism: Prospero is the very model of an Alpha Male, commanding Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda all about, and his treatment of the castaways has all the feeling, to me anyway, of a dick-measuring contest. So I was pretty darn excited to see what a female director (though not an appreciably feminist one) would do with a gender flip, still one of the boldest things you can do with Shakespeare.

It turns out, she doesn't do much. The biggest effect of the change seems to be that Mirren gets to play a part with a pretty awesome monologue that she wouldn't otherwise get to recite. But there's not a single thing that would have materially changed about this film if Prospera had been a guy, just like always.

And that, in essence, seems to be the big, monolithic fact about Taymor's adaptation: it doesn't really do anything. It’s flashy and full of crazy spectacle and huge over-elaborate costumes that make look Mirren like a raven constructed out of obsidian shards, and it’s all bent towards absolutely no coherent end whatsoever. Unless you've thought of something I missed?

Zev: I'd have to agree on that. No overarching principle or metaphor is apparent, and the many choices feel arbitrary. One could argue that it's a good thing that the cross-gender casting barely registers, but think of the missed opportunities! Mirrenís capable of extraordinary work, and an actress with her fierce intelligence could have explored the power and contradictions in the character to thrilling effect. But she doesn't do anything particularly exciting here. She has the strongest command of the verse of the cast, but by the end, I was left feeling "Yeah, that was pretty good." And for a Helen Mirren performance, that counts as a major disappointment. (I'll leave the question of her relative attractiveness to you, as you're the one with the raging crush on her.)

But the character who suffers most from Taymor's approach is Caliban. The character is immensely problematic: he was born on the island, but Prospera stole it from him when she was exiled there. She and her daughter, Miranda, kept him and raised him in their home, educating him, until he tried to rape Miranda. By the time the play starts, heís exiled to a hut outside of their home, and is used only for menial tasks--carrying logs, and the like. Obviously, the character of a "savage," who attempts to rape the virginal young woman who taught him language and is now constantly insulted and kept as a slave, is immensely troubling to modern audiences. It's hard not to read the whole character as a full-throated endorsement of colonialism and slavery, and contemporary interpretations need to take care to make the character palatable and non-racist.

Remarkably, Taymor seems completely unaware of this minefield. The film's representation of Caliban is...well, let's just call it remarkably insensitive. Djimon Honsou, who plays Caliban, is the only non-white actor on screen, aside from the Boatswain, who gets maybe a minute onscreen, which makes him the "other" from the start. His physical representation is even more disturbing--he has patches of skin that are bleached white, is covered with mud and scars, and wears only a raggedy loincloth. Often when he appears, the soundtrack helpfully adds in "tribal" drums and didgeridoos. Add in the way the camera caresses his partly-exposed buttocks for a little dash of sexual exoticism, and it makes for a profoundly troubling representation.

Were you bothered by this as well? And what other choices would you say worked or didn't?


Tim: Oh, man, don't make me think about Caliban. There are only two possibilities: one is that Taymor is an utter idiot, and the other is that she hates black people, and she's too clever to be an utter idiot.

"What other choices would you say worked or didn't?" Choices? What choices? All I saw were a lot of ideas pitched at the screen with no thought for what effect they had (of which Caliban is merely the most odious), the very opposite of a creative "choice". It's like the director had a bet that she couldn't make a complete movie out of changing tones with every single new scene.

Though I guess she, or somebody, did "choose" to put Ben Whishaw's Ariel (the second-best performance in the movie, by my lights) in those terrible fake boobs. She chose to introduce Prospera with a series of jump cuts to her screaming face, like she was the villain in a slasher movie. She chose to have Russell Brand and Alfred Molina humiliate themselves as the most foppish clowns in any Shakespeare adaptation. She chose to wildly miscast Chris Cooper and David Strathairn as the Duke of Milan and King of Naples. She probably didn't choose the dodgy-ass CGI that keeps cropping up, especially in the ghost hounds sequence; but it shouldn't have come to having that CGI absolutely ruin Prospera's big monologue, one of everybody's favorite bits in the whole thing.

If I were going to defend Taymor's vision - and oh how I wish I could! She has never before failed me - it might be along these lines: since the play was originally just one big spectacle as the Globe audience might have appreciated spectacle, all she's doing is stripping the play down from any kind of "reading", and just giving us the 2010 equivalent of spectacle: lots of effects, lots of famous people, big swooping camera. But that's doing too much work for her, and ignores the fact that so much of it doesn't work: most of the acting, most of the swooping, the execrable Elliot Goldenthal score. But I tire myself; what were your least favorite bits?


Zev: I'm entirely in agreement on that awful score, the completely inappropriate introduction of Prospera, the disturbing fake boobs, and everything else you mentioned. To that, I would only add the bizarre costumes (apparently Milan is the kingdom of zippers, as every Milanese character has several dozen per garment) and Reeve Carney's performance as Ferdinand. He seems to be going for a dreamy, laid-back romanticism, which is not necessarily a bad choice for a character who has virtually no personality beyond how smitten he is. But his line delivery is a disaster. Not only does he mangle the verse, he can't even manage the words very well. Rather than dreamy romance, his slurred deliveries indicate a state somewhere between stoned and developmentally disabled. It's hands-down the worst performance in the film--and nobody is exactly doing their best work on screen, though I agree that Mirren and Whishaw give the most interesting performances. One wonders what Taymor saw in him: she also cast him in the title role of the Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway, which makes that already notorious project look even more dire.

