NYC Theater Roundup: “Big Fish” on Broadway, Julie Taymor's “Dream,” Irish Rep's “Juno,” Lincoln Ctr Theater's “Luce” off-Broadway

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 14 November 2013 21:55

Written by Kevin Filipski

Music/lyrics by Andrew Lippa, book by John August; direction/choreography by Susan Stroman

Performances through December 29, 2013

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Julie Taymor

Performances through January 12, 2014

 

Juno and the Paycock

Written by Sean O’Casey; directed by Charlotte Moore

Performances through December 29, 2013

 

Luce

Written by JC Lee; directed by Mae Adrales

Performances through November 17, 2013

 

Baldwin and Butz in Big Fish (photo: Paul Kolnik)

From Daniel Wallace’s novel and Tim Burton’s film, the musical Big Fish is jammed with big emotions, big production numbers, even big songs. But, as in most new musicals, composer/lyricist Andrew Lippa’s conventional tunes (interchangeable ballads, showstoppers and romantic duets) seem an afterthought, but they advance the show by allowing the always inventive Susan Stroman to choreograph the hell out of each number. Thanks to her ingenuity and the show wearing its sentimental heart on its sleeve, it works, up to a point.

 

 

Big Fish—book, movie, musical—hits on a poignant theme: reconciliation between family members before death makes it impossible. Edward Bloom, an irrepressible teller of seemingly tall tales, recounts his fantastical stories about his life, which include a giant, a witch and his hometown escaping a disastrous flood. His just-married son Will feels that all he knows about his father is through his stories. So when Edward falls ill, Will checks them out for himself with results that surprise his skepticism.

 

Stroman’s brisk but unfrantic pacing helps the show keep moving, even when there may be one Bloom tale too many, as well as a few too many endings. But it’s all done to such an illustrious sheen by its boatload of talented performers—Kate Baldwin as the winsome heroine/wife/mother Sandra, Bobby Steggert as the likable son Will and the indestructible Norbert Leo Butz as Edward—that Big Fish overcomes its flaws to pull in its audience hook, line and sinker.

 

Benko in Taymor's Dream (photo: Es Devlin)

No one would deny that Julie Taymor is a dazzling director, but Shakespeare seems her comeuppance. She did wondrously with The Lion King onstage and Frida onscreen, but when she attacks the Bard (Titus and The Tempest on stage and screen), the results are underwhelming. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the inaugural staging at the Theater for a New Audience’s impressive new downtown Brooklyn space—her sumptuous stagecraft obscures the heart at the core of this classic.

 

 

For three hours, a whirlwind of visual wonderment from Taymor and her co-conjurers—Donald Holder (lighting), Sven Ortel (projections), Constance Hoffman (costumes), Es Devlin (sets)—time and again causes the audience to “ooh” and “aah” at will. There’s not as much flying as in her woebegone Spiderman as Taymor’s aerial team Airealistic smartly picks its spots to elevate the fairies. Unfortunately, Taymor is on less firm ground with the play proper, since her performers can’t handle Shakespeare’s verse.

 

Despite a stunning opening—the spirit Puck disappears into the first of the production’s many billowing sheets above and on the stage—Taymor gets the Bard’s impish sprite totally wrong: despite her elasticity, Kathryn Hunter’s mischievous fairy is the least puckish Puck I’ve seen.  It’s tempting to give the rude mechanicals a pass, since Bottom and his performing buddies are supposed to be daffy and dumb: but even with such a resourceful actor as Max Casella playing him, Bottom never reaches comedic heights, and his awkward donkey head (which the actor has to manipulate with controls in his hands) is something that might have worked on paper but stops the seemingly foolproof “love scenes” with the fairy queen Titania dead in their tracks.

 

The less said about the quartet of lovers in the forest—Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander—the better, since none of the actors and actresses playing them makes any impression, and even Taymor seems stymied, resorting to farcical standbys like ripping clothes off and pillow fights, in desperation. The two pairs of monarchs—Athens’ Theseus and Amazon Hippolyta, King and Queen of the Fairies Oberon and Titania—fare better, with Tina Benko’s Titania by default the best performance in a visually memorable but otherwise deficient Dream.

