The Cripple Is No Lieutenant

The problem with writing a remarkably and inappropriately funny play like The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the high expectations left for any Martin McDonagh play making its way west to New York City.  The Lieutenant of Inishmore was riveting and funny and altogether human, largely in its lack of human kindness.  Not to mention “that fecking cat.”

Alas, The Cripple of Inishmaan is not in that class, despite the expert direction by Michael Grandage, bolstered by the scenic and costume design by Christopher Oram that immediately place us on a cold damp island in another time.  The play has a similar group of denizens of Ireland down on their luck living isolated lives on a similar craggy island.  But the immediacy of Lieutenant’s travails is missing.

The production of The Cripple of Inishmaan just finished its limited engagement at the Cort Theatre — and practically closed 48^th Street due to the mass of Harry Potter fans impeding the exits as they clamored for their golden boy, Daniel Radcliffe.  The balcony at the Cort Theatre was filled to creaking with young women and men, 20-somethings, with some representation of an older generation along for the ride.  We are thankful to these young people for filling the house and can only hope that 1 in 20 of them will actually discover the magic of the theatre, realizing that it is not about seeing a movie star in relative close proximity. The Cripple of Inishmaan is an ensemble piece of which Daniel Radcliffe as Cripple Billy is a major part, but not the only part.  To his credit, Mr. Radcliffe is well aware of this and, at the curtain call, seemed quite reluctant to step forward from his ensemble as if he were the lead.  Nevertheless, with an audience of silly girls demanding it, to step forward is the safest route.

Curtain call: Aunt Kate, Helen, Billy, Johnnypateen, Aunt Eileen.  Photo credit:  Walter McBride, 2014

Mr. Oram’s revolving stage set opens on the storefront of Kate and Eileen Osbourne, the traditional off-kilter sister act, where the two are worrying about “Cripple Billy,” a boy they have taken in and raised.  On a rock like Inishmaan, where the news is delivered orally by Johnnypateenmike (a vulgar, funny, oddly loving performance by Pat Shortt) and consists largely of gossip about geese and catfights that extend to their human owners, everyone knows that Cripple Billy’s parents drowned when he was an infant.  It takes the length of the play to learn the whole story about that incident and then we re-learn what may (or, considering the source, may not) be the true history of the parents.  The daffy sisters as played by Ingrid Craigie and Gillian Hanna, respectively, are hilarious and heartwarming, welcoming all into their shop — the front room of their home — to share the days and the gossip and whatever food may be available.  And, of course, tea.

Johnnypateen’s news today is that an American film director is on the next island over, searching for people to screen test for roles in his epic about the people of the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.  The chosen discoveries would go back to Hollywood for screen tests and maybe, just maybe, American film stardom.  This causes quite a ruckus amongst the young people who want to leave the island to go anywhere else, any way.  Helen McCormick would trade at least kisses for her fare.  What has Billy to trade?

Daniel Radcliffe  as Billly, Sarah Greene as Helen. Photo Credit:  Sara Krulwich/NYT

Siblings Helen and Bartley McCormick are daily visitors to the sisters and Cripple Billy.  Helen ostensibly to deliver eggs for the eggman, Bartley to buy “sweeties” (particular candies) that the sisters never seem to have.  What they do have in the little shop is an overabundance of canned peas. 

Helen is a wild and pretty thing sharply played by Sarah Greene.  She’s vain, bored, violent, and too adolescent to admit to anything resembling emotions, except anger.  She enjoys anger.  Her annoying younger brother (played wittily by Conor MacNeill) is marked forever, though not physically, for his childhood tendency to fall into holes in the road.  This is the thing of growing up in a tiny place where everyone knows everybody and everything about one another:  There’s no escaping the past, no future to look to or even dream of.  Every person on the island is trapped by his fellow residents’ knowledge of him.  Or her.  But the obvious example is Cripple Billy, who is not above wanting to escape the island and go to Hollywood either.

The revolving stage reveals a cove where widower Babbybobby (a darkly romantic portrayal by Pádraic Delaney) is preparing his boat to row to the next island over.  Babbybobby’s young wife died of TB.  Billy leads Babbybobby to believe that he, too, is dying of TB, and needs to get over to Hollywood for whatever time he has left.

