Stage Beauty (2004) is a costume drama taking place in 1660′s London in the world of theatre where gender roles are confusing to say the least. All female roles on stage are played by men, something that has to do with various preconceived notions on the general moral decay of the world of the stage. Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is the famous, and infamous, main leading lady/man, and his most acclaimed accomplishment is his role as Desdemona in Othello. There are still women at the theatre, but they are relegated to the role of dressers and general dogsbodies, working behind the stage only. Maria (Claire Danes) is one of them. Maria dreams of the stage herself, learning everything she can from Kynaston, all the way down to his gestures and inflection.
I get the sense that a part of the aesthetic behind all this is borrowed from the Shakespeare plays that are so heavily referenced in the story. The stages and costumes and the very showiness of the setting is a bit too much to be considered realistic. The actual performances of the plays within the play are not naturalistic, but rather very formal and contrived. Something of the naturalistic comes through in the very last performance of Othello and Desdemona that Maria and Kynaston give, and it’s done well enough that the entire house is so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. All this is very interesting, in a very art as a symbol for itself and woven through itself and using itself as a metaphor kind of way.
Also, the ban of female actors gets revoked through some very physical convincing from the King’s mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper). The King, played with a kind of decadent whimsy by Rupert Everett, inverts the whole world of the stage by forbidding male actors to perform female roles and thusly pulls the rug out from under the feet of the notorious Kynaston. Maria gets her shot at the stage, and more importantly, at Desdemona.
Through a series of mishaps and miscalculations on Kynaston’s part, he goes from being in the highest honours on the stage, with a noble patron/lover, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), and royal backing since the King is fond of theatre, to living more or less as a drunkard destitute mockery of himself on the less discriminating stages that mostly entertain the lower classes.
There are many themes in this piece, everything from class issues to gender issues and meta structural components that highlight the contrast between modern and post-modern presumptions on the actual playing of a role within a role, to the more rigid ideas of particular gestures adhering to a specific emotion on the restoration stage. It is a game of masks and identities and it could presumably keep a scholar busy for a while, but even with all that intellectual stuff there to keep the mind occupied, there is still something unformed about the central core of the narrative. For me, personally, I think it has to do with the way what happens to Kynaston is presented as a comedy of errors as well as a tragedy. Billy Crudup gives this performance an arm and a leg and a cynical twist that hides a sensitive heart. Clare Danes is good enough to be able to portray an actress who is frankly not always very good, which is difficult in and of itself. If anything the subject matter can be derived at as the malleability of gender and everything that goes with that.
I would have preferred that to be played slightly less for comedic value and more with some kind of serious intent. Take Maria’s performance as Desdemona the first time she does it, for instance. She models her acting completely on Kynaston’s. She is a woman playing a man playing a woman. That is more than complicated enough for me to cringe inwardly when she gets seriously mocked on stage for doing a bad job of it. That is more than enough fodder for thought without it being played for slapstick value. So the wit is occasionally like that of Shakespeare, who had to compare with bear-baiting and decidedly less gentile amusements when he wrote his plays. Presuming he did write them, if we want to be post-modern about the whole thing. The rudeness of the comedy is somehow at odds with what the there could be at the centre of it all this.
It is still well worth watching. The costumes and settings are sumptuous and gritty at the same time, Crudrup’s performance is impressive and there’s a nucleus of doubt about the value of hereto-normative certainties and the sometimes crude wit is entertaining and occasionally cringe-worthy. All that adds up to a slightly confusing, but entertaining spectacle. And that’s good enough for me.
Stage Beauty (2004) directed by Richard Eyre stars Billy Crudup (Ned Kynaston), Clare Danes (Maria), Tom Wilkinson (Betterton), Ben Chaplin (George Villiars, Duke of Buckinham), Hugh Bonneville (Samuel Pepys), Rupert Everett (King Charles II), Richard Griffiths (Sir Charles Sedley), Zoe Tapper (Nell Gwynn), Edward Fox (Sir Edward Hyde).