 

The cast of the Irish Rep's Juno and the Paycock (photo: James Higgins)

Sean O’Casey’s humane, masterly Juno and the Paycock delicately dissects the fraught emotional lives of a poor Irish Catholic family—carefree father Jack (the peacock/“paycock”), overworked mother Juno, son Johnny (physically and emotionally crippled by the Irish Civil War), and daughter Mary, hoping for a better life elsewhere—in Dublin, circa 1922.

 

 

In Charlotte Moore’s straightforwardly-directed Irish Rep production—especially intimate on the tiny stage with James Noone’s set credibly evoking this ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious era—the family and their friends (and even enemies) are presented as flawed but recognizable human beings, as O’Casey merges the personal and political in a way that’s still exciting and incendiary.

 

And the performances by Ciaran Byrne (Jack), Ed Malone (John), Mary Mallen (Mary) and, best of all, J. Smith-Cameron (Juno) keep Moore’s respectful presentation of an enshrined masterpiece out of mothballs.

 

Onaodowan and Hinkle in Luce (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

JC Lee’s at times auspicious debut Luce attempts too much as it explores how natural cultural divides lead to misunderstandings—and worse. Lee introduces Luce, a seemingly perfect high school student: he’s smart, well-liked and an all-star football player. He’s also the adopted black son of Amy and Peter, white liberals who plucked him from the war-torn Congo at age seven and have raised him right—or so they think. His teacher Harriet notifies Amy about a paper bag full of explosive fireworks in his locker and a provocative pro-terrorist harangue in a journal he keeps at school, so they begin to wonder about their “perfect” son (Amy more than Peter, it must be said).

 

 

Although Lee sets up the dramatic fireworks convincingly, his characters—Amy, Peter, Harriet, Luce and Stephanie, Luce’s ex-girlfriend who has a revealing scene with Amy at Starbucks—are less plausibly etched. The play is, literally, too black and white: more shading would help. It’s apparent from the start that Luce is guilty, and there’s no doubt about it when he commits a climactic act of treachery that undermines Lee’s lip-service to ambiguity.

 

Under May Adrales’s sensitive direction, the quintet of actors givesLuce a veneer of substance. Would that Neal Huff’s befuddled, hands-off dad, Marin Hinkle’s complicated, loving mom, Sharon Washington’s no-nonsense teacher (though I doubt she would tell a student to “F—off”), Olivia Oguma’s typically shallow ex and Okieriete Onaodowan’s appealing but distant Luce weren’t undermined by this provocative but unprovoking drama.

 

Big Fish

Neil Simon Theatre, 250 West 52^nd Street, New York, NY

bigfishthemusical.com

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY

tfana.org

 

Juno and the Paycock

Irish Rep, 132 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY

irishrep.org

 

Luce

Claire Tow Theater, 150 West 65^th Street, New York, NY

lct.org

2013 NYFF Main Slate is a Grand Showcase of Cinema

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 14 October 2013 23:23

Written by Jack Angstreich

The main slate of this year's New York Film Festival, sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center from September 27th to October 13th, presented a host of local premieres of outstanding new works. What follows is a roundup of what I saw.

Jia Zhang-Ke's accomplished, unsettling narrative feature, A Touch of Sin, is an omnibus film that explores in four separate episodes the emergence of a new kind of violence attendant upon the emergence of capitalism in today's China. This is the first time that I have encountered any relationship to genre in the director's work but the shooting and editing of the carnage here reveals an understanding, if oblique, of action-film stylistics even as most of the storytelling is in accord with Jia's formal approach in several of his previous films. (It seems significant that Jia was about to direct a martial arts epic before switching to this project.) The filmmaker's mise-en-scene is impressive throughout while the impact of A Touch of Sin is intensified by many striking performances as well as the cinematography of the masterly Yu Lik-Wai. What reservations I have about this film on a first viewing include an impression of a certain diffuseness in the screenplay coupled with a seemingly programmatic commitment to the doom of the protagonists — however, a unexpectedly luminous and mysterious epilogue goes a long way to reversing this perception.

