Insidious Is As Insidious Does

The definition of insidious is: “awaiting a chance to entrap, treacherous. Harmful but enticing. Or…of a disease: developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent.”

“Insidious” is an intriguing title. Screenwriter Leigh Whannel (“Saw” and “Saw II”) drew on his memories of “Poltergeist” to structure his story, with a few minor changes here and there. However, this script isn’t as good as the one Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor wrote for “Poltergeist.” Further, “Saw” notwithstanding, while director James Wan does what he can with the script, he’s no Tobe Hooper.

The older house we see a young couple move into is quite attractive. It’s a much nicer house than the one that looks just like its neighbors in “Poltergeist.” This old house has an open central staircase, which is divided into half landings allowing for stops and starts as the adults individually run up those stairs to respond to cries from above. These staring stops are what passes for suspense in the early part of the film. Of course, the house is mostly wood, which creaks nicely. Trees older than the house creep up close to the windows in the wind, making it just the right setting for a haunted house story. And the attic appears to contain things the last owners did not clear out….

The family that moves in is young – Renai, thin as a rail, appears slightly nervous and tries to write songs. She is a good mom, very well played by Rose Byrne. Josh seems to be a nice guy, leaves much of the unpacking to his wife, but is at least appreciative as he goes off to work and leaves her alone with the baby. He’s rather dull, actually, played by Patrick Wilson. They have three children. As these parents are younger than those in “Poltergeist,” so are their children. And instead of the disturbances in the house centering on the youngest child, here it is the eldest child, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), whom we meet when he gets up early with his mother and they look at a photo album with snapshots of Renai when she was younger -- but none of Josh. The photo album is a very tired ploy, but at least it’s earned later.

Dalton, who is drawn to that mysterious attic, falls, appears fine, then fails to awaken next morning. Medical science is not helpful beyond saying it doesn’t seem like your standard coma. The comatose boy, with wires and tubes and monitors, is set up in the house, where a visiting nurse gives instruction to an ever more fragile Renai.

Boxes are not where they ought to be, books are dislodged from the shelf. Sounds are heard over the baby monitor, something flashes by interior and exterior windows. Initially these plants hint of good stuff to come. “Insidious” has some moments of nifty frights in this house, and while Josh is not around much to see the issues – he stays much later in his grammar school classroom than he logically would, nods out over his computer there, so he’s clearly avoiding going home – he takes his wife’s fears seriously and they move to another, smaller, newer house.

But the house was not the problem. Josh’s mother Lorraine did not help unpack at the first house, but she shows up at the second. Lorraine (played by Barbara Hershey – after her last mother in “Black Swan,” this one’s nothing special) gazes at a pretty standard family photo of Josh, Renai, and the two boys – no baby yet. She is surprised that Renai got him to pose for a photo. We remember there are no photos of Josh as a child. The two women are rather distant in this not at all homey kitchen scene, implying a less than warm relationship between the wife and the mother of Josh, or perhaps between the actresses. Yet Lorraine is supportive because she’s quite certain Renai is not imagining anything. She brings in an old friend to investigate.

In “Poltergeist,” when the two guys walked in with equipment, we took them seriously. In “Insidious,” in walk two nerds with some lame equipment. These guys have watched “Supernatural” and “Ghost Hunters” and tried to emulate television and built their own equipment. The characters are bumbling fools played by worse actors (one of them the screenwriter). This is someone’s attempt at humor falling flat.

Lin Shaye plays Elise, the “medium” in this film. She has a fabulous face, long and narrow, and she makes us take Elise seriously. She recognizes Josh, whom she apparently knew as a child, although he does not remember her. Elise learns pretty quickly that it’s not the house that’s haunted – it’s their son Dalton. That’s no spoiler, it’s in the trailer. The spoiler is that he’s a “traveler,” that is, he unknowingly travels by way of astral projection, although he thinks he’s just dreaming. And she knows this because Josh did it himself. Spoiler Alert: Elise shows Josh and Renai photos of Josh as a child – in the background of each and every one is a creepy old woman with fuzzy features and demonic eyes, gradually moving closer to him. Review definitions of the word “insidious,” above.

Funniest bit: Elise, when trying to talk to the absent Dalton, wears a gas mask. It is connected to the headphones worn by the guy taking down her words, who chooses to do so with something resembling a charcoal pencil. This caught my wandering attention, since it was totally inefficient. Just use a Sharpie -- the charcoal stick does not have the panache of Stephen King’s Black Warrior pencils.

