the wrestler (d. aronofsky, w. robert d siegel)

The Wrestler is a skilful piece of film making. This deduction is possible because when you look at the narrative, at what’s going on in the film, it’s all fairly silly. (Said without wanting to sound too English). The Ram basically commits hari-kiri, using his sizeable heart by-pass wound and a fat old man who goes under the stage name of The Ayatollah to carry out the deed. This because he went out and got ‘fucked-up’ when he should have been making amends with his estranged daughter, who as a result becomes even more estranged. The lap dancer who doesn’t fancy him suddenly does and quits it all to convince him not to commit hari-kari, but because he's such a complete and total fuck-up he goes ahead and does it anyway.

Maybe this is supposed to be a warped commentary on the American dream. It makes for a lot of potential schmaltz and vaguely preposterous narrative turns, but, in spite of all this, the film kind of works.

There’s doesn’t seem to be too much doubt where the credit for this lies. Firstly Aronofsky, who shows he can pull off the multi-faceted Soderburgh trick. The grainy, restless hand-held photography successfully conveys the bleakness of some of the colder, duller parts of the US. It also adds a pseudo-documentary feel to the investigation of the wrestling sub-culture the film is set in. The participants don’t feel like Hollywood actors faking it – they feel like the real, unadorned thing. In addition to this, no one does screen violence better than Aronofsky. It’s often wince-making, and again, even when it’s clearly fake, (as in the meat-slicer scene), he pulls it off. There’s a kind of meta-text at work here: the fakeness of the wrestling violence is reflected in the fakeness of movie violence, and as a result the audience really doesn’t know what hurts and what just look like it hurts. Consequently, when it doesn’t just look like it hurts, but looks like it really looks like it hurts, the violence is hyper-effective, and we feel Rourke/ Ram’s pain all the more.

Rourke is the second reason the film works. It’s a performance which succeeds as much for its under-statement as its over-statement, and this is what separates it from other renowned macho performances. The moments of reflection which suggest that all the pain he’s endured (or faked) has taught him something, that something in part being the uselessness of a macho approach. The performance is a sly commentary on North American values; emphasising both the abrasive charm of a macho posture, but also its suicidal boneheadedness. In this regard The Wrestler might well be the full stop at the end of eight years of neo-con government.

three monkeys (d nuri bilge ceylan, w. ceylan & ebru ceylan / ercan kessel)

This was the last film he watched before fleeing England. His pursuers not really external, they were internal, and besides, it might have been argued that the true object of his flight resided in the place he was headed for.

Was Three Monkeys an appropriate film to watch under these circumstances? I would like to be able to tell the reader that yes, this film was the one that compounded or concretised or validated or whatever other mangled word sprung to mind his flight. That in its brooding Istanbul melodramacy, he perceived a key which neither his hometown nor the place of his flight had ever revealed. That as he watched the, (it emerged) revelatory titled Three Monkeys, the key turned, his lock was sprung, and he prised from the narrative’s own locked algorithm the solution to it all.

However, to suggest this would be to deceive. And although deceit and its consequences were the raw materials of Three Monkeys, and although the film did indeed brood with an intense, near-catastrophic Turkish gloom, signalled by random events whose significance would never be known, only gleaned, (the son’s assault; the man’s visit to the mosque; the son’s brutal vomiting; the wife’s red nightdress), these things in the end cloyed his impatient mind, (impatient to flee), leaving him with a sense of frustration rather than epiphany.

Sometimes a film can skewer you to your soul; at others it skids past like a long-lost lover avoiding you in the street.

revolutionary road (d. mendes, w.justin haythe)

Article 1. Wo sind die kinder?

Towards the end of the film, the last time the Wheelers will see one another, after their long night of the soul, April decides to pretend for the benefit of Frank, and makes him breakfast. She says something along the lines of - 'I sent the kids away, as I thought you'd like to have a quiet breakfast before your big day'. At which point one is tempted to scream: What kids! Admittedly their two children have been glimpsed, upon occasion. But miraculously, every time the Wheelers have one of their bust-ups (frequently) or invite the all-seeing mad man round for lunch (twice) or need to go out - the kids vanish. Who looks after them? Where do they go? Why are they so conveniently absent? The reason this seems important is that this is a film seeking to capture a raw emotional honesty - it could be argued its the whole premise and raison d'etre for the making of the movie - but right there you have this massive child shaped gap, suggesting a void at the heart of all this truth, a lack of emotional honesty. There's one very good dramatic reason for absenting the children so much: the movie strives to ensure that the audience retains sympathy for the Wheelers, in particular April, in spite of the nasty way they act towards one another. If the audience were to glimpse the suffering their actions imparted to their children, their sympathy quotient would plummet.

Article 2. Paradise Lost involves losing a paradise.