Arnaud Desplechin is another veteran of the Film Society and the New York Film Festival and returns here, in relatively unfamiliar territory, with Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, based on the true story of the treatment of a tormented Blackfoot at the Menninger Clinic in 1948. If the film appears to lack much of the exuberance and creative urgency of the director's extraordinary earlier work, he remains fully in command of the medium and manages to achieve a memorably moving ending. Benicio del Toro is touching as the titular protagonist but Desplechin axiom Mathieu Amalric steals the film as the erratic, Romanian anthropologist, Georges Devereux. (The supporting cast, including Larry Pine as Karl Menninger, offers fine support.) The transfer to a digital intermediate diminishes the visual impact of the work but Howard Shore delivers a powerful, often haunting score.

Philippe Garrel's Jealousy, about a tempestuous love affair between two actors, is very much a characteristic film. Although many of the director's high-contrast, monochrome images are arresting, the digital format again blunts the force of his vision, fostering the impression that the screenplay is under-developed with respect to the filmmaker's strongest works. Louis Garrel, in the lead role, drivers a fine performance, although all the actors are excellent as always in Garrel's films.

Tsai Mingliang's enigmatic but also baffling Stray Dogs is so strange that I don't feel competent to evaluate it — or even describe it — after only a single viewing. The film is no departure in terms of style for the director — indeed, it's a formally stunning work in terms of camera placement and rhythm suggesting that the filmmaker is at the height of his powers as a stylist, although the loss of contrast and resolution in digital weakens the impact of the compositions considerably. Tsai draws uniformly strong performances from his actors, especially from his alter-ego, Lee Kang Sheng, in one of his most impressive roles to date.

Agnieszka Holland's Burning Bush is a four-hour miniseries about the aftermath of the self-immolation of Jan Palach in 1968 Prague in protest of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The work is fluid and consistently absorbing with a style strongly reminiscent of many Eastern European films in the early 1980s. It is a pleasure to watch such an attractive cast even if the cost is a certain glamorization of the material while the relative conventionalism of approach here renders the result less resonant than that of the director's strongest works, especially as the evident humanity and subtlety of the filmmaker seems to be at the service of a rather familiar anti-Stalinist narrative that has hitherto received abundant rehearsal in the cinema.

Catherine Breillat's Abuse of Weakness is a semi-autobiographical tale of a film director's dalliance with a celebrity thug who she engages to star in her next film. This turns out to be one of Breillat's most immediately accessible and entertaining films, largely because of the dazzling comic performance of Isabelle Huppert, one of the greatest, and bravest, actresses of our time. Visually, however, Abuse of Weakness seemed to be of slight interest, rendering this one of the director's less remarkable works.

Joel and Ethan Coen's brilliant Inside Llewyn Davis, about a nightmarish week in the life of a fictional folksinger (partly inspired by Dave Van Ronk) in New York City in the late 1950s is another instantiation of these filmmakers' Kafkan mode so pronounced in several of their earlier works such as Barton Fink and A Serious Man. The writer-directors display unerring judgment on almost every front, e.g., camera-placement, art-direction, casting, direction of actors, lighting, dialogue, the selection of music, etc. Relative newcomer Oscar Isaac is perfect as the title character and there are brilliant turns by Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Stark Sands, John Goodman, F. Murray Abraham, and others. The soundtrack, supervised by T-Bone Burnett, is magnificent.