I think we've pretty much gotten the point across, though we could inventory the film's failings for paragraphs more if we chose. But here's my closing thought, related to what you said above: even if the film is meant to be nothing but spectacle, it doesn't succeed. The problem isn't just that the special effects are generally blah and the CGI looks bush-league, or that they frequently detract from the play's best elements. It's that the film's entire visual aesthetic is...uninspired. Taymor's first three films, whatever their flaws, were stuffed with images and moments that made you drop your jaw in wonder. But I can only remember one such moment in The Tempest: a shot, early in the film, of four of Prospera's victims walking out of the water, unscathed by their wreck. It reminds you of what the movie could have been, if Taymor had had a better handle on the material and her actors. It's all the more frustrating that she's ended up with a film that's alternately misconceived and dull.

Any final thoughts on your end?


Tim: Final thoughts? I suppose "Julie Taymor owes me $12" would just be mean.

When all is said and done, the worst thing about The Tempest is that I don't even hate it. I just felt really let down and deflated by how boring it was, and disappointed by pretty much everything on screen. Disappointed that Taymor was making the first Tempest of the CGI age, and only dreamt up the most superficial fantasies. Disappointed that the once in a lifetime chance for Helen Mirren to play one of the great boys' roles was wasted, unless some unlikely brave director decides to give us Henry IV with Lady Jane Falstaff, or Queen Lear. Disappointed that it felt so rushed and disjointed, like a college paper you write over breakfast the day it's due. Like the play or not, you have to agree that The Tempest deserves better than this.

And dammit, Julie Taymor owes me $12.

"Body Snatchers" At City Lit Discussed

Here's the long-awaited second  collaboratioin between myself and Tim Brayton, film blogger extraordinaire over at Antagony and Ecstasy, where this article is also posted. This time, rather than a stage-based movie, we have a film-influenced play. Enjoy!

TIM: In 1954, Collier’s Magazine began serializing a science-fiction novel by Jack Finney, titled The Body Snatchers. It was fairly characteristic of the genre fiction of the ‘50s: essentially conservative, telling the story of a perfectly ordinary town that finds itself under siege by an incomprehensible alien force, and committed to the notion that human – that is, American – ingenuity and stubbornness can trump even the most implacable foe, so take that, Commies!

The crux of the tale, that the planet Earth has been invaded by alien spores that can form a perfect clone of any living being, except for their total lack of emotion, is one of amazing possibility, which is probably why Finney’s novel (published in book form in 1955, and revised in 1976) has been dramatized so many times: no fewer than four motion pictures have been adapted from the material, starting with a reasonably faithful 1956 film titled Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all the way to a remarkably shoddy Nicole Kidman popcorn movie from 2007 simply called The Invasion. And now, we have a stage version, courtesy of Chicago’s City Lit theater company and adapter-director Paul Edwards.

The confluence of Chicago theater and classic cinema doesn’t come along that often, which is why we’ve joined forces to discuss this new project. First, Zev has some words about the genesis of the play, and Paul Edwards’ specific attachment to the pop culture of the 1950s.


ZEV: Adapter/director Paul Edwards is a professor at Northwestern in the department of Performance Studies. To brutally simplify a complex field, Performance Studies is divided into two large branches. One studies performance and performativity in an anthropological and sociological perspective, in everything from religion in indigenous cultures to contemporary American politics. The other treats on the adaptation of non-theatrical texts, especially literature, to the stage. It is the latter area in which Edwards studies and teaches.

Paul Edwards was my professor at Northwestern, so I come to the play with a certain lack of objectivity. It was in his mind-blowingly awesome class on the literature and film of the 1950’s that I first saw the 1956 film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, along with many other brilliant films. His immersion in the era is obvious in the stage version, but it gives a special kick to recognize a fair portion of the images shown on the projection screens (designed by Edwards and Daniel Carlyon) from his classroom.

So suffice it to say that I went in to the performance with high expectations and a certain sympathy for the project.

Guido at the Mercy of Detractors

So we've come to the end of our long, verbose journey. Tim Brayton, of the excellent film blog Antagony and Ecstasy and I have been tracking the winding path of Nine to the screen. First we had a discussion based on my viewing of 8 1/2, Federico Fellini's film about his life and artistic struggles (parts one and two) then we talked about Tim's initial listen to the original cast album of Nine, Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit's musical adaptation of the film (which can be found here). Now we've each seen the film version, directed by Rob Marshall and...well, it's a pretty sad discussion. Tim has already posted our discussion at his blog, but here it is for your reading pleasure.


Tim:
Hi Zev,

Well, here we are at last with Nine, as adapted by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella from Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit's 1982 Broadway musical - or is it? I know we both have quite a few disappointments with this one, for a lot of shared and personal reasons, but I want to put that off for the moment to focus on what seems to me the film's strange and ultimately fatal choice to bring so very much of Federico Fellini's 8½ back into the fold, both visually and narratively. I remember finding to my shock how much the stage musical didn't feel like a travesty of that 1963 classic, simply because it was so damn different: the thematic concerns, the way the narrative was structured. And while I might have still disliked the movie - director Rob Marshall and I do not have a very good history together - a film adaptation of Nine still would have been worth seeing.

