The Art of Leonardo and others

by Marty and Martha Roth

The Art of Leonardo, and Others What a month for DiCaprio fans, although there’s good news and bad. In Martin Scorsese’s flamboyant, expensive “Gangs of New York,” Leo is, we’re afraid, a dud. For some reason he just refuses to act and so, when you put him together with Cameron Diaz who seems to have taken the same vow, they add little to this large-scale narrative scrawl. “Gangs” opens with a “Road Warrior”-type battle royal between native-born Yankee Bowery Boys, headed by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day Lewis), and the Dead Rabbits, an Irish immigrant gang under the leadership of Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). The film never really recovers from this horrific fight: ritual preparation with lots of candles and ratty leather garments; blood on the snow; body parts enthusiastically hacked by Bill the B. We see the carnage through the eyes of Priest’s young son, Amsterdam (DiCaprio), who will, like Hamlet, spend the rest of the show seeking to avenge his father’s death.

Scorsese miscalculated; he fails to rhyme the gang violence with larger political changes in the city, like the rise of Tammany politician William Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and the racist Draft Riots of 1863, and the film collapses into high-profile shapelessness as though he had run out of money and time. On the positive side are a brilliant, audacious production design and a lavish cast of talented extras: Chinese acrobats, Peking opera performers, Irish folk singers, African American tap dancers, lovely transvestites, and supporting actors like Broadbent, Brendan Geeson, David Hemmings, and Henry Thomas. Day Lewis steals what isn’t nailed down.

The good news for Leo-watchers is “Catch Me If You Can,” in which he shows good comic timing as a son who learns duplicity at his father’s knee and embarks on a career of impersonation and fraud. Christopher Walken does a wonderful job as smooth-talking Dad, and the grimmer and more dangerous aspects of a con man’s life aren’t mentioned in the blithe script, which makes it a perfect piece of fluff. “Catch Me” has almost no story except the new impersonations and a bumbling FBI chase (although the sequence of impersonations suggest the influence of James Thurber’s “Secret Life of Walter Mitty”). Tom Hanks sturdily pretends to be an FBI bloodhound sniffing the trail of Leo’s kited checks, and the ending takes a happy turn for which we were grateful; we’d grown fond of the young scamp.

Phillip Noyce’s “Rabbit-Proof Fence” is a true narrative of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and cruelty. Set in the Australia of the early 1930s, “Fence” tells the heroic tale of three young girls who escape from the boarding school where they were sent to be “civilized” after being literally ripped from their families. Alone and without resources, two of them manage to walk twelve hundred miles back to their home, partly by following the infamous fence the English built “to keep the rabbits on one side and us on the other.” Although much is made of this fence at the start, and its radical absurdity could have shaped the film, director Noyce and scriptwriter Christine Olsen let the image fall limply from their enervated grasp. Given the fact that life (human as well as leprine) is unruly and no respecter of fences, the film should orchestrate a triumph; but Kenneth Branagh’s wooden performance as Mr. Neville (the children call him “Mr. Evil”), a commissioner of aboriginal affairs, does as much as the two-dimensional screenplay to drain the film of its vitality. In the last few minutes we learn that the two heroines are still alive and we see the monumental women they have become; they pack more punch than anything that has gone before.

When Pedro Almodovar accepted the Golden Globe for “Talk to Her” as Best Foreign Language Film he praised his producers for having the courage to take on a script about “two comatose ladies.” No courage was needed; that’s the perfect set-up for a retro sex comedy in which the women can’t talk or even move. We get to know one of them, a bullfighter named Lydia (the glorious Rosario Flores, splendid in her Suit of Lights), before the goring that puts her in a coma. Her journalist lover Marco (Dario Grandinetti) keeps vigil at her hospital bedside where he gets to know a pudgy male nurse named Benigno (Javier Camara) who appears to be mildly retarded and is si milarly occupied with a beautiful young dancer, Alicia (Leonor Watling), in a coma since her accident.

We were somewhat creeped out by the story and the performances, although Almodovar’s smooth, shiny surfaces are always beguiling. The best moments are the scenes of the women’s inert bodies being exercised and dressed, and a wonderful silent film sequence sandwiched in to the middle involving a finger- sized manikin who scales the slopes of a normal-sized sleeping woman (are you getting the sense of his peculiar humor?). For all its surreal charm, “Talk to Her” is a moderately misogynist fantasy. The director of “All About My Mother” should be over this by now.

Our daughter loved “Chicago,” the Kander and Ebb musical made from a play called “Roxy Hart,” about gold-digging, thrill-seeking female murderers (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger) in Prohibition Chicago. On the other side of the music-video gap, Martha was less enthusiastic while Marty just shut down under the assault of images and went kind of comatose himself. The two women are treated as celebrity sex murderers who can look forward to show biz careers after a fancy lawyer(Richard Gere) gets them off, and a lot of the sizzle comes from their being Babes-in-the-big-house. In real life women rarely murder the men who betray, abuse or exploit them, while men kill women—their wives or lovers or total strangers—with chilling regularity. Having said that, we must admit that Zeta-Jones makes a magnificent floozy and Richard Gere did not give us hives. The less said about Zellweger the better. Where would the American musical be without Bob Fosse—and where would Kander and Ebb be without Kurt Weill? A long heritage of women in black bowler hats doing pelvic thrusts has dwindled to this degenerate offspring.