Hany Abu-Assad's accomplished and highly cinematic Omar, about a Palestinian militant in the occupied West Bank who is forced to collaborate with the Israeli police, surpasses in stylistic excitement the director's fine Paradise Now, previously shown at the New York Film Festival. Abu-Assad's brisk pacing, precise camera movements and crisp editing, with the aid of good actors, maximize the resources of a forceful screenplay. The film's only liability is the digital format, unsuitable for capturing the bright sunlight that dominates the region.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's typically mournful Real is a science-fiction thriller about a manga artist in a coma contacted by a type of telepathic communication called "sensing". The director's films have arthouse connections but also bear a consistent relation to genre, here invoking horror and monster movies. Some mechanical construction in the film's final act prevent this from matching Kurosawa's best work. The digital format is appropriate for the futuristic aspects of the story and the digital effects are first-rate but the film lacks the visual power of some of the director's previous creations. This must be the first narrative feature to explicitly cite the concept of a "philosophical zombie", popularized by the prominent philosopher of mind, David Chalmers.

Inspired by Giacomo Puccini, an aria from whose La Rondine is sung in the film, James Gray, in what may be his most ambitious film to date, crafts a redemptive melodrama with echoes of D.W. Griffith and Frank Borzage with The Immigrant, about the painful experiences of a young, poor, Polish woman — effectively played by the beautiful Marion Cotillard — who comes to New York in 1921 with her tubercular sister. Gray's confidence as a filmmaker is evident throughout and he is assisted with moving performances by Joaquin Phoenix — who has been in every feature by the director except his first — and Jeremy Renner. The extraordinary Darius Khondji photographed The Immigrant in 35-millimeter and the image is quite handsome in digital by virtue of shooting in overcast skies in daylight and in gaslight indoors.

Claire Denis is another remarkable filmmaker who betrays little uncertainty in her directorial decisions and her new Bastards, a revenge-drama about a ship captain — played by the superb Vincent Lindon — who comes to shore after his niece is brutally raped, is ultimately mesmerizing. Michel Subor, Chiara Mastroianni, and Alex Descas provide significant support as does the soundtrack by the Tindersticks and the camerawork of Agnes Godard. This is the director's first film shot in digital but unfortunately the format is not sufficiently adequate here for a consistently attractive image.

Steve McQueen's third feature, the intense 12 Years a Slave — a dramatization of the true story of a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South — is being presented within the festival's Main Slate, under the rubric of "Film Comment Selects". On a formal level the film is consistently controlled and frequently brilliant, with imaginative compositions and expert use of focus effects. The screenplay is intelligent and well-structured, with stylized dialogue, while the cast is simply outstanding, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender (who has started in all three of the director's features), Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Alfred Woodard, Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti and Benedict Cumberbatch. However, it is unfortunate that the bright sunlight of the American South proves to be a liability for the digital format here with the image falling far short of the intensity attained in McQueen's debut feature, Hunger.

Alexander Payne's bleak and hilarious comedy, Nebraska — a road-movie about a son (Will Forte) who drives his elderly father (an extraordinary performance by Bruce Dern) from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect what he thinks is a million dollars in prize-money — is one of the most entertaining movies in the festival. Bob Nelson's dialogue is perfectly judged and there are many marvelous performances in the supporting cast, including June Squibb, Stacy Keach and Mary-Louise Wilson. The monochrome cinematography is often handsome but in digital lacks the sharpness and range of contrast that it would have had on film.

Jim Jarmusch's poetic, melancholy Only Lovers Left Alive is a story of two vampire-lovers, played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, hiding out from the world in contemporary Detroit. Shooting for the first time in digital, Jarmusch (and his cinematographer, Yorrick Le Saux, who has several times collaborated with both Olivier Assayas and François Ozon) nonetheless manages, by shooting exclusively in low light (as is appropriate, after all, for a vampire story), to recreate the extraordinary, subtly luminous palette of his early color films such as the similarly nocturnal Night on Earth (which also was originally screened at the New York Film Festival). However, the director's career since Dead Man seems to have mostly settled into a minor mode, generally lacking the urgency and brilliance of his earlier work and his new film does not break this pattern — one wonders if Jarmusch might not benefit from a project where he was in greater tension with his material, rather than able so unrestrainedly to indulge his personal affections. The acting, as usual, is characteristically good, though, with pleasurable support from John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, and especially Mia Wasikowska. (The film also features an excellent soundtrack largely performed by the filmmaker's own rock band, Sqürl.)