Harry no longer

The setting revolves again inviting us into Johnnypateen’s native habitat with his drunken mother (a nastily funny June Watson) in a rather tedious scene with the island’s only doctor, played with humanity and exasperation by Aidan Redmond.  The scene goes on a few minutes too long and we are at last brought back to the sister’s shop.

In the second act we revolve to another part of the island where the sisters, bereft in Billy’s absence, and Babbybobby, Helen, Bartley, Johnnypateen, and his drunken mother watch a grainy and dismal bit of film about the Man of Aran on a bedsheet.  Helen is, as always, angry that Billy took her rightful place and went to Hollywood.  When Billy returns, a failure — apparently Hollywood would rather cast a young blond Floridian who can act as a cripple than an actual Irish cripple who cannot — the sisters are angry but relieved, Helen is angry still, and Babbybobby is furious at the cruel ruse Billy pulled on him to gain passage.

Of course we close in the sisters’ shop where we began, with the doctor tending Billy’s bruises and listening to his shallow wheezes.  Billy makes peace with his “aunts,” learns the truth about his parents, and even makes progress with Helen, but all for naught. This is an Irish comedy, after all, and must end darkly.  (Since this production has closed, and it is a Martin McDonagh play, I cannot consider that a spoiler.)  McDonagh is a playwright, but I tend to think The Cripple of Inishmaan would have worked better as a short story.

The original West-End cast does fine work together, yet Daniel Radcliffe does not appear to have their level of skill.  While I admire his hard-working drive to carve an adult career beyond the Harry Potter films, he has some time to go to deserve the adulation those 20-somethings give him at the end.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to read some Harry Potter stories.

Ghosts and Ghouls in the Cold, Dark North

Ghost stories, on the printed page, on the silver screen, on the tube, I’ve always been drawn to them.  I developed a taste early for black-and-white horror films, from The Haunting to The House on Haunted Hill (the original, not the remake, in both cases). You may recall that I have issues with allegedly scary movies that aren’t. (A blog about less than scary stuff I've seen.) I tried again this weekend, viewing a period piece with cinematography that sometimes appeared almost black and white, but wasn’t — cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones’ rich tones made the blacks blacker and the grays deeper, with some luscious browns in addition.  Visually, this ghost story was exactly as advertised.

Daniel Radcliffe as Arthur Kipps at the gates of the haunted house.

I’ve enjoyed the build-up and trailers to The Woman In Black.  And I’m rather surprised but happy to report I enjoyed the film as well.  This is an unambiguous ghost story, sure of itself. Its color scheme lends to a time when Nature ruled us and we had no inkling yet that we might try to rule Her.  Candles light houses, headlights are weak, and the amazing combustion engine is something that no one has had before to potentially uncover truths ― and skeletons ― in this mad haunting. 

Some thoughts:

First, adults are stupid.  That’s not about the movie, but I ask you, if you saw the advertisements for this film, where there’s a scary lady and a number of dead children, would you bring children?  A five year old?  The woman behind me brought a gaggle between five (at most) and nine.  These children may not have gotten this film while they watched it, snuffling and slurping and crunching and whispering that they had to pee.  But tonight, or tomorrow night, or the night after?  I predict there will be nightmares and the stupid adults won’t understand why. 

Second, this film is visually awesome, from the close-ups to the long shots, the darkness that is barely touched with light.  Shadows frighten even as they woo us toward their peculiarly warm depths.  Director James Watkins and cinematographer Maurice-Jones seduce us with a watercolor palette in a brightly lit opening scene of innocents at play.  Then the tones turn to moody oil paints. Kudos to set decoration by Niamh Coulter — the child’s nursery is the creepiest room I’ve ever seen.  All those Victorian wind-up toys and gewgaws may seem like mere clutter, but those bulging eyes engender dread and terror.  The Woman in Black has fabulous production design (Kave Quinn) and art direction (Paul Ghirardani), as well as brisk film editing (Jon Harris). 

Third, the premise works pretty well — most haunted house stories start off at a disadvantage with a ridiculous reason given for staying in the psychologically and physically threatening place. Here the protagonist actually has good cause to determinedly push on to this unpleasant wreck of a house to find all the papers hidden there — and they are indeed hidden without rhyme or reason throughout the house. The death of the last inhabitant was allegedly recent, but the estate has been falling into ruin for a good many years.  The rather desperate plight of the protagonist, Arthur Kipps, attorney, is set up well, and, rather like the decrepit house, Kipps has been grieving for his dead wife for four years and probably wouldn’t care at all about his debt and looming job loss but for his four-year-old son.  He must do this unpleasant task or face whatever English debtors face in the time between the Boer War and the first world war. 