I don’t think the makers of “Insidious” could quite make up their minds what this film should be. Their version of "Scream" perhaps? Or an homage to “Poltergeist?" Just the basic cast list is all too similar:

Insidious
Husband Josh (Patrick Wilson)
Stay at home Wife Renai (Rose Byrne)
Three kids
Medium Elise (Lin Shaye)
2 guys with equipment


Poltergeist
Husband Steve (Craig T. Nelson)
Stay at home Wife Diane (JoBeth Williams)
Three kids
Medium Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight)
2 guys with equipment

Even once the astral projection theory is revealed, Whannel doesn’t veer from the tried and true “Poltergeist.” He just substitutes something called “The Further” for the Native American burial ground. “The Further” is a place where astral projectors wander and sometimes get lost, as Josh did as a child, and as comatose Dalton has done now. Where “Poltergeist” horrified us with the hellish realm where the actual child was imprisoned and wreaked havoc on the physical house (not to mention the pool!), “Insidious” tosses a few people about in the new house, then goes back to the first house and shoots the “horror” scenes there, hoping against hope that lighting effects will make up for the lack of imagination used in creating this alternate reality. And by the way, “The Further?” Really? That’s what they came up with for this netherworld, dreamworld, etherworld, otherworld, dark dimension, lost dimension, la-la-land? Mr. Whannel needs a dictionary and thesaurus.

If Mr. Whannel and Mr. Wan didn’t want “Insidious” compared to “Poltergeist,” they shouldn’t have copied so much of it. If they meant it as an homage, they fell short. Byrne and Shaye are very good, the rest of the cast merely serviceable -- except for the screenwriter. All in all, “Insidious” was disappointing.

If my response to this film appears harsh, consider this: I still remember the night, back in 1982, when I first saw “Poltergeist.” Once home alone, I went to bed, turned out the light, then shrieked when my long braid appeared to move on the pillow next to me. After seeing “Insidious” last night, I slept just fine.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer – or maybe I’ll stream “Poltergeist” and watch a really scary movie….

Meek's Cutoff is No Place for the Meek

Going to see Michelle Williams at the movies can lead to some pretty morose evenings. She has a way of picking deep, layered characters in starkly realistic films that leave the audience feeling hopeless at the end. Witness last year’s “Blue Valentine,” and 2008’s “Wendy and Lucy.” Gritty, realistic films with endings that don’t argue hopelessness, but rather accept it. That’s what reality does for you. In her new release in theatres now, “Meek’s Cutoff,” Williams is not meek for a moment, nor is the director Kelly Reichardt. This film is powerful and breathtaking, frighteningly quiet in a landscape that is as terrifying as it is beautiful. Yet the film is not at all morose.

“Meek’s Cutoff” is a western of the northern variety, and far from typical. It has standard elements of wagons, oxen, horses, a donkey, high plains, big skies, and tiny human beings traveling west across an enormous, untamed frontier. From there, however, director Reichardt and writer Jon Raymond veer off the usual course.

The film is painfully realistic, painted in the dusty earth tones of the desert. Three Conestoga wagons lumber across a plain. Before a word is spoken, we see the wagons and people ford a river, the women carrying baskets and a birdcage high over their heads as they walk through the surging water that reaches up to their chests. The men drive the oxen pulling the wagons through the river. The travelers fill their barrels with the fresh, clear water. Not a word has been spoken in the film at this point. On a felled tree trunk that looks as parched as the land, a man carves letters – L O S T.

Oregon, 1845. Part American, part British, not even a territory yet. The travelers to it are "Americans" from the United States and its territories. Theirs is a small wagon train, with Mr. Stephen Meek contracted to lead three families over the Cascade Mountains. The travelers are “Americans,” but the territory is not yet. The “cutoff” of the title is Meek’s alleged shortcut off the beaten track. The cutoff is already taken, and the people are in mid quandary as we come into their story. That they’re lost is one thing; that Meek won’t admit it is another. It is the bone of contention for these determined but dependent people.

The three couples at Mr. Meek’s mercy are Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) and her husband Solomon (Will Patton). This couple converses quietly, respectfully. He does not keep secrets from his wife, unlike the other husbands. William White (Neal Huff) tries to protect his wife Glory (Shirley Henderson) in every way and she does the same for him and their son Jimmy (Tommy Nelson). Glory is far enough along in her pregnancy to make every day walking along the plain without water an even greater danger than usual, although she never complains. She runs against the wind to grab a scarf of her husband’s before it's lost to the winds, she works as hard as the other women. And the work is grueling. The third couple is the youngest, Thomas Gately (Paul Dano) and his wife Millie (Zoe Kazan). Gately is a young man trying very hard to be a good one; Millie would be hysterical if she were of a different class. As it is, hysteria from anyone on a trip like this would be deadly. Their cocky leader, Stephen Meek, dresses in buckskin with long ragged hair. He would be reminiscent of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill, except the Bills came of age later. The actor was a mystery to me until halfway through the film, when I realized it was Bruce Greenwood. I do love it when I don’t recognize a very familiar actor.

These actors inhabit their roles, their shoes are wearing out, their skin drying and tanning. The women’s cotton and muslin dresses are lived in, billowing about their legs as they walk on cracked ground with the wind whipping all around them. The men trudge next to the oxen. No one speaks for hours at a time. All hands are ready to work for each other – when the axle of the young couple’s wagon breaks, the journey stops for breath, and all the men work to fashion a new axle.