Article first published as Movie Review Stage Beauty (2004) on Blogcritics.
Public Enemies – Dillinger, fedoras and Tommy guns
March 15, 2010
Public Enemies (2009) directed by Michael Mann stars Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Jason Clark (Red), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Channing Tatum (Pretty Boy Floyd), James Russo (Walter), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Lili Taylor (Sheriff Lillian Holley), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis) and Branka Katic (Anna Sage).
It starts with a prison escape. It is fast and vicious and goes badly wrong as one of the escapees gets shot and never makes it out, left hanging on to Dillinger’s hand while dying as the get away car speeds off. That sets the tone.
This is one of those movies that is going to leave people a little puzzled. I have had that feeling quite a few times when watching Michael Mann’s work. I had it with Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995) and with The Insider (1999). Mann has this obvious thing about surface and visuals and it snags your attention, but you have to be cautious about that kind of thing. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.
In Heat there is a specific scene, just a flash of seconds really, where Neil (Robert DeNiro) puts his gun down on a glass tabletop. Ten years later I can call up that scene and that sound with almost perfect recall. It’s a matter of texture and precision and a certain indulgence on the directors part, I suppose. It didn’t propel the action forwards or have any meaning in the larger sense, but it still left an imprint on this viewer that won’t go away.
Here we are dealing with a lead character that a lot of people will have heard of, at least to some extent. We also have a cast of spectacularly good actors, like in Heat and Manhunter (which I still say is the better version of that particular narrative, despite The Silence of the Lambs). There is always going to be the sense that the actors weren’t used to their full potential.
It’s 140 minutes long. It could easily have been twice that to my mind.
The era, the 1930s, lends itself beautifully to the big screen. The guys are in suits and fedoras, the girls are in pretty dresses, the cars have running boards and the weapon of choice is the Tommy gun. If you’ve seen the still frames, you know what I mean. This is as visually appealing as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
We are also dealing with “real life”, although many small facts have been altered to fit the narrative here better. Despite that anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the lead character knows that he was shot to death by the FBI, actually on the night of July 22 in 1934. So we know how this is going to end right from the get go.
It sets up a sense of foreboding and inevitability right from that first prison break. That makes this a grim story for a lot of different reasons. There is also less of a glorification of the bank robbers than you would expect. They take hostages on their way out of banks in order to not get shot at by the law, and even though they mostly leave those people unharmed, they still use them as human shields, which must leave them deeply traumatized.
The representatives of the law are likewise not particularly easy to sympathize with. Hoover seems wound extremely tight and his go-to guy, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is a very serious young man. There is a rather unpleasant scene where Dillinger’s girl Billie gets slapped around by a G-man, and that leaves you feeling a little nauseous, despite how delicately it is handled.
When Dillinger’s body was lying in the street outside the Biograph theater, many onlookers dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood as a souvenir. This movie doesn’t do that exactly, but it gives you that same sense of distance, surface and grim interest.
It’s not hard to like a movie as consistent and as visually pleasing as this one. There are some very, very good actors at the core of it, the beautiful and talented Marion Cotillard, Johnny Depp playing a more subtle character than I have seen him do in a while, Christian Bale being a supporting actor and so on and so forth with guys like Billy Graham and Giovanni Ribisi.
If you are looking for a caper movie or an action movie, this is not the thing to watch. This is more of a character study. Many of the locations, like the lodge at Little Bohemia in Manitowish are the actual locations where scenes from Dillinger’s life took place. Rumour has it shell casings from that gunfight between the FBI and Dillinger’s gang can still be found in the woods surrounding the lodge. As a character study, though, it takes liberties with the truth as it has been documented.
I highly recommend it, none the less. I recommend it for the obvious tension in the narrative, for the visuals and the stellar cast. My only caution is that the fewer preconceived notions you have of what kind of movie this is the better you will fare and the more you will enjoy it.
Mule