But that's not what we saw, is it? Frankly, the film Nine doesn't feel at all like an adaptation of the show: it feels like a remake of 8½ spiced up with some songs from the stage Nine. Which is a crippling, terrible choice. A film of the musical might have been able to avoid the worst comparisons with Fellini's masterpiece, on account of being so very different; but Marshall and the writers not only court comparisons, but practically beg for them. For starters, the structure is much closer to the film than the musical: this is especially apparent in the second half, which is where the previous two versions of the story diverged most, and the film Nine follows 8½ in nearly all specifics, especially the much later arrival of Luisa Contini to the spa where Guido is staying, and the addition of several "filmmaking" scenes - I can't think of any other way to call them - like the sequence where Guido and the producers watch the screen tests, a major climax in Fellini that is wholly absent in the stage version.

The result is a terribly aimless hybrid of two essentially disparate takes on a similar (not identical!) scenario, and the film Nine never figures out what it wants its identity to be. There's simply not enough left of the musical's treatment of a man-child and the woman who have shaped his world to have that stand as the film's primary angle, but Marshall is no Fellini, and he doesn't have remotely the same things to say about creative block, although he certainly appears to suffer from it.

Even worse than it's middling appropriation of motifs from two incompatible sources, there are plenty of points where the movie just makes stuff up, which is nowhere more obvious or more upsetting than the end of the story: unaccountably, Tolkin, Minghella and Marshall decided to do away with the moment where Guido contemplates (or, in some interpretations, commits) suicide, which in both 8½ and the stage Nine seems like the obvious and inevitable point that the story has been building to all along. Instead, there's just some lame flash-forward that has all the feeling of a lazy biopic ending. If I could tell what they were trying to do there, I think I'd be a much happier man.

I'm also confused and heartbroken by the way it treats Guido's fantasies: one of the chief appeals of both the previous movie and the musical was the way that we're rarely clear whether a given moment is Guido's fantasy or the actual reality he is observing; eventually we come to understand that there's not much point in distinguishing them. But, using the same trick that appeared in Marshall's dispiriting adaptation of Chicago, all of the musical numbers are unambiguously Guido's fantasies, and everything that's not a musical number is plainly "reality", no ambiguity or melding of the real and the imagined to be found. For me, that is the whole entire point of 8½, and if it's not quite as central to Nine, it's still a tremendously important component - to do away with that entirely seems to have quite missed the point of both works of art that Marshall et al are copying.

I could and probably will say a lot about the way the film travesties Fellini, but for now, I'm tossing it over to you, to ask a) what you think about its attempt to combine the two sources, and b) your feelings on the things the film does to Yeston's music, and I know that on this second point, at least, you have some very definite, very strong opinions.


Zev:

I think you've expressed how the film unsuccessfully blends the Fellini and the original musical very clearly, though the list of shots (e. g. Guido meeting Carla at the train) and scenes (e. g. the conversaton with the Cardinal in the spa) cribbed directly from Fellini could go on and on.

And before I get into the flaws, a promise: I will say what works about the movie at the end of this message, because it's hardly a total waste.

One of Rob Marshall's fundamental ideas about film musicals, and a very unfortunate one, is that an audience simply will not accept characters breaking into song within the story. There has to be some sort of framing device, with the songs being one character's fantasies. I actually thought the device worked rather well in Chicago, where the main character dreamt of a vaudeville career, but it is far less successful here. There's simply no reason for Guido Contini's fantasies to be songs, unless the film establishes the rule that song is a part of the storytelling language.

Another problem with the device, and to my mind the more damaging one, is that it takes agency away from the women. One of the main distinctions between 8½ and Nine is that the stage musical gives the women powere they didn't have in the Fellini. They are singing directly to Guido, confronting him with their feelings, and baring their souls directly to the audience. If everything they are singing is simply what Guido imagines, it saps them of much of their power, and again makes them abstractions whose inner life Guido doesn't understand and the audience can't really access.

Several other major decisions made on the film were similarly wrongheaded: what can we make of the fact that the stage version's major stylistic device, to have the adult and child versions of Guido be the only men in a sea of women, was jettisoned? Suddenly, there are men back in Nine. However, none of them have major roles, so rather than stylistically bold and arresting the film just seems peculiar.

Why drastically reconceive two characters? Lilliane La Fleur, the fearsome Parisian producer, is changed to Judi Dench's Lilli, the kindly costume designer who acts as Guido's confidante. Leaving aside that it makes no sense for Guido to have a trusted friend of any kind, this removes any tension from "Folies Bergere": if it's not performed by a producer demanding that Guido make the musical he promised her to get the contract, what's the point? Similarly, why turned acid-tongued critic Stephanie into a fawning Vogue writer, remove her caustic countermelody from "Folies Bergere," and replace it with the really awful "Cinema Italiano"? (More on that song in a moment.) It's almost perverse to make changes that so obviously harm the story's drama.