Days are the same, except when a new danger enters. On a day like any other, the men have ridden off to look for water, and the women wander the brush surrounding their camp, bent over to gather kindling. Emily comes upon an Indian. He does and says nothing. She turns and runs back to the camp, loads a rifle (in 1845 this takes a very long time) and shoots into the sky to signal the men to return. Meek questions her closely in the growing dark, doing his best to encourage her fear. He talks on and on about the Native Americans, different tribes, different pejoratives, ugly stories of travesties. Of course, we already know Meek is not strictly truthful, so we are in the same position as the travelers – how much of what he says is to be believed.

Soon the boy Jimmy sees the lone Indian again; Meek and Tetherow ride off after him. They return hours later with the captured Indian walking bound between them – Meek says he wants to kill him; Tetherow wants to find out from him where there’s water. The need for water by now far outweighs his fear of this unknown.

Ron Rondeaux is intriguing as the Native American, listed as “The Cayuse” (the Cayuse is a tribe native to northeastern Oregon). Initially silent, he begins to speak in his own language, even sing what appears to be a healing song at one point. He watches and waits, seems to accept young Mr. Gately’s offer of barter – blankets for leading them to water. If the travelers weren’t torn before, the tension rises with the addition to their party. None of the “Americans” speak the Native American’s language, and he does not speak English. Meek shouting and threatening is clear without understanding the words, as are the more civil, cajoling tones of Tetherow and Gately. Emily Tetherow tries to make the Cayuse beholden to her by mending his torn boot. He is as fascinated by her sewing basket as by her actions. The picture of frightened Millie Gately gripping a boulder as she stares at Emily is an intimate revelation of horror.

This is an engrossing picture of the hardy folk who traveled across this untamed country. There is no distant planet in space exploration more frightening than the unexplored American desert. When a cry of water goes up, it’s from miles away. Only up close can the travelers know whether the water is potable or alkaline – if the latter, deadly to humans and animals alike.

The characters of “Meek’s Cutoff” are intense and pushed to that point where a person finds out what’s inside, like it or not. This film is like a finely wrought short story, told by the details and the depictions – of the terrain, the faces, the clothing, the hands, the wind, the shoes, the postures, the silence. Always more silence. Tension builds day by day and moment by moment, characters clashing quietly at first and finally at an impasse. The last day of the film’s story leaves it to the viewer to decide: To choose to believe that water will be found in the next day by following the captured Cayuse. Or not.

Jonathan Raymond (who also wrote “Wendy and Lucy” with Kelly Reichardt) crafted the spare script that brings the audience along on the grueling journey. The few words spoken are choice. Each character speaks only what he or she must, and can.

Director Kelly Reichardt (“Wendy and Lucy”) keeps her actors in view, sometimes at the edge of the screen. Each of them gives her a finely tuned performance. Shirley Henderson is glorious as the resilient Glory, Zoe Kazan affecting as the anxious Millie, and Michelle Williams inspiring as the powerful and strong Emily – they teach us that American women can do anything. Most Westerns are about the men, and the women are peripheral. In “Meek’s Cutoff,” if either gender is portrayed more richly than the other, it would be the women. These are some of the best performances you’ll see this or any other year. The three men, different as they can be, are also giving subtle, strong, characterizations – Patton, quiet, strong with the the kind of quiet that other men recognize and follow; Huff drawn long and tight, sacrificing, carved of knotty wood; and Dano, with hope and plans of youth, and somehow patience of age. Finally Greenwood, brilliantly unrecognizable as the dislikeable, untrustworthy Meek.

The loving care given by director and editor Reichardt to every shot, every stoic face, every frame is evident. This is a gorgeous film, a harsh film, a frightening film. And yet not morose, and not ending on a hopeless note. The hope is up to the viewer. "Meek's Cutoff" poses hard questions, without giving answers.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer, but not the light.

Dreamlike Macbeth at BAM

Cheek by Jowl’s production of “Macbeth” is performed without an intermission, which makes it rather suspect – those of us with a smidgen of cynicism wonder if there’s no breaking point because the director or producer fear the audience won’t return for the second half. I can assure you, that’s not why there’s no intermission in this production at the BAM Harvey Theatre.

As we were shuffling out of the theatre last night, one woman said to her companion, “Well, those are two hours I’ll never get back.” But, while not alone in her opinion, it’s fair to say most of the audience didn’t agree. Of my companions and myself, one loved the production wholeheartedly, one more than halfheartedly but not wholly, and then there was me. I liked a lot of it, but have bones to pick. For one thing, a production that’s been around for the better part of two years should know how long the play runs, and both the BAM web site and the program said two hours, without intermission. When we arrived at the theatre, we were forewarned more accurately – two hours and twenty minutes, without intermission.

For this production, its flow, its forward motion, would not bear the interruption of an intermission. Director Declan Donnellan has his actors moving, touching, stroking, reaching, watching, listening, throughout the play. The action is non-stop. Then why is this, one of the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, two hours and twenty minutes? Because what is not non-stop is the speaking of Shakespeare’s words. In the title role, Will Keen totally ignores Shakespeare’s advice to the players. He does not speak the speech trippingly, he most certainly does saw the air, and he added twenty minutes to the running time with his pauses alone. As my friend said, there were no trucks in Brooklyn last night because they were all idling in the pauses in this production. Which is too bad -- Mr. Keen’s characterization was more than interesting. His compact muscled body was taut with repressed energy, his eyes darted suspiciously, angrily, he was the embodiment of a paranoid man of power. But my attention wandered when his gaze glazed over between the third and fourth words of a phrase, again and again. Mr. Keen’s Thane of Cawdor jabs out a word or two, then searches the air for more, glares angrily toward the audience, then grabs a few words from them. This made him the most verbally incomprehensible Macbeth I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen the play in Japanese.