The film opens with a roadside argument. It feels as though this will be a pivotal moment. The rot has set in and the slide towards marital disintegration has begun. This is fair enough. Except that, within the context of the film, it's not a pivotal moment. Because the audience is never shown what has been lost. We're asked to buy into the notion that the Wheelers possessed some unique, Fitzgeraldian glow, without being given any evidence for it. (If there is any template for Revolutionary Road the movie, not the book which I haven't read, it's surely  Tender is The Night, which endows the Divers with a similar, although articulated mystique.) A few fragmentary flashbacks aside, the narrative dwells exclusively in the section of the arc that has crossed the yardarm. In effect, what this means is that an audience's real reason for accepting the (vital) premise that these characters have something magical about them (which they lose) is the fact they're played by very famous and beautiful people. Which is a bit of a trick, when all's said and done - the conceit being that because these very famous and beautiful people are so special, then the Wheelers must be too. 

Article 3: The Meta-narrative. 

This is a bit more discursive. Mendes has been the key overseer over recent decades in the evolution of a kind of boutique theatre, initiated at the Donmar, his highly successful London HQ, a product of its late-Thatcher, Blairite era. This has seen the creation of a meticulously cast and packaged brand of theatre, which takes calculated risks to create an expensive cultural product, consumed avariciously by its affluent consumers. A couple of years ago Mendes quit the Donmar, in part to exercise his ambitions to make movies, in part, one likes to think, because he recognised that what he was doing there was, in a way, creatively bankrupt. An exercise in capitalism as much as theatre. In this sense, Mendes was, within the meta-narrative of the film, Frank Wheeler. Around the time he quit he also hooked up with Winslet, who is April within the meta-narrative as well as the film. Winslet, a partner whose filmic cultural framework offers Mendes the opportunity for redemption. It comes as no surprise that much of the film becomes an exercise in Mendes capturing Winslet, luminescent, tragic, striving towards a broader personal frontier, striving to get to Paris. The raw emotional honesty Revolutionary Road seeks to capture is testament to their brave new creative world. However, just as it's harder for a rich man to get to heaven than not enjoy the sight of Kidman taking her clothes off on the Donmar stage, the last place to go in search of raw emotional truth-telling is Hollywood. Where the very budgets themselves conspire to wrap your truths in a tasteful package of well-framed shots with excessive amounts of extras. No matter how desperately hand-held it all gets towards the conclusion. Hollywood cannot offer the Wheelers cinematic redemption. There's only one place to go for that, but you have to be able to speak the language. And that's Paris.

My friend told me in the pub after watching the film that if you're on facebook you can poke Godard. Maybe Sam should give him a nudge and see if that spawns the missing children.

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao (junot diaz)

To start at the beginning of our relationship. Mine and Junot's. There's a certain novelistic circularity. Back in 1994, when I was given the nickname Y&T, and living in Montevideo, a North American friend, who I would never see again, called Chrissie Ehrick, who was studying some aspect of the politics of Battle and its relationship to feminism, I suspect, gave me a book called Drown to read, written she said, by a New Yorker. And although there was plenty going on that year, more than enough to keep me busy, I read it.

Drown was a collection of short stories that propelled Diaz onto the map as a literary prodigy. Apart from the fact it seemed more hispanic than gringo, I can't for the life of me remember a thing about it.  Not a character nor a storyline. I don't even remember if I liked it.

Fast forward fifteen years (that's quite a few years in relationship-time) and I, on the point of returning to Montevideo for my first extended stay since 1994, find myself reading Diaz again. Not that he's been exactly prolific. God knows what he's been up to all this time, but it certainly hasn't been getting books published. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was only published last year. As is the way of relationships, I've changed and so has he. Although how much I can't tell, as I don't remember what he used to be like. But I do know he's grown up into a full-blooded novelist, and whatever stopped him writing novels (or getting stuff published) for fifteen years didn't mean he wasn't working on it. (I'll wikipedia him in a moment and no doubt all will be revealed.)

This book wouldn't have had as much of an impact on me back then, just like I don't think he'd have written it. Why? Because, it is, in large part, about growing up. The pains of. Underneath the book, hidden away in the corners, is a narrator, who grows up alongside Oscar and his sister Lola, his story tucked away in the margins. Maybe that's Junot, maybe it's not, he sure as hell flirts with making us think it might be.

Or maybe Junot has more in common with the tragic nerd, Oscar, the hero of his book. Or one of them. Not every day a book manages to make one of nature's losers into its hero, but Oscar is all these things. Hero, nerd and loser. Cursed by the fate of his family, and the family cursed by the island they come from. An island cursed by Columbus, and maybe whoever else came before him.

Like all the best books, he says with gross generalisation, The Brief Life is about a lot