You've already mentioned the dispiriting way the movie puts reality, memory, and fantasy into rigidly separate worlds and the weird ending, My ire is reserved for two major elements: the choreography and the music.

Rob Marshall got his start as a Broadway choreographer, but he seems to have lost something along the way. With a few exceptions, his choreography gives the impression of nothing more than crotches and breasts being thrust at the camera. Apparently this is supposed to be erotic, but only one of the characters in Nine is a prostitute. To take "A Call From the Vatican," a teasing seduction, and turn it into an exotic dancer's routine that makes Penelope Cruz look downright cheap, is really distressing. He even adds it at the least appropriate possible times--when the female chorus comes in at the end of "Guido's Song," singing a classical-sounding melody, why are they shimmying like strippers? When he avoids that trap, he ends up with choreography that is just plain dumb--why is Guido running around the set like a jungle gym and doing chin-ups during "Guido's Song"? Why does the choreography in "Cinema Italiano" consist of the chorus doing runway struts and posing, then jumping up and down while shaking their heads back and forth? (It's even more ridiculous looking than it sounds, I promise.)

But it's what happens to Yeston's score that's really heartbreaking. First off is the fact that something like half of it is missing. I didn't much miss the title song or "Getting Tall" (though I do wish they'd done something more with young Guido), but they also cut "The Bells of St. Sebastian's" (the best song in the show, and one of the great first-act closers in musical theatre), "Be On Your Own," "Simple," the entire "Grand Canal" sequence (along with the plot point that his eventual movie is a biopic of Casanova which mirrors his own life), "Not Since Chaplin," "Only With You," half of "Folies Bergere"...I understand movies have to make cuts, but this is ridiculous.

And the lyric changes? While I'm the first to admit that the musical has some clinkers, shouldn't the point of replacing them be to improve them? While I appreciate that "Be Italian,/ You rapscallion" was replaced by "Be Italian,/ Be Italian," the other changes just replaced eh lyrics with other eh lyrics, and in a few cases made decent lyrics worse. I still miss "When he was working on the film on Ancient Rome/ He made the slave girls take the gladiators home," which speaks more to the mad way Guido's life is affected by his art than "Like Michelangelo, he paints his private dome,/ But can't distinguish what's his work and what's his home," which is painfully on the nose.

As for the newly written songs...I am going to assume that Rob Marshall ordered very specific things, rather than that Maury Yeston has lost his touch, because none are particularly worthwhile. "Guarda La Luna," for Guido's mother (Sophia Loren) is a blah set of lyrics and minimal dramatic content wedded the beautiful waltz melody from the show, but otherwise passes almost unnoticed. "Take It All" is passable, but it seems more like an excuse to get Marion Cotillard to remove her clothes than anything else, and deprives us of "Be On Your Own," an absolutely scorching song. And "Cinema Italiano" is really just awful. It has the wrong sound for the period, idiotic lyrics, and an annoying melody, plus is sung by a pointless character and lacks dramatic impact. Amazingly, it was only three minutes long, but it felt much longer.

And now for an episode of musical theatre nerdiness: the orchestrations. For those who are unfamiliar, the orchestrator takes a piano-vocal score from the composer and decides how many instruments are in the orchestra, which they are, and who plays what. Sounds simple, but a good orchestration can add immensely to the musical and storytelling power of the score. Jonathan Tunick, who orchestrated the original production, gets my personal vote as greatest living Broadway orchestrator (he also worked on the original productions of nearly all of Stephen Sondheim's shows since Company). The original orchestrations are gorgeous, and help the score leap out in all of its musical and dramatic richness.

The movie's new orchestrations by Doug Besterman? Not so much. I understood after seeing the movie why so many reviews have called the score bland: the orchestrations are unforgivably dull. Besterman took an original score and made it sound like every other film musical--lots of instruments, very little thought. Sometimes, he actively made the songs worse: the underscoring of the "Overture Delle Donne" drove me up the wall. It's a terrible shame, because the people who see Nine without knowing the score will have very little reason to check it out.

And now, as promised, the things that worked: Daniel Day Lewis is a rather good singer, even if he is 10 years too old for the part. Judi Dench, though playing an unnecessary character, sells her number like a pro, and has delicious line readings. Penelope Cruz manages to wrest a few moments of genuine seductiveness and vulnerability from Marshall's vulgarity. And Marion Cotillard...she's a wonder. When she was on screen, I couldn't take my eyes from her, and I felt deeply for her. She handily made "My Husband Makes Movies" the highlight of the film, managed to make "Take It All" sound better than it has any right to, and had me misted up in the screening room scene. I can't believe I haven't seen La Vie En Rose yet.

To change the subject completely: this movie, while not that great, hardly enters the pantheon of bad movies--and is nowhere near the worst film adaptation of a stage musical. But I think it may end up doing serious damage to the show. Despite a run of nearly two years, five Tonys, a national tour, and a well-received revival, Nine has never really entered the musical theatre repertoire. I don't know if it's too artsy and European, people can't get past the concept, or what, but it isn't produced nearly as often as shows of a similar caliber. Until the movie was made, it wasn't well known to non theatre people. And now, the people who know the show will know it as a mediocrity or worse. The name recognition might help it get produced, but the terrible reviews and word of mouth, not to mention the anemic grosses, are more likely to discourage companies. And that's a damn shame.