Ciaran Hinds as Mr. Daily

How do we know when this takes place if we’re not experts about the single automobile seen?  As Kipps reads The Evening News on the train north (Daniel Radcliffe may never escape long train rides north), we see an ad about spiritualism and a medium endorsed by Arthur Conan Doyle.  That would place the story after the Boer War.  Everything else (clothing, candles instead of electricity or even gas lights, horse-drawn vehicles) definitively places the story earlier than World War I. 

Fourth, the performances in this film across the board are first rate.  Really.

• Daniel Radcliffe’s first foray into a feature film as an adult tells us that the boy’s still got it.  As young attorney and widower Arthur Kipps, his big blue eyes are woeful, his face lights up with amazed joy then crumples in bewildered despair.  Arthur is running on fumes, but Radcliffe is not.  He took the chance of doing a ghost story and carries it well.  He’s not yet a powerful player in the adult arena, but he’ll get there.
• The last few times I’ve seen Ciaran Hinds, I considered him miscast.  At last, in this film, it’s a fine fit as wealthy landowner Mr. Daily, the only man in the village with an automobile.  He is a sturdy, certain, god-fearing and loving man, who has suffered loss but still reaches out to help a stranger. 
•  The great Janet McTeer plays his wife.  She’s a little bit off, perhaps way off, but anyone who stays in this god-forsaken village is likely to be.  McTeer is delightful and fearless, her Mrs. Daily as loving to her “twins” as she would wish to be to her dead son.

Daniel Radcliffe and Janet McTeer

The people in this town are unpleasant. They lie, they stare, they close doors on poor Arthur, they’re downright mean.  Then we remember the opening scene of the film — one of very few in bright daylight, in which three pretty little girls interrupt their tea party.  They look in unison toward something we cannot see, then turn to look at the windows.  They go to the child-size windows, and….I don’t need to see the result, it’s searingly bright and horrific.   It’s an affecting and shocking scene in which there is no blood or gore.  Blood and gore aren’t scary, they’re just gross.  Director Watkins and screenwriter Jane Goldman (based on Susan Hill’s novel of the same title) get the horror genre better than many.  Together they create simple, sharp scenes with multiple characters; then long silent scenes with Arthur alone.  Or is he?

The villagers are not caricatures, even though we can think of them as the Innkeeper, the Innkeeper’s wife, the Lawyer, the Lawyer’s wife, the Cart Driver, the Landowner.  These may sound like stock characters, but the acting makes these people individuals instead.  This is a village of the damned.  All the people of the village are extremely well played, from Tim McMullan as the local lawyer Jerome and his wife Cathy Sara, to David Burke as the Constable.  Daniel Cerqueira as Keckwick the cart driver is surly and closed off.  But he has a name.  Later Arthur will call his name in the mist, in the dark. Keckwick is an echo of the whole village.  Liz White as Jennet, the Woman in Black, is haunting and haunted as she wreaks havoc and revenge against anyone and everyone.  The unfriendly Innkeeper and his wife, the Fishers, are well played by Shaun Dooley and Mary Stockley, each dealing with their losses differently.  Not to mention the exceedingly creepy children, particularly Aoife Doherty as Lucy Jerome and the children we meet first, the Fisher girls, Emma Shorey and Molly Harmon. The acting in this film is terrific and that makes it a lot of fun.

All in all, I enjoyed The Woman in Black:  It brings Hammer Films into the 21^st Century with a hoot and a holler, and I had a few good frights.  I would have enjoyed it more had the children behind me been off watching “Hugo” where they belonged.  When The Woman in Black is on DVD and I can control the viewing space — that is, the only juveniles behind me will be cats — I think I’ll enjoy it more despite the smaller screen.  After all, my current television screen is much larger than the old TV screens on which I saw many a memorably frightening film.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, but keeping the lights on....

The End of an Era

Fans of Harry Potter books and films will see “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 2)” no matter what reviewers say, as they should.  Nevertheless, I must grouse a smidgen.  There are good things and bad things about this, the eighth and last of the series of films based on the seven Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling.  One of the delightful things about those novels for the readers was observing the children grow up as they struggled through each year at Hogwarts.  The movies gave us the extra pleasure of watching the child actors playing them grow into adults.  That’s been so much fun that no matter how annoyed I may be at aspects of any of the films — including this one — I cannot say I didn’t have a good time.  I did.