Lady Macbeth was tightly wound from the moment she appeared, growing toward a harridan, and by the time she’d decided upon murder, she was a regular fishwife. Anastasia Hille was thin to the point of gauntness, her hair wild and untamed, her pale feet bare as she read her husband’s letter. In her “unsex me here” soliloquy, I felt Ms. Hille’s Lady Macbeth was mad because none of her babies had lived. This did not make sense of her actions– even in an irrational way – but seemed to clear the way for her mad dash to murder and mayhem. Once company came, she was no longer disheveled, she put on pumps (!), hair pulled back in a bun. Her public persona still shrill, she held it together better than her husband. The problem, though, with starting at such a pitch in her early soliloquies is that, like starting a song on a high note, where on earth can you go in the second half of the play? The woman was no different in her mad scene than she was in her opening scene.

For me the main problem was that while she ranted, her husband paused. This, of course, is appropriate to the story of the play in the first half or so and mayn’t have been as distracting if he’d paused prior to killing Duncan and then pulled his speech together as he became more and more murderous. If he’d used that jagged, annoyingly slow speech -- it was not a pattern, it was lack of pattern -- to differentiate his mental state from one part of the story to another, it might have been effective. As it was, he appeared incapable of stringing enough words together to make a phrase. My friend thought this was a valid depiction of madness. I thought he was applying the Method to Shakespeare. Not to mention (although I will), that in the beginning of the play, he’s a great general, admired and liked and respected by his countrymen and his king. We’re not talking “I, Claudius” here, where a speech impediment made ignorant people think the man stupid. This is a style of inarticulateness that would be unlikely in an eleventh century general and is annoying from an actor of Mr. Keen’s obvious talent.

Moving on to the physical nature of the play – Nick Ormerod designed a spare acting area ripe for lighting effects, with wooden crates of different sizes lining both sides of the stage. These are made of Birnam wood, of course.

Everyone (except the extraneous gatekeeper, below) wears black. All black. Black on black. The actors’ movements are smooth, choreographed, coordinated. Donnellan keeps the Macbeths at the center, to the point of not naming many characters in the program’s cast list. Noticeably toned down, the other characters and actors fade back into the usually visible ensemble when their characters were not needed.

One might even wonder if Donnellan was making everyone else a figment of Macbeth’s imagination.

From the play’s opening, the creepy factor is established – Judith Greenwood’s design illuminates the frightening, casts shadows here and beams of light there, and allows whispers to come from the almost dark. We see people standing on stage, but we cannot see their faces. The “weird” sisters speak, and there are constant whispers around them – this effect is used later in the play as well. From this beginning we hear an excellent sound design by Helen Atkinson. Voices from the dark are one thing, but whispers are truly creepy.

These sounds also lean toward the interpretation that Macbeth is hearing voices throughout – could it be that no one else is there, just the whispers….?

A man breaks ranks with the formation onstage, and runs through and around the lines of people. He comes in front and appears to stab himself in the hand, prompting the line, “What bloody man is that?” Throughout, the actors use no props but the wooden crates. Despite the lack of props, all the fight scenes and murders are highly effective because of the actors’ reactions. Credited as an associate director of the company and movement director, Jane Gibson did marvelous work with the cast.

The introduction of Macbeth and Banquo is intriguing, setting up the disparity of each one’s behavior and speech patterns. Banquo is laid back, relaxed, he lopes from here to there looking for the owners of the voices speaking to the pair. Macbeth rather stomps about, as if he could pounce on the ethereal voices prophesying his future. Throughout, Mr. Keen’s Macbeth can barely restrain his pent up energy. And throughout, Ryan Kiggell’s Banquo is calmer, more judicious, and then suspicious.

Banquo’s ghost, when “seen” at all, is so precisely lit that only his head shows, and then two shadows of his head and shoulders radiate out as his bright head looms toward the cowering Macbeth. It’s gorgeous. Throughout, there was fine lighting over an excellent, stripped bare design.

The lack of props didn’t mean the actors didn’t use objects, and herein lies danger. Miming can be annoying, potentially jarring the audience out of the scene – in one instance, after Macbeth’s fit on seeing Banquo’s ghost, the Thanes exited at Lady M’s exhortation – she screams them all away. The now royal couple sits at opposite ends of a long (invisible) dining table and have a perfectly ordinary conversation about death and murder while serving themselves invisible food. What distracted me was Macbeth serving himself from an invisible someone holding a bowl for him. And yet something similar was done in the MacDuff murder scene, in fact in all the scenes of violence – we do not see the perpetrators of the acts of violence, only the reaction of the victims. Therefore there are invisible people on the stage…

…or in Macbeth’s mind.