So, what say you? Any more thoughts?


Tim:
I agree wholeheartedly with damn near every word you've said. You're right on with Marshall's essential mistrust of the musical format, and I can't fathom why he keeps making the damn things if this is how he feels about them. While I must respectfully disagree that the fantasy angle worked better in Chicago than in Nine - minimally, I think there's precedent in Fellini for making this story take place mostly inside Guido's head - I still think Chicago is better on the whole because at least there are some good dance numbers. The choreography in Nine is just plain lousy. You mention the three worst offenders, and I have nothing to add to that, really; but good Lord, it's just embarrassing that he is an alleged professional. I could have designed better numbers than that.

You're also right about what happens to the music. One of the things I noted when we discussed Nine was that I felt the songs worked better as part of a musical continuum, whereas I was a bit lukewarm to a lot of them just taken as individual bits of singing. Lo and behold, the movie breaks that continuum and makes the songs sound a bit flimsy in the process - and of course the awful orchestrations don't help with that (I'll see you the overture and raise you the flat and not at all sexy reworking of "A Call from the Vatican"). Nor, for that matter, does the singing; I think I have much less generous feelings towards pretty much everyone than you do. The huge exception is Cotillard, who wrests every drop she can from "My Husband Makes Movies" and turns it into probably the strongest moment of the film, although that song was a lot better when it came at the start of the show, and not in the middle; but that's what the writers get for following 8½ too closely.

I did mention that I would have more to say about that, didn't I? Then I should probably get on with it. The biggest problem with Nine as a remake of 8½ is quite simply that Rob Marshall is not undergoing a crisis of his art, such as it is. Fellini's movie was about his process, telling a story that commented upon its own creation in an Ouroboros-like cycle of self-reflection and naval-gazing. Marshall isn't doing anything remotely like that. His film's treatment of Fellini's scenario is based on the most shallow understanding of the matter of 8½ that I could imagine: a director is wasting time and money. Both 8½ and the stage Nine make it clear that Guido is trying to represent himself as cinema, but by taking out any hint that Guido's movie is autobiographical, the film denies us even that bit of meaning. There just don't seem to be any dramatic stakes involved: he'll either finish the movie or not, whatever. In 8½, finishing the movie was a matter of life and death.

The movie's Guido is little more than a parody of Fellini himself; even in 8½ there weren't so many direct references to the director's previous films. All this does it to make the film even less urgent and certainly a great deal less personal. In place of creative block, marital angst, mortal dread, or any of the other things that made the first film and the musical interesting and thematically rich, Nine the movie seems to largely operate in that terrible space occupied by the lesser biopics, in which pointing out that Federico Fellini existed and did things takes the place of actual introspection. It also leads to that dreadful "Cinema Italiano", about which not enough terrible things can be said; may Heaven save me from ever again hearing "neo-realism" rhymed with prism. The whole pointless song, sung by a pointless character (and if there's one change relative to 8½ that is a complete and unmitigated fuck-up, it's turning the caustic, arrogant critic into a vapid gossip-mage reporter) says one thing: "In the 1960s, Americans liked stylish European movies!" And that's probably the closest Nine the movie has to a theme itself. At any rate, it has nothing whatsoever to say about the creative process, and very little to say about one man's relationship to women, which as you have astutely noted, was a thematic thread that lost all validity the instant that the women were stripped of their personal agency.

I'm going to do the intolerably lazy thing and just refer back to my review of the film for the rest of my problems; they are not few, and a lot of them overlap with what you've said. But since you're playing nice to end your thoughts, I guess I can do the same thing: as mentioned, Cotillard is great, and I think that Dion Beebe's cinematography is quite extraordinary, even making the hellish "Cinema Italiano" interesting to look at. Even when Marshall has him doing terrible things - such as copying the Seraghina sequence from the movie exactly - he does them with a good deal of talent and grace. And um... the sets never fell down? This is hard.


Zev:
In looking at our comments, I've come to a rather dispiriting conclusion: this film version of Nine lacks a compelling reason to exist. The engine of 8½ was Fellini's own artistic block and psychological stress. The stage version of Nine made use of a full, complex score, a stronger focus on the women, and a very different but still compelling take on the central story. The movie combines their approaches with some new material into...well, something. There's good work being done by the actors, particularly Cotillard, and apparently the cinematography is quite excellent (I'm not anything like a connoisseur ). But there doesn't seem to be any animating passion to it. Why does this director tell this story with these performers? Well, a musical with lots of stylish clothes and an insane number of Oscar winning actors must have seemed like like a sure bet to win some Oscars of its own. This is hardly an uncommon reason to make a movie, though the poor reviews and terrible grosses make it unlikely it will succeed at even that debased goal. It's just depressing to see the Oscarbait treatment given to a musical I so dearly love. It's especially sad because I think there is a good movie to be made of Nine. Unfortunately, it hasn't been made, and it's unlikely ever to happen now.

*********

So that's the end of our part of the story: we've talked enough. But what about you? Anyone have thoughts about any incarnation of the story? Have any of you seen the movie? Please comment, either here or over at Tim's post, and be part of the conversation!