The script for Spike Lee’s “Twenty-fifth Hour” was written by David Benioff, who adapted his own small elegant novel into a sprawling, heavy-breathing homage to the victims and survivors of Sept. 11, 2001. The story of a convicted drug dealer on his last day before going to jail has some good moments, and strong performances by Ed Norton as the dealer, Rosario Dawson as his lover, Barry Pepper as an old friend and Anna Paquinas a precocious preppy sex pot passed the first hour pleasantly enough. But “Hour” is too ramshackle to bear any weight of suspense or even sustained interest, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s gifts are squandered. The attempt to marry this private farewell to New York with sad celebration of catastrophe overloads the film.

Hardworking press agents have made Charlie Kaufman the best-known screenwriter of the day, and having admired “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” we looked forward to “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” Based on a memoir by Chuck Barris, creator of such rich cultural artifacts as “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game,” and “The Gong Show,” “Confessions” wheels freely through the worlds of network TV, CIA special ops, and 1970s California dreamin’, without ever really letting a story take shape. Some sequences have wit and bite but most have a slovenly, druggy demeanor. Sam Rockwell turns in a gorgeous performance as Barris, but it’s a little like finding a pearl in a Ho-Ho. Supporting actors Clooney, Julia Roberts, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rutger Hauer telegraph desperately what fun they’re having. Pity we couldn’t share it.

Roman Polanski’s most recent film, “The Pianist,” is the story of a Polish Jewish pianist, Wladislaw Szpilman, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Warsaw although the rest of his family did not. The bloody story of the Warsaw uprisings, first in the Ghetto and then in the city as a whole, are familiar to those of us who have seen a few movies over the years, and the verisimilitude of Polanski’s version (the director himself survived the war in Poland) doesn’t really add much to this endless sub-genre. “The Pianist” is very long and good to look at, and it reduces life to a series of stark sensations: cold, warm; hungry, full; fearful, relieved; foul, clean. As played by Adrien Brody, a boring actor whose interesting face has fooled many a casting director, the pianist is a passive, emotionally empty cipher whose survival was a matter of luck and random acts of kindness.

Other reviewers have called the film a reverential commemoration of the twentieth-century Judaicide, but that’s not what we saw. Instead, we saw a bitter and ambivalent meditation on art and family. Throughout his ordeal Szpilman has no focus beyond the memory of his music, and that also seems to be his meaning for others as he is passed along to safety by people who recognize him as Poland’s greatest musician. He is more a Pole than a Jew, from the lush, showy Chopin that he plays. Although much care is taken early on to establish a warm, cultivated, argumentative family, once they are sent to the camps neither Szpilman nor the film ever refers to them again. One can only wonder why in Polanski’s work the nuclear family has not been a safe or pleasant place; think “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Macbeth.”

At the theater, Michael Frayn’s suave three-person play “Copenhagen” explores a historical moment in 1941 when Werner Heisenberg, quantum physicist and loyal German, came to Copenhagen to visit his mentor Niels Bohr, a Danish Jew whose brilliant teaching and hospitality facilitated many of the cutting-edge discoveries of the 1920s and 30s. Park Square Court’s production features three fine actors, Stephen D’Ambrose as Niels Bohr, Katherine Ferrand as Margrethe Bohr, and J. D. Cutler as Heisenberg, and under John Cranney’s direction they make what is essentially a long conversation about nuclear physics, history, loyalty, and scientific ethics both dramatic and fascinating. Rick Polenek’s perfect set amounts to three chairs, a teacart, and a huge expressionistic backdrop with equations chalked over an aerial map. It’s clever of a playwright to let history do some of his work, and the audience collaborates at least in the sense that we accept the cosmic significance of the characters’ talk.

Over in the Other City, the Guthrie offers a splendid production of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Hers is a disreputable one but she plies it successfully, and playwright George Bernard Shaw coolly demonstrates that there is no such thing as clean money. In this early play Shaw created some wonderful characters who turn up under different names in later plays: Mrs. Warren’s daughter Vivie is a New Woman (like Major Barbara, Ann in “Man and Superman,” or Liza Doolittle herself); her lover Frank has abundant charm but no money or ambition (like so many cheeky boys); and Sir George Croft is a plain-speaking old capitalist rascal cut from the same cloth as Undershaft or Shotover. Shaw was a writer of idea plays but also a theatrical genius who learned from Wilde and the Restoration wits to clothe ideas firmly in language and characters that can hold an audience spellbound. The production was about the best we have seen in thirty-five years of Guthrie theater-going. Lisa Peterson’s direction was crisp and economic and Vivienne Benesch gave a triumphant performance as Vivie.

Over the years we’ve seen many wonderful things in the Out There performance series that Walker Art Center and the Southern Theater bring into our drab Midwestern Januaries, but luck, or gifted performers, may have run out. A New York company called Big Art Group presented “Shelf Life,” a live video/theater piece that began with one small idea—to use multiple video cameras with limited range to shoot manufactured images made out of graphics and multiple actors—and beat it quite to death. If this sounds confusing, imagine an enormously long arm, constructed from video images of three actors’ arms in identical jersey sleeves, showing on a screen in front of the actors and the cameras. Some amusement was meant to derive from Asian and Black actors wearing identical platinum-blonde wigs. Perhaps the audience should demand tighter quality control from the series producers.