Once the first murder was done, Mr. Donnellan got Akalaitis fever and opened a black hole to another universe, pulled the vulgar gatekeeper out of it for a loud scene that had nothing to do with anything, then pushed her back to her galaxy far, far away. The gatekeeper’s scene is not funny, ever; just cut it. (My companions loved this scene, by the way.)

Despite the dreaded gatekeeper scene, Mr. Donnellan’s carefully choreographed direction of this finely focused production was fascinating. The ensemble leaned against and held onto the wooden crates, moving them, sitting on them, placing them where they were needed. They were constantly on the fringes of the “private” scenes, impassively watching the Macbeths go mad. All figures commiserated physically with any one character’s triumph or woe with group hugs of black-clad figures stroking the suffering character.

There was little focus on scenes without Macbeth – he, in essence, introduced those scenes: He said what he would do to MacDuff and his people for running off to England, and the scene of the savage murders of Lady MacDuff and the children is enacted as if a dream, an extension of Macbeth’s wishing it so. (Kelly Hotten gave us a striking Lady MacDuff in addition to Lady Macbeth's gentlewoman.) The England scene with MacDuff and Malcolm was the longest without a Macbeth in it, and played a little flatly except for MacDuff’s response to his family’s murders.

Once again, the possibility looms – was it that no one else was ever there, just Macbeth and his fevered brain?

Additions to the play are party songs and a scene of dancing (music by Catherine Jayes). This Lord and Lady Macbeth are not afflicted with coldness in the marriage bed. They embrace, they touch, they hug, they definitely cleave. Once the doctor (well played by David Collings after his extremely likable Duncan is murdered) says he has no art to cure Lady Macbeth, she sits center while her husband, ordering his men about, caresses her face.

Lady Macbeth gazes up at her husband adoringly even after the scream that signals her death. Yet another point toward the idea that all of this is in Macbeth’s mind.

There are some wonderful ideas and exciting scenes in this production. The Macbeths dancing together with the Thanes looking on and applauding is mesmerizing, and is one of the scenes that makes me believe this is one long dream sequence of Macbeth’s madness. Mr. Keen’s choice, though, to say every line so differently from everyone else in the world to the extent that the lines became indecipherable, drained some of the production’s power and energy.

Regarding the thought that this story is all told inside Macbeth’s head:

1) Should this be titled “Macbeth’s Dream?”

2) If it is his dream, perhaps the reason Keen stops, stares, says a few words, stops, glares, etc., etc., etc., is that when one dreams, one might exit from the dream for a moment, rather like nodding off, and then come back into the dream. But if he’s nodding off, there's the danger the audience may as well.

“Macbeth” is running another week (to 17 April) at the BAM Harvey Theatre. Go. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer so I can rustle through my box of paperback editions of Shakespeare.

A New York Saturday

Had a fine time yesterday at the New School Arts Festival presentation of “A Checkroom Romance.” It’s a musical with cartooning -- that is Mark Mulcahy’s music with libretto and drawings by Ben Katchor.

The cartoons telling the story were projected onto a screen and carefully timed to the lyrics sung by the wonderful musicians – Mark Mulcahy singing the most characters, the composer’s prerogative; Flora Reed singing the checkroom girl, Lena Basilicia, extremely well along with other characters; keyboards player Ken Maiuri also plays percussion and sings a few characters; and hidden from my view, Dave Trenholm was busy playing the sax, clarinet, and flute, in addition to guitar, so that when playing any of first three, he clearly wasn’t singing. But he did sing on occasion. These people were tight, if not perfect, imaginative, and very funny. As is the off-the-wall story by Katchor.

In this mad story, the main character, Marcus Rule, has a checkroom fetish. He toured the capitals of Europe to visit great checkrooms. He fantasizes about checkrooms. He evicts his young daughter from her bedroom in their New York apartment so it can be converted to a checkroom. Really. The subplots with the checkroom girl and a scam artist addicted to salted peanuts is mad as well, and they come together to create chaos. It’s absurd, it’s a blast. But it’s too funny to be noir.

Now, many a checkroom girl could be found in noir films. They had pouty lips and were part of the story’s mystery – or they were sweet innocents like “Mildred Atkinson” in the great Nicholas Ray film, “In A Lonely Place,” who checked the ubiquitous gentlemen’s hats and explained the story of a bestseller to struggling screenwriter Humphrey Bogart. Lena Basilicia, the checkroom girl in “A Checkroom Romance,” however, is no femme fatale, so I don’t know why this musical was in a so-called “noir” program.

But no matter. I had fun, the rest of the audience had fun, and, in this crazy city that drags the money out of our pockets from the moment we awaken, these two hours of laughing to music were free. Yes, free. In the New School Arts Festival this week, there are movies, readings, and who knows what, all free, listed and described here: www.newschool.edu/events/noir.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, looking for more free fun.

Not Your Grandmother's "Frankenstein"

Since 2009, the National Theatre has been filming performances of its plays and screening them in moviehouses around the world, while the play continues running in London. This is quite a gift for those of us whose passports are getting moldy.