Discussing 8 1/2, Part Two

Welcome to the second part of the conversation between Tim Brayton and myself about 8 1/2, in preparation for our discussions of the cast album of Nine, the musical version of it, and the film version of Nine, being released on the 25th of this month. You can find the first part here. (A reminder, I'm in italics, Tim's response is bold.)

Not being a filmmaker, my perspective on the film was more influenced by its view of Guido the man and his relationships, but your comments obviously get at something central that I didn't really address: it's a movie about making movies. Perhaps this makes it a movie that outsiders can never truly appreciate as much as insiders can (certainly there are plays that people who work in theatre love and civilians don't entirely connect with), though I did get quite a bit from it. (And I had sort of heard that the title relates to Fellini's career, but not exactly know how it worked, so I didn't mention it. I was also confused because the title of Nine means something entirely different, as we shall see.)


However, what that different viewpoint seems to mean is that we have very different opinions on the character of Guido.


You described him as a creative mind, stopped by outside forces from making the movie he wants to make. However, nearly all of the problems in his life are self-inflicted: his producer, actors, and crew are only pushing him because he is unable to give them any answers or a clear idea of where to go, and the women in his life don't seem to have a problem with his filmmaking--it's more that he treats them badly, whether meaning to or not. Nearly all of Guido's problems could be solved if he stepped up and took some responsibility.


Also, the film falls into the trap of portraying fictional artists, which is that it's hard to portray their art. And we never see Guido actually making a movie, or any pieces of his previous film; all we see are screen tests, giant set pieces under construction, and publicity events. All are important in a movie, but none are actually involved in shooting it--and he doesn't do any of them with particular engagement. We also see sections of his extraordinarily cinematic fantasies, but an overactive imagination does not a filmmaker make.


Now you could argue that Guido is Fellini, and 8 1/2 is the movie he was making, but this is still a fiction film, even if autobiographical, and the work of shooting a film is never shown onscreen.


Which leads to the fact that I think I view the story of this film in a fundamentally different way: I don't see it as "the exploration of a creative mind forced to think about any number of distracting things outside of the creative process, and the frustration that it brings," but rather the story of an immature man forced to grow up. This takes nothing from the film--it's an exceptionally well done story of an immature man forced to grow up--but it does illuminate two different perspectives held by filmmakers and outsiders.


As for your comment that Milo (And I can't believe Fellini had the chutzpah to cast his mistress as his mistress. I shudder to imagine the conversation he had with his wife.) and Aimee's performances were incidental to Fellini and Guido's intentions: I think the movie might have gotten away from them. For me at least, Guido is enough of a cipher, and many of his actions thoughtless enough, that I had trouble truly identifying with him. He was fascinating to watch, but I never feel like I truly knew him. As a result the other characters took up a lot of my identification. Again, not a bad thing, but interesting to note.


So am I misreading the movie entirely, or is it elastic enough for multiple interpretations? And is there something else I should be commenting on but am not?

I think it's a dull movie indeed that only admits for one possible reading. And everything you say about Guido is perfectly true, particularly that he seems a bit of a cipher. To me, this fits in quite well with what I was arguing: someone who thinks about everything in cinematic terms would indeed come across as a bit bland and impersonal. Though I don't know that it's really quite the case that we don't get to know him all that well: we get to know the movie he wants to make, which is the most intimate thing there is about him.


The big disconnect between ourselves is, undoubtedly, that Guido's mind makes so much sense to me, as a nascent filmmaker. You correctly point out that the physical act of filmmaking never appears in 8½; only Guido thinking about the movie that he can't quite put into practice. At a certain level, this is exactly the point: it's a story about creative impotence. But I must disagree with you, that having an active imagination doesn't make him a filmmaker - visualisation is a very key part of the filmmaking process. Alfred Hitchcock is said to have hated being on set, because by the time his films entered production, he already knew exactly what they looked and sounded like, having executed the whole thing in his mind already, and he was already bored with the project by the time the cameras rolled.


Guido's problem is cowardice and indecision: he knows what he wants to make, but he also knows that it will reveal more of himself than he wants to reveal, and as we see throughout, he has a fundamental inability to share himself with others. It's never stated or even strongly implied, but I've always believed that he was terrified that if the film didn't work or was castigated by the critics, that would be proof that he, himself, has no merit as a person. You're probably right that most of his procrastination is self-inflicted, and looking back, I overstated what I meant by that: what I would rather have said is that, the constant pressure from everyone around him is making him defensive, which in turn makes it harder for him to find the necessary self-confidence to put his demons out for all the world to see. I certainly don't admire him and I don't want to indicate otherwise; but I understand his terror and reluctance. (I think your word "immature" is an appropriate one; but on the other hand, isn't immaturity a necessary part of being an artist? A mature person wouldn't have the need for other people's validation. And I say this as a wannabe filmmaker to a theater guy).


It's one big admission of guilt, I think: Fellini acknowledging all the sins he has committed in the name of pursuing filmmaking. Guido is arguably even worse: he commits all the same sins and doesn't even have anything to show for it, although it's at least possible that at the end of the film he has realised that he doesn't need to use cinema as a means of dealing with life, and on that argument, we could suppose that he stops being a film director after the end of the movie (that could certainly be what the last scene, with the dancers, symbolises). And in that respect, he'd actually be a better man than his creator, who did in fact keep making movies to work out his personal demons: his very next film, Juliet of the Spirits, was supposedly considered by no less an authority than his wife Giulietta Masina to be the director's way of dealing with his repressed homosexuality, just to name one example.