The thing is, “…Deathly Hallows (Part 2)” is not part of a miniseries.  Its previous episode did not air last Monday night on television.  It should be a standalone movie, but it is not.  While understandable — this was an exceedingly difficult task to master — I’m afraid Steve Kloves’ script directed by David Yates just didn’t quite do it.  They dropped us into the middle of the action, picking up where we left off at the end of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1),” which, however seemingly logical, leaves many viewers confounded.  The last of Rowling’s Potter books pulled together elements, themes, and people from the previous six books.  That’s a lot of characters, places, and history that the audience is expected to remember.  The first film devoted to telling the story of the last book was very well done, with a cliffhanger ending leading to anticipation for this year’s finale.  However, no one viewing a movie should be required to re-view the previous film or to reread the book to understand what’s going on in the beginning.  I doubt anyone without a solid grasp of the stories will ever find their way past the confusion of the first fifteen minutes of this final film.  Of course, once the action starts, most will not care.

(c) 2011 Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.

The opening of the film is stark and jumps right into the story, scenes all bleak and gray and shadowed.  John Hurt reflects everyone’s feelings of sadness with a touch of despair as Ollivander, providing some much needed reminders of the story so far.  He looks haunted, perhaps foreshadowing the ghosts to come.  Soon Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) lead us to explosive action at the famous goblin bank, Gringott’s, affording Helena Bonham Carter the fun of playing her mad character Bellatrix as if Hermione were impersonating her.  With magical manipulation, goblins and heroes make their way into the catacombs of the bank, through twisting turning rail rides down to the vaults.  This is all enough fun to make you forget you may not quite recall why you’re here.  (It’s about the Horcruxes.)  And then comes the dragon.  A most fabulous dragon in a rip-roaringly good series of shadowy scenes bursting into light and flame. 

“Deathly Hallows Part 2” brings us to the final battle between the remaining stalwarts at Hogwarts (now under the rule of the deceptively wicked Severus Snape) against evil personified (snakefied?) by Lord Voldemort.  Hogwarts as we’ve known it is defended but destroyed, our beloved Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) gets his due at last, Harry and Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) fight it out a couple times, and the long-suffering Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) is finally vindicated.  Unfortunately that exposition of Snape’s hidden history — in which Harry, Ron, and Hermione finally see the truth behind Snape’s extraordinarily brave actions while they misjudged his every move — was just plain long.  However valuable the information, you can’t, in one segment of the last movie, go back and retell an entire story that took seven films to tell in the first place.  Well, they did, but it certainly stopped the flow.

Matthew Lewis, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe.

  (c) 2011 Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.

The huge cast of well defined characters makes performance analysis beyond the scope of this review, however: Helen McCrory shows us the human face of the wrong side; Jason Isaac is unusually subdued as the broken Lucius Malfoy; and Draco, well Tom Fenton does a fine job of making us feel sorry for the bully we’ve hated all these years.  All three of our usual suspects are as much fun as ever, lovely looney Luna Lovegood is again personified simply and truly by Evanna Lynch, while Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagal put me in mind of Miss Jean Brodie — another film to see again.  Ciaran Hinds snuck in as testy Albeforth Dumbledore in a heartwarming scene.  Seeing (almost) everybody one last time was bittersweet as they fought for their shattered world.  I could natter on about everybody, but a reasonably complete list to remind you of the actors playing these well-known characters is on IMDB .

There’s fun to be had in this movie, as well as disappointment in two flavors.  One: that the last film does not live up to the expectations of the second to last.  Two (and more importantly): that it’s the last film.  Alas and sigh.  The epilogue of J.K. Rowling’s final book on Harry Potter, his friends, enemies, and their adventures, was a tad tedious, obviously written so it would be clear she wasn’t writing any more of them.  It’s a bit tedious here, too, but it does tie everything up with hope, more than real life can guarantee.  Now I want to go back and read the entire series of books all over again, then watch all eight movies. 

In the future when we have Harry Potter DVD nights and watch Parts 1 and 2 back to back, none of my niggling will matter.  This one’s mighty dark, but it’s still fun.

~ Molly Matera, signing off and moving on.  Sigh.