The cruelest month

by Marty and Martha Roth

Our daughter in the film business warns us every Christmas to beware the films of February, the month of cinematic garbage when Hollywood unloads everything that was barely fit to print. We tried to circumvent this wasteland by going to out-of-the-way venues, but then we encountered another financial wrinkle in the entertainment business. The Parkway (“Tully”) and the University Film Society (“Code Inconnu”) were showing films that we had already seen on cable TV. We saw “Tully” again before we realized what was happening. Hilary Birmingham’s quiet film of a Nebraska farm family plays off its pastoral surface against a dire American story, and its casual earnestness manages to avoid exposing its plot excesses (the monster mother, the illegitimate son). All the principals are just right, particularly Anson Mount as Tully, Julianne Nicholson as Ella, and Bob Burrus as the father.

And then we suffered films like “The Recruit” and “Daredevil” for our sins, anyway. “Recruit” seems designed to show how clever CIA tactics are, yet both the film and the “CIA tactics” in it are spectacularly inept, ill-conceived and poorly executed. The film is populated by the worst spies imaginable, lending some weight to current concerns about U.S. security services—one tactic consists of ducking quickly behind a car on the populous streets of Georgetown to avoid being seen. Al Pacino, a veteran operative, seduces computer ace Colin Farrell into working for the CIA by playing on his ambivalence toward his father, who might himself have been a spook, but these plot points have no relevance whatsoever. Farrell (a new Brad Pitt) is at least cute but Pacino grows more physically grotesque with every film; repeated closeups show that he talks as if his face hurt. And well it might; director Roger Donaldson has the chutzpah to stage an early training scene in which Pacino says, “We are here because we believe, we believe in good and evil and we choose good. We believe in right and wrong and we choose right.” But what can you expect from a film set in a place called the George Bush Center for Intelligence?

“Daredevil” is another comic-book, high-decibel film where every movement or gesture cracks or bangs with acoustic punctuation and everything makes a significant noise except the mouth in the act of dialogue. Ben Affleck stars as Matt Murdock, New York lawyer by day and costumed crimefighter by night. When he was a child, Matt was blinded by industrial chemicals at the very moment when he discovered that his boxer father was an enforcer for a local crime syndicate, and he has learned to triangulate objects in the dark, fight like a samurai and move through the urban jungle without fear. There are a series of villains in the film, the most dazzling being Colin Farrell again, nicknamed Bullseye because of a target tattooed on his forehead and his unerring way with any missile. He’s hell with a paper clip. Affleck has a charming courtship fight with Jennifer Garner, but “Daredevil” remains a wretched film with little narrative glue behind the fights. It’s hard to tell whether Jennifer Garner has talent; it’s clear Affleck does not.

Philip Noyce’s “The Quiet American” should be partially exempt from our opening judgment. It’s a well-made, visually powerful film that just doesn’t work. To begin with, a film that stakes its effect on the discovery of a dark side to American innocence courts a fatal naivete. We simply can’t revisit a time when we first learned that behind their milk-fed charm Americans could be cruely duplicitous with such simple wonder as the film displays. Set in Saigon in 1952 with the French colonial occupation at the point of defeat, the film weaves its allegory of America through a love triangle consisting of Fowler (Michael Caine), a newspaper correspondent, sunk into the sins of colonialism—opium, an Asian mistress, and a cynical indifference to morality; his mistress Phuong (Do Hai Yen); and an American medical advisor, Pyle (Brendan Fraser), an agent for the newly named CIA, who is working behind the scenes to expel the French but who is at the same time offensively sincere in his belief in the gospel of democracy. Pyle becomes offended at Fowler’s living arrangements, falls in love with Phuong, and offers to marry her and take her away from all that. But performances and images do not fall neatly into place in fulfilment of this outline. Caine plays his European realism as weakness (he feels so tired), while Fraser, a fine actor, is altogether too large, too strong, in Marshall McLuhan’s terminology too “hot,” for the screen.