While this extraordinary “Frankenstein” is on in London, I am in New York. The National Theatre’s broadcast of the play has all sorts of juicy extras. Emma Freud introduced the play and an excerpt from a National Theatre documentary on the making of the production. Called “Creating Frankenstein,” the excerpt whets the appetite for the full documentary.

Seeing a play on film is not the same as seeing it live, but the National has done this very well. The play is not performed on a proscenium stage but a thrust, and the film does not merely shoot the stage from the audience point of view. We are up in the flies, among the extraordinary web of lights looking down on the characters, we are house left, house right, we are close up, we are removed, but only so much.

The play opens with a membrane stretched across a frame -- a canvas? We see a figure, perhaps a child. Then the extraordinary series of chandeliers flash and the body moves. It is alive, moving forward. The development of the child is explored physically, from lifting the head, to flopping about, to crawling, to trying ever so hard to balance, to the miracle of standing. The “child” shouts out his pain and glee and he discovers walking, skipping, running. Finally he collapses from his exertion near his incubating membrane. A fully dressed man enters. Touches it. The manchild moves, appalling and frightening his creator. And we’re off.

This “Frankenstein” gives voice to Victor Frankenstein’s experiment, and tells the story largely from the Creature’s point of view. Born alone, rejected by its creator, the Creature wanders into the world, meeting more rejection as people scream running from his horrific looks. He spends a year in and around a mountain cabin where only the blind man does not reject him, and from this man he learns not only speech but reading. He reads Milton, and, just as importantly, he reads Victor Frankenstein’s journal. He learns great philosophies and he learns about this race of which he is a part but separate. It is here in the mountains that the Creature, once again rejected, reveals that flaw that will always keep him apart. He is, after all, still a child, and, despite his articulacy, does not, cannot restrain his viler instincts. The culture he has learned cannot teach and strengthen him to disdain revenge and retribution on those who’ve hurt him. No short measures for him, all he knows how to do is kill. All that learning has taught him to strategize, so once this Creature’s only friend is dead at his own hand, he makes his plan – to demand a “favor” of his creator. Or else. He sets off from the woods and hills around Ingolstadt and makes his way to Geneva.

The director has not merely cast one man as the Creature and one as Victor. No, he cast two, and Benedict Cumberbatch (the new Sherlock Holmes in Masterpiece Mystery’s modern series) and Jonny Lee Miller (“Eli Stone” a few years back, among other things) play both roles, trading off on alternate nights. I didn’t care which combination of actors was in this film, and the performance I saw shows Cumberbatch as Victor and Miller as the Creature. I now yearn to see the alternate version, partly because of the bits of the documentary shown in which the two men talked about preparing for the role of the Creature. Were I in London, I’d book a ticket for the next performance opposite to the one I’ve just seen.

This is not to say I didn’t like the actors in these roles. I’m just fascinated at the idea of watching them switch back and forth between creator and created, between overweening man brought down by his own hubris and the “lesser” being that brings him down. Really interesting to watch these two guys work. In their first meeting, the Creature is frighteningly alive, full grown, horribly scarred, but inarticulate. By their second meeting, the Creature has become well read, and he quotes Milton to Victor. Victor says, amazed, “You’ve read Paradise Lost?” The Creature responds, “I liked it.”

The production has an interesting, warm, strong Elizabeth (Victor’s fiancée) in Naomie Harris. Victor’s father, the magistrate, is a tad over the top as played by George Harris in a classical style. Victor’s younger brother William, a very deliberate victim of the Creature in his quest for Victor’s attention, is rather stiffly played in this performance by Jared Richard (three young boys play William on different nights). The mountain family the Creature resides by, the De Lacey’s, are played by a wonderful trio of actors who make this segment in the larger tale a really interesting story in itself: Agatha is well played by Lizzie Winkler – she is so likable, so appreciative of the mysterious gifts that she never questions (but which could only have been provided by the Creature), her husband Felix by Daniel Millar, a solid man of the earth; both of these lovely people disappoint us dreadfully when they immediately react violently against the physical appearance of the Creature, despite his developmental leaps. Finally the blind teacher DeLacey, a sweet, sensitive and giving performance by Karl Johnson. The four seasons the Creature passes with DeLacey, hiding from all others, are the only good he experiences. And he doesn’t behave at all well when fear and hate overpower the good old man’s kind intentions. The Creature’s revenge is swift and final, showing us who he will become when his will is thwarted.

Back at the Frankenstein estate, we see a delightful actress we saw early on as a prostitute, but here she is Elizabeth’s maid, Clarice. Ella Smith steps out from the ensemble in these two characters and does right by both of them. The entire ensemble is fabulous, playing a train and the citizens around the tracks in town, hobos, Scottish fishermen, estate workers, things and people, whatever’s needed. A terrific group of players.