There's so much else to talk about, though: you touched on a bit of what made the music so outstanding in your first post, and I'd add that it lends a certain flair of the carnivalesque to the movie. I'm also a great fan of Gianni Di Venanzo's camerawork, with all of its gliding through and around sets; I sometimes feel like the camera is positioned as a predator animal, hunting around in search of its subject. And notwithstanding the conventions of Italian film sound, I think that you're right to point out the heightened effect of the sound; the most overt dream sequences most obviously, but there are a lot of strange and unexpected sound cues scattered about.


What about you? Any lingering observations on Guido's psychology, or other matters?

I think we've pretty well anatomized Guido's neuroses, and of course his identity as a filmmaker and as a man are inextricable. It's the desire to turn the people and world around him into the perfect aesthetic object that makes it so hard for them to relate to people honestly.


(To clarify one thing--I should have said that an overactive imagination is not enough to make a filmmaker. Plenty of people have vivid things in their head that never get into practice, and it doesn't make them great artists. Of course, the gap between intention an practice is a dramatic thing in many contexts, and one more thing applicable both to Guido as filmmaker and Guido as man.)


The cinematography is indeed gorgeous, though I’d leave it to you, the cinematography addict to explain why--I just don't have the technical background.


And as for the carnivalesque atmosphere of the music...well, we'll just use that as a segue to a different version of the story, told with more music, and a whole lot more focus on the women.

Discussing 8 1/2, Part One

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the first part of a collaboration between this blog and Antagony and Ecstasy, an excellent film blog written by the awesome Tim Brayton. In preparation for the upcoming release of the film version of the musical Nine, which is a movie based on Maury Yeston's 1982 musical which is based on Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8 1/2, we will be discussing movie, musical, and movie musical.

As for the film, it's a carnivalesque, dreamlike look inside the mind of Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), an Italian film director (based on Fellini himself), whose life is falling apart as he struggles to make a movie without knowing what movie he wants to make. Adding in his relationships with his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée), mistress Carla (Sandra Milo), and favorite star Claudia (Claudia Cardinale) makes for plenty of complication, especially when the film drifts into fantasy whenever things get too difficult.

Here we have the first part of our conversation about Fellini's film. (Tim and I are both rather long-winded writers, so I didn't want to dump our entire conversation in one post.) I am in italic, he's in bold.

So I finished 8 1/2 this evening. It's going to be a challenge to discuss it as itself, rather than comparing it to the musical, but I'll try. (There's lots to compare--as you'll see, Maury Yeston adapted the hell out of it.)


I had seen this film in college--maybe even freshman year?--but in the intervening time, I'd forgotten nearly all of it. And it remains the only Fellini film I've seen, though the next time I have 2 free hours at home I will watch that copy of La Strada you so graciously lent me.


I suppose a good place to start was how it compared to my expectations of "Fellini." The image I always had was of garish surrealism: clowns, painted women, general freakiness. While this film was certainly very far from realism, it was of a subtler variety. Sometimes it was simply "real" scenes filmed in such a way that they seemed surreal: a shot of a long line of people, all moving forward in step, to "The Ride of the Valkyries" is revealed to be a line of people at a spa in line for the healing waters, while a band plays Wagner. (That was one of many "wow" moments in the film.) Of course there are also dream sequences--the initial traffic jam is quite creepy, and the dream near the end of the house of women is amazing--but it's not the kind of aggression that I expected.


In fact, to me, the least realistic, and most striking formal element of the film was the use of sound. First off there is Nino Rota's score, which I know you've discussed quite admiringly. It walked the line all film scores have to walk very successfully--setting the mood without telling us exactly what we're supposed to feel at every moment. The fact that it's really quite beautiful and catchy on its own merits is just gravy.


But even more striking is how often the sound heightens the mood of unreality. Often the mix will put forward just one element of the sound--the traffic jam dream is silent but for Guido's breathing for instance--or the music from one scene will come in several seconds before the scene itself. Frequently in a conversation, the focus will be on the person not speaking--a fight between Guido and his wife Luisa, focused largely on their backs, comes to mind. At a few points, sound all but disappears. (Another element that worked with this is the fact that the dialogue frequently seemed out of sync with the mouth movement, but apparently that was a convention of Italian film in general that Tim can explain far better than I.) It's this manipulation of an element we take for granted that for me is the most fascinating way the film plays with the boundaries of reality.


As for the acting, four performers stand out. The first is Sandra Milo, as Guido's mistress, Carla. She's vulgar and shallow, yes, but genuinely touching by the end--a real, good woman, who deserves better. Claudia Cardinale, as movie star Claudia, could just sit there being beautiful and do just fine--she's a stunning woman. But she also brings a reserved intelligence and grace that make the character a fascinating foil to Guido's abstraction. And Anouk Aimée as Luisa is magnetic--her slow-burning fury at Guido's constant lies and betrayal is very moving, and she's one of the few able to break through his determinedly cool exterior.