What hurt most was an atrocious “Nicholas Nickleby” that we attended with some expectations since the cast glittered with fine names. The film may have been desperately trying to separate itself from Trevor Nunn’s magnificent 12-hour stage version, adapted for TV in the 80s, but the result was Dickens on speed. Even the best actors went for a Monty-Pythonish distortion of character: Jim Broadbent went totally over the top as Wackford Squeers, master of Dotheboys Hall and a creature of twisted and villainous deformity, and Nathan Lane, Dame Edna Everage, and Allan Cuming capered and simpered as traveling players. Only Edward Fox as the predatory Sir Mulberry Hawkes deserves to escape a lashing.

But there are exceptions to every rule and Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” escaped the rule of February. Its subtle interweaving of three women’s stories offered the perfect antidote to the month’s wretched acting. The story of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), struggling with madness while she prepares to write “Mrs. Dalloway,” set off a story of a 1950s housewife, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), uneasy in suburban Los Angeles, and the contemporary New York story of smart Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), feeling estranged from her lover (Alison Janney) and daughter (Claire Danes) while she devotes her time and energy to caring for an ex-husband (Ed Harris) dying of AIDS. The stories are all downers, no doubt about it, yet the film is directed and photographed with such wit and gusto that its ultimate effect is quite upbeat. Daldry and screenwriter David Hare have style in the finest sense; their film listens to itself and takes itself seriously. What was promised in “Nickleby” is abundantly true here: a wealth of performance, not merely the three principals—Julianne Moore, as she often does, slides close to delicate self- parody—but Ed Harris (who almost always amazes), Toni Colette, Eileen Atkins (on and off in a few moments), Stephen Dillane, and a wonderful boy-presence, Jack Rovello. “The Hours” devotes a lot of visual energy to parallels between the three women and the three stories, but each has a distinctive tone. This is a serious, grown-up film about pain and death in women’s lives, and it’s an awful lot of fun.

Among its many brilliant and innovative theatrical strategies, Theatre de la Jeune Lune has from time to time wedded its acting company to different kinds of performance. The marriage with opera created stunning productions of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and “Don Giovanni.” In its last work (now unhappily over), “The Circus of Tales,” the company merged with a company of aerialists to set in motion an overlapping series of fairy tales. There were choice examples of the zaniness we have come to expect from this company (Barbara Berlovitz’s spoiled brat, Stephen Epp’s frog prince, Vincent Gracieux’s wannabe prince, etc. etc.) but there was also a dazzling use of all that other space that we normally don’t even bother to look at, the feathery grace of an upper atmosphere filled with swinging bodies.

Jungle Theater’s current production, Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” represents a serious failure in playwriting that barely gave the fine performers a chance (except, maybe, not to schedule the play at all). “Hero,” billed as a complex drama of ethical dilemma and the betrayal of friendship, is itself betrayed by its central character, lobby hero Jeff, a security guard who staffs the front desk of an apartment building and whiles away the time joking with his boss and the two cops that pass through the lobby. The play fails the Juliet’s Nurse test: how to communicate the character of a great bore and yet not bore the audience. A static series of two-person scenes dealt out an exposition that seems to go on forever and keeps on going long after any reason has ceased to exist. James Young II gives an immensely competent performance as the security boss, William, and we enjoyed seeing an African American character as an authority figure.

Martha Clarke, one of the founding dancer-choreographers of Pilobolus and now a maker of dance theater, brought “Vienna: Lusthaus [revisited],” a new version of a nearly 20-year-old piece, to Northrop Dance Series in February. “Vienna” evokes the complicated emotional currents of that city at the turn of the twentieth century: artistic, sporting, political, and medical (Freudian) in a series of quick vignettes that combine intense physical movement with music and speech. The effect resembled a series of snapshots, some comic, some sexy, fearful, squalid or tragic, performed by agile dancers prancing like horses, embracing, “skating,” waltzing, writing. What should have been a charming intimate performance was spoilt by the venue. Dance fans, arise! We’ve suffered long enough; it’s time we demand that dance be presented in a better place than Northrop.