Meanwhile, the rest of the production was imaginative, polished, and inspired: We see fire, we see rain, we see cold, we see good, we see evil. We see causality. All this through the smart and sharp script by Nick Dear and the masterful direction of Danny Boyle, augmented by the broad to highly detailed strokes by scenic designer Mark Tildesley, which worked in brilliant harmony with Bruno Poet’s exhilarating lighting design. All through the work as seen by Dear and Boyle (who’ve been working on this creation for many years), we see the age of science and reason faltering in its very humanity. Victor Frankenstein substitutes electricity for God, and creates a faulty circuit. Had he not deserted the child, could he have taught him well? Could Victor, by taking responsibility for his actions from the get-go, have prevented the death and heartbreak wrought by his neglected child? Who is the monster in this story?

The Creature would like to be called Adam, and he wants an Eve. He dreams of her as being put together from mismatching pieces, just like him, someone who would not reject him. This dream Eve is played with balletic grace by Andreea Padurariu. We see her again later, when the Creature has made his pact with his creator: He and his bride will leave for South America if only Victor will make him that mate. Victor travels first to England, then the northern islands of Scotland to meet the Creature’s demands.The bride is clearly a step up in Victor’s work – not yet animated, but movable, she is not as hideously scarred as the Creature. Victor learned from his technical mistakes. Addlepated by whatever he was drinking, not to mention his gruesome practices, Victor converses with his dead brother William, who questions the wisdom of creating two such beings, asking will they reproduce, and therefore what race of monsters will Victor bring into the world this time?

The showdown between Creature and creator sets up the rest of the story. When Victor shows a lick of sense and destroys the not-quite-living “Eve,” the Creature demands vengeance. Victor knows this, knows the Creature will follow him back to Geneva. Either he mistakenly believes the Creature’s vengeance will be simple, demanding Victor’s own death, or he uses his new wife Elizabeth as bait for the Creature. In either case, Victor underestimates his creation. As Elizabeth awaits her husband on her wedding night, the Creature breaks in, woos away any reserve she had, conversing with her as a civilized man, and she, open-hearted, agrees to speak to Victor on his behalf. The audience, too, is lulled into complacency here, until the Creature quietly says he’s learned all about man, including the one thing that nothing except man does. He’s learned to lie. He rapes Elizabeth as she screams for Victor, who shows up in time to see the deed and Elizabeth’s death, but for some reason is unable to shoot the monster his Creature has become.

Finally the Creature leads Victor to hell. Otherwise known as the vast expanse of lifeless ice that is the Arctic Circle. In the book, we see Frankenstein die, we see the Creature mourn him, then build his own funeral pyre. Here the Creature cradles the seemingly dead Victor, but Victor revives, his fur-clad body writhing in much the same way the Creature’s had as he learned to move, crawl, and stand. The two walk into the white light of the ice, Creature and creator continuing the journey until death.

It’s a rather gorgeous production, and I’d love to be able to fly over to London on a whim to see it live in person instead of live on film. As it is, this well-filmed live performance was a treat. Theatres where the National’s program is available are shown on their website, www.ntlive.com. I hope it’s coming soon to a theatre near you.

~ Molly Matera, signing off but not turning off the computer -- the National’s online programme is a treat, too.

The Duck Pond

About a city block from my old workplace there’s a duck pond. A manmade duck pond in which large goldfish swim and real ducks settle in awaiting whatever they can cadge from visitors. They dive in that cartoonish way they have, tailfeathers waggling in the air. Come May or so, there’ll be ducklings.


Today there were three residents, two aggressive males with gorgeous green throats, the mallard masters of the pond.

One dull little brown duck, the female. A man tossed the universal food, Cheerios, one by one, to the female, then the males came charging over for their – and her – share.

The pond had little islands interspersed between the waterfall and the low rim of the pond where people and dogs sat. Each island was strewn with stones, clearly seen in March since the sheltering plants had been shorn, cut back for winter. In a few months, though, the plants will grow back to fullness with their long and broad shafts and fluffy tops. Hidden within will be the ducklings that would be tended by both males and female.

The little islands in the pond, perhaps five or six feet across, were strewn with stones and bound by what looked like barrel staves sliced to a height of a foot or so. They were wrapped with rusting metal bands, but surely they were stone, under the water, not wood.

This is real, not a decoy!

“No,” my friend said, “come closer and look.” We stepped closer to the edge and bent over, our tailfeathers less entertaining than those of the ducks, and peered under the water. “Wood. Coated with something to avoid rot? Creosote?”

I visited my friend today because I felt she needed a trip to the duck pond. At least I thought that I thought she needed it. As it turns out, I’m the one who needed the duck pond. Its quiet. Its movement. Its promise of new life.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer, the lights, everything.

"Win Win" Does Neither

“Win Win” is a sweet if slight film. Its characters are likeable, even when annoying (except for one, who, while played by winsome and likeable actress, is just plain unlikable), its set-up interesting, its action forward-moving at all times. Its potential heft is in the undeniably wrong action by its main character; its greatest weakness in the complete lack of retribution for that act.

Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is a middle class attorney practicing in a middle class neighborhood, his shared offices part of a house for which he and his partner have responsibility (for the ready-to-blow boiler and the backed up toilet, for instance, things that cost money). The day we meet him, Mike has two clients. The first is an elderly man who believes his son has kidnapped his orange tabby cat. The second is a senior citizen living alone in his own house, who is not indigent, but upon whom dementia is creeping. He’s been picked up by the police more than once, not knowing where he was, and is in danger of becoming a ward of the State. This is Leo, played winningly by Burt Young. While Leo can no longer safely live alone at home, he does have money – enough to endow some parks in his neighborhood in his will, and enough to pay a monthly fee to a guardian. And Leo, of course, wants to live in his house, not in an old folks home.

Mike’s home life is happy if presently house-poor. His wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) is at home with their two young daughters. She’s smart, loving, and not likely to put up with any nonsense. The tree out front is dead and endangering the house. The health insurance premium check is written out but not yet mailed. And Mike has only two clients. He is stressed, reaching out to friends for overflow work from other practices, but having no luck. He jogs with his polar-opposite friend Terry (an endearing performance by Bobby Cannavale), but it’s not helping. It doesn’t solve his money problems, and he takes clear note of all the people jogging right past him. Giamatti is, after all, our Everyman – he is overweight, a tad whiny, with non-descript features but for the huge eyes always ready to tear up. All those fit people in spandex run past us, too, so we’re right there on his side.

Giamatti’s Mike and his business partner Vigman (the always authentic Jeffrey Tambor) also team up to coach the high school wrestling team, which is on a long losing streak. It is at this point that Mike essentially breaks – after doing an unsuccessful search for Leo’s daughter, with whom Leo’s had no contact in twenty years, he takes on the guardianship of the man, telling the court that it’s so the old man can stay in his house; but then Mike drops him off at the local assisted living facility while pocketing the monthly check. Suddenly he’s relaxed, pushing the guilt of his action to the back closet of his mind. The excuse he gives himself to not be a real guardian to Leo is that he hasn’t time. The man has two clients, he’s got time.

Into this situation walks a bleached blond teenage boy named Kyle, quietly and convincingly played by Alex Shaffer. He is the grandson Leo didn't know he had, he’s got a shiner, he took the bus alone from Ohio to New Jersey to the front stoop of his grandfather’s house. Jackie’s mother instincts kick in all over the place – protect the boy, but also protect her little girls from this unknown teenager. Kyle’s mother’s in a rehab facility in Ohio, and he’d been left with the mother’s boyfriend, which sends Jackie on the warpath against Kyle’s mother. Naturally she becomes the mother Kyle has always needed – mind you, Kyle’s turned out pretty well for having a mother in rehab and no stable father image. Amy Ryan’s terrific here, a wild cat protecting whatever child needs her help.

Meanwhile, in the primary plot, now Mike has to lie to everyone – the boy, the grandfather Leo, his wife, his daughters, as well as the court. Because this is Giamatti, we see the inner torment over the one criminal act that snowballs into many lies. Giamatti’s Mike is kind, tolerant of just about everyone, and a good man despite his imperfections.

Things seem to be going right – no one guesses that Mike’s cheating the client and the system, Kyle is settling in nicely with Mike’s family, and then turns out to be a wrestling champ. Now he can even resuscitate Mike’s losing wrestling team while making a best friend. Cannavale’s character Terry, who’s miserable over his breakup with his wife (in which she seems to have gotten their house as well as their contractor) begs to join the team as another assistant coach, so now everybody’s a big happy family. Until …. you guessed it, the long-lost daughter shows up. Sullenly played by the charming Melanie Lynskey, Cindy is still a junkie, looking for what she can get, wheedling her father, trying to regain the affection of her estranged son, and hiring a lawyer (the estimable Margo Martindale) to help. This is where Mike could get into trouble, and if there was a moment of reality in this film, he would have. But he doesn’t. Everything’s settled discreetly, out of court, he has a big new extended family since Cindy willingly leaves her son with the Flahertys for the monthly guardianship fee, and Mike’s money problems are solved by his getting a second job. Which he should have done in the first place, right? But then we couldn’t have watched Tambor, Giamatti, and Cannavale being guys going nuts about high school wrestling matches. They do this very well, but as it’s March Madness time, aren’t we all seeing quite enough of guys going gaga over school sports?

Thomas McCarthy directed his own screenplay lovingly. It’s all about love, it’s all charming, the stumbles along the road dismaying. The primary stumbling block is, of course, the boy’s mother showing up – her very presence makes Kyle, a good kid, go crazy and do bad things. Just as a really bad situation made Mike Flaherty do bad things. We don’t know anything about what sent Leo’s daughter Cindy off the rails, but since she’s a junkie, she’s not likely to get much sympathy. Few actresses could have made us almost feel sorry for Cindy, but Lynskey pulls it off.

All of things that could go seriously wrong in this story do not because this just isn’t that kind of movie. It all ends up a step away from where you’d expect with confrontations, guilt, forgiveness, and pleasing resolutions, none of which involve the courts or the police or the Bar Association. “Win Win” is perhaps not a good film but seems to be due to its good acting. Structurally sound, well-paced, it’s the story’s absurdity and falseness pretending to be realism that bothers me. I doubt it’ll be out there on the big screen for long – but take heart, in a little while, it can be part of a pleasing evening at home.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer, but not the light.