Marcello Mastroianni, as Guido, has of course the largest and most difficult role: this is a man who doesn't know what or who he wants, genuinely cares for the women in his life even as he hurts them, and never really lets anyone see what's inside him. Mastroianni does a masterful job of holding back what's inside, only showing us flashes of what's boiling underneath. Making such a passive and indecisive character so interesting to watch, without ever making him particularly likable, is quite an achievement. Also, though he has a reputation as a sex symbol, I was quite impressed by how unglamorous the role was--Mastroianni seemed more harried and stressed than anything else.


The themes? Well that's rather larger than I really care to tackle, or even feel equipped to. The inability of men to grow and make up their minds is certainly central, lest you think that Judd Apatow invented it. The influence of the Catholic Church is also central. I'm not sure what the giant scaffolding and spaceship were meant to represent, aside from the huge cost of Guido's fecklessness. And as for what actually happens at the end...I'm not foolish enough to claim to know. It's utterly fascinating to watch, though. And am I off base to see an echo of the end of The Seventh Seal (one of the few other mid-century foreign classics I've actually seen) in the dancers all holding hands?


Those are a few thoughts, and I'm sure I'll have more as I think about it. Any reactions to them?

Thanks for having me, Zev. And thanks to your readers for being patient while we take a look at some cinema, and not Chicago theatre.


Beginning with one of the last things you brought up, which is the theme of the movie: one of the key elements about the film and the reason that so many movie people like it (everyone I've ever known who completely adores the movie is or was or wishes to be in film production), is that 8½ is a movie about filmmaking as a mental process, like virtually nothing else in history. You didn't mention, so perhaps you don't know, but the title refers explicitly to the film's place in Fellini's career: he had directed six features, co-directed a feature and contributed two shorts to anthology films, so counting these latter three projects as one-half each, this was his eighth-and-a-half movie as director.


The story of the movie is exactly the story of how it was produced: Fellini was trying to put together a big-budget epic without having the slightest idea what he story he wanted to tell, and he was getting increasingly lost at sea; so to work out his problems, he wrote the story of a film director who had a costly epic and no idea what plot he was spending so much money on. It is often noted that the movie Guido can't make is the movie that Fellini makes for him: all the events that Guido merely thinks about, Fellini successfully dramatizes.


I like to think of this as the exploration of a creative mind forced to think about any number of distracting things outside of the creative process, and the frustration that it brings. All Guido wants to do is to make a movie, but the producers, his woman troubles, the pressure of the church, any number of things keep jockeying for his attention, and he's only able to fantasize about the kind of movie he wants to make - and thus the surrealism you point out. The reason that the film keeps drifting from pretty straightforward realism to more archly stylised moments is because the only thing that Guido can do to keep himself from going completely mad is to imagine how this or that particular moment in his real life might be turned into a cinematic moment. Most of the movie, I think, takes place inside his head; at any rate, there is literally not a single shot that isn't ultimately from his perspective. I think you're correct to note that Milo (Fellini's real-life mistress!) and Aimée give sensitive performances that flesh out their characters, but I don't think that Guido or Fellini especially cares that they do; to the director (either one), they are just objects in the grand cinematic project of one man's life. The great understanding that Guido comes to at the end is when he realises that his wife is actually a human being who can contribute something of value to his life, and not just an obstacle to his moviemaking.


And yet, the way I read the final scene is that Guido/Fellini, having realised that his life is full of people and not characters, still can't give up the essential need to direct every aspect of his life and every person he knows (and as a sometime film director, I can vouch that one of the most irritating things is that you can't yell "cut!" and have everyone around you do just what you want in reality). He is, after all, directing every single person we see him interact with over the course of the movie in one grand spectacle, completely under his command. Still, at the very end, he steps into that ring of people, perhaps finally acknowledging that he's just one of them. It's both an arrogant and a humble moment, and probably the part of the movie that speaks the most to me as a filmmaker. Does it echo The Seventh Seal? Maybe: both films use dance as a metaphor for life, and they do it in a similar visual way. But I doubt that Fellini was consciously pinching from Bergman.


A quick historical note: you are correct that 8½ lacks the grotesques that Fellini is famous for; this was actually his transitional film from the neo-realism that he was trained in, to the most fantastic, imaginative tableaux of Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and Amarcord. He'd already begun that process with his previous feature, La Dolce Vita, but it was only here, in a film about the creative mind's desire to break free of realistic constraints, that he began to indulge himself. Whether that's a good thing or not, is hard to say - for every moment in Satyricon that works, two don't.


As for the peculiar use of non-synced sound, that's just a convention of Italian cinema: the famous Cinecittà studio where nearly everyone in the Italian industry learned their trade used to be right next to an airbase, so it became the standard practice to record visuals and then overdub the audio later, even years after it was no longer a practical necessity. Some filmmakers, and Fellini was a notable example, didn't even have a script written: he just had the actors move their mouths, and then wrote lines for them to read later on. Obviously there are a lot of ways that this has an impact on the finished product, but it doesn't do to read too much into it; it's the same in just about every single Italian movie made into the mid-1980s.


Check back later today for the rest of the discussion, and some time next week for thoughts on Yeston's musical!