As it happens

Jane Austen for bi-polar characters, letters included.

The most marvelous thing happened at the showing of Silver Linings Playbook (2012) I attended.  As Jennifer Lawrence's character reveals a very painful portion of her backstory, an audience member gasped and let go of a sympathetic "Ohhhh" as if this confidence was a true story being recounted in our own presence.  Even better, we all resisted the temptation to chuckle at this naive expression of sympathy, because we were not far from where that tender woman was.  At this point, still in the first act, all of us in the audience were already so invested in these characters that we had become genuinely worried about them and concerned for their emotional recovery and survival.

That's particularly impressive because at this point in the movie, they're both a pain in the neck.  That's a hallmark of the characters in writer-director David O. Russell's films, a corpus which includes Spanking The Monkey, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster, I ♥ Huckabees and The Fighter.  The films and the characters tend to be smart, acerbic, obsessed and a bit superior.  But there is a wonderful echt-Austen moment in the meeting of Lawrence's and Bradley Cooper's characters, the instant recognition of kindred damaged spirits and the consequent opening of hostilities as a mode of flirting.  Obviously, if you hate yourself, you're going to hate anyone you're attracted to, right?  After all, if your mind is broken, at least it shows you have one.



But where body and mind meet, that's where cinema lives.  So the film really takes off when Cooper and Lawrence dance together (charmingly, like the amateurs they are) to Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing."  Arlene Croce said it in her book about Astaire and Rogers:  When two characters sing together, they're falling in love; when they dance together, they want to have (or they are actually having) sex.  There is an intimate energy to the rehearsal montage (that word!) that is irresistible.

One last note -- the family dynamic is astonishingly similar to that of The Fighter, something I was thinking about in the theater before I remembered that the two films had the same writer-director.  There is the oppressive influence of the parents, the slightly soiled (and disapproved) girlfriend, the weight of brotherly expectation.   When you consider that the one piece is based on a true story and the other on an utterly unrelated novel, the critic feels invited to see autobiographical qualities in those shared elements.  And in both cases, Russell smoothly blends stars and journeyman actors into a seamless ensemble.

It seems Russell was always telling us about broken people -- it's just that he has now shifted his emphasis to the ways in which they fix themselves, and the result is exhilarating.

Enough to make you gasp and say, "Ohhhh..."

Under my head

A passel of young'uns snapping their whippers

As far as I can tell, the 2011 remake of Footloose is a pretty good for what it's meant to be, an excuse for tweeners to get out of the house and dream about how exciting it will be to be in high school.  (This sort of fantasy is always accomplished with the help of 27-year-old actors pretending to be 17.)  It is competently put together, with some moments of visual excitement which may be attributable to the skills of director Craig Brewer, who has made much more challenging films prior hereto (Hustle and Flowand Balck Snake Moan).  I am sure this was driven both by the paycheck and genuine affection for the original 1984 film, an affection I cannot feel, as I was already too old for the first film when that one came out.

Yet I see many films for which I am not the target demo, yet they reach me in some way.  I didn't mind Footloose, I didn't dislike it, yet I find it difficult to write anything about it because it felt like just a bunch of bits of film edited together so they would last an hour-and-three-quarters.  Nothing specific was communicated to me.  I know that was just me-- the film inspired both pleasure and displeasure from many, but I just felt a pleasant numbness.

What makes a film land or not land for any individual viewer?  I could say that I think the whole premise is phony and artificial -- that towns don't outlaw dancing, although specific religious sects do.  Director-co-writer Brewer tried to increase the plausibility factor by putting the fatal accident that triggers the repression at the front of the film (after a quite energetic title sequence), but a film like this is not meant to be believability, and such things almost damage the film.  I'm reminded of films that Laurel and Hardy made in the 1940s at the major studios, rather than the independent Hal Roach studio where they had done their best work.  The studios changed their make-up and lighting to be more natural and beelievable, and in the process destroyed much of what was charming about Laurel and Hardy.  They were always strange and fantastical characters, and to put them in the real world revealed them as aging, overweight men who seemed to be so simple that they should have been under medical supervision.  No longer golden fools dancing in the moonlight, they were old and pathetic.

Moreover, the film is not a musical.  Musicals I like.  Musicals I understand.  They have a special grammar and logic that appeals to me and bypasses the rational mind.  But Footloose wants to be rational.  The key, turning point scene consists of the villain and the hero making speeches.  Not singing, not dancing, but talking.  Talking about dancing.  But talking about dancing is not dancing.  This is an out-and-out confession that the filmmakers do not know how to make dance dramatic, or indeed even narrative.  Instead, dancing is appliqued onto a story of generation clash, and the same script could be used (and doubtless will be) for tagging, skateboarding or hang-gliding or whatever those wild kids want to get up to.  It would be unsurprising to see Tuesday Weld show up as a troubled teen.  In any event, the film is a romantic melodrama with comedy overtones and a lot of footage of young people dancing.  But not a musical.