To learn more, go tohttp://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/

The 51st New York Film Festival
September 27 – October 13, 2013

The Film Society of Lincoln Center

New York Film Festival Presents Most Comprehensive Godard Retropsective

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 09 October 2013 10:55

Written by Jack Angstreich

This year's New York Film Festival's comprehensive retrospective, Jean-Luc Godard - The Spirit of the Forms, programmed by Kent Jones and Jake Perlin, runs from the second week of the 51st New York Film Festival and continuing through the end of October - the 30th.

 It features a new 35-millimeter print of Hail Mary, a modern day re-telling of the Virgin Birth, one of the stronger films of the director's late period.

Godard here creates a dialectic between a corrosive irony, where he satirizes hagiography, and an exalting celebration of the miracle of nature. Myriem Roussel is the eponymous heroine, her face and body serving as an inspiration for the filmmaker who focuses considerable attention on photographing her. (A very young and lovely Juliette Binoche has a small part as Mary's sexual and romantic rival for Joseph's affections.)

Hail Mary was released with a preceding short film, The Book of Mary — about the emotional effect of her parents' separation on a young girl — by Godard's longtime collaborator, Anne-Marie Miéville. This is a sensitive and memorable work — influenced by Godard but by no means a derivative enterprise — with the superb participation of actors Bruno Cremer and Aurore Clement. Miéville was to fulfill the promise of The Book of Mary with her first feature, the underrated My Favorite Story.

The Film Society is screening these preceded by a bonus short video, Godard's Small Notes regarding the film, Je vous salue, Marie. This essay-cum-promotional-ad is not aesthetically rewarding in itself but anything that sheds light on the intentions of an artist of the stature of Godard is of interest, as is this.

The mesmerizing Everyman for Himself can with some justice be seen as the film that inaugurated Godard's late phase and the filmmaker's return to commercial features. The story is an intricate one, plotting the intersection of a Swiss television director named Paul Godard (played by French pop star, Jacques Dutronc), the girlfriend he has recently broken up with (the gorgeous Nathalie Baye) who places an ad in a newspaper to rent out (or sell?) her apartment in the countryside, and a prostitute that eventually answers that ad, played in a brilliant and subtly comic performance by Isabelle Huppert. The Film Society presented a strong 35-millimeter print.

Pierrot Le Fou, a lovers-on-the-run film noir starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina and arguably the masterpiece among Godard's works of the 1960s, was also screened in a strong, 35-millimeter print — from Rialto — where the vividness of the primary color scheme characterizing the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard's extraordinary widescreen photography was often palpable. (This work features an outstanding score by Antoine Duhamel, an unsung composer who also composed music for the films of François Truffaut.)

Passion is another major but extremely challenging work from the 1980s — Jerzy Radziwilowicz plays a Polish director making a film while romantically involved with two women: one, portrayed by Hanna Schygulla, the wife an industrialist (Michel Piccoli), and the other a factory worker with a stutter, played by Isabelle Huppert. (The actor, Laszlo Szabo, who has appeared in many Godard works, has the role of the producer of the film-within-the-film.)

The complications in the story include labor politics, the Solidarity movement, and the film business but the plot is especially difficult to summarize. Raoul Coutard's photography here is among the most remarkable in his glorious career and I was grateful that the 35-millimeter print here had excellent color. 

The rarely screened A Married Woman observes the life of an attractive young woman — wonderfully incarnated by the exquisite Macha Meril in her most celebrated role — who is conducting an adulterous affair. Again photographed by Coutard, this is one of several magnificent black-and-white films that Godard made in the 1960s and the programmers deserve applause for finding such a sumptuous 35-millimeter print of this unjustly neglected work.