The dancing, need I point out with overmuch emphasis (as Peter Cook said), is devoid of narrative content.  The boys and girls dance because they want to dance, because they are young, and because both in movies and the real world, dancing is a socially acceptable form of public foreplay -- almost communal foreplay.  Consequently, the single best sequence in the film is the "Let's Hear It For The Boy" montage in which the non-dancing comical sidekick gradually learns to dance, and with attitude and style.  That sequence alone gives me hope that Mr. Brewer will stop his flirtation with music and make a real full-out musical someday. 

Thus I think the best audience for this film are groups of happy 8 and 9 year olds watching the movie in large basement rec rooms watching the screen and aping the dance steps as they go along, although I shudder to think of the kiddie hip grinding that is likely to ensue.  Maybe the film should be issued in a karaoke dancealong version.

Ultimately the point is that there is no point in reading anything anyone writes about Footloose.  Because it is called Footloose, the name of a 1984 film, you know almost exactly what this is and you are capable of deciding whether you will like it or not, based on that fact.  That it is decent and professional is gratifying, but irrelevant, and people like me are irrelevant as spectators.

I hope it earns Mr. Brewer the privilege of making something closer to the heart -- his and mine.

The thin white line

Every Little Step (2008) is not only superior to the disastrous film version of the musical play A Chorus Line, it just may make the play itself unnecessary. The film is about auditions for a musical about an audition. Being film, it short-circuits the major flaw of the play--which is that it is, and must be, a rehearsed reenact of spontaneous human events. Documentary film by its nature can be present for and record actual events, although its presentation of them is in turn artificial.

That is, theater creates a spontaneous and natural shell within which to present a (usually) unspontaneous, un-natural event. Film--especially documentary film--does the reverse: capture actual life as it lived and encase it in a shell of technology which removes it from reality as experienced.

So part of the evaluation of which medium is most appropriate for which story must be the consideration--for whom is reality more important: the people in the narrative, or the people observing the narrative. In classical theater, in which surprise is not significant, and public ritual is at the forefront, the characters need no spontaneity. The entire significance of the event lies in it being carried out in public in the prescribed way so as to create a particular effect in the audience. That is theater in its most natural form. We may be more familiar with the variations and distortions introduced in the succeeding centuries, but they are the result of shifts in the culture and the technology--indeed, over the last ten years, the expectations created by film have colored our theater. But its roots are in pre-ordained ceremony. Theater is by necessity performance. If it is not now being performed before an audience, theater doesn't exist.

To the extent the film audience is a community, it is a continually temporary one. Primacy is invested in the events recorded and arranged, not the performance of the film. Film exists independent of the audience. How many films have failed with one audience, disappeared and reappeared to be celebrated by an audience in a different time and place. Film can punch a hole in space and time, theater exists solely within space and time.

The point of A Chorus Line was the difficulty and uncertainty of the audition process--the vulnerability of every performer who put himself on the line. If the play could be done with a different cast and a different outcome every night, it would be able to represent its own experience. But it can't. It must have pre-written lines, music, choreography. It must be rehearsed down to the last flutter of the last eyelash. And thus it invalidates itself.

The film of the audition for A Chorus Line requires only the artifice (and it is substantial) of film editing (and to some extent score music). I suppose to be utterly true to the event, one would have to sit through the entire process on some sort of endless live television feed. (Note to cable stations--get on this right away!) So for the sake of human endurance, we must needs have editing, shaping the incoherent experience into compact and well-formed narrative. Still the elements which have been shaped are themselves real and true. (The superb editing is by Brad Fuller and Fernando Villela. It rivals Alan Heim's work on All That Jazz.)

The performers are real and exciting, those who made the cut and those who didn't. Although the film is not the definitive Chorus Line documentary, there is some amazing vintage footage, included for purposes of comparison with the more recent performers. Not all of the play is represented (notably the song "Nothing" scarcely appears). There is an enchanting guest appearance by Jacques D'Amboise. Given the tightly-defined and somewhat artificial quality of the event being documented, the producer-directors did a superb job of making sure to have selected enough characters and have enough cameras running in enough places to have, like Frank Buck, brought it all back alive.

And when you see someone tell a loved one, "I got the job," to a loved one (not re-enacting it--the moment is happening right in front of you), there is such an irreducible reality to that joy that I defy you not to weep at the beauty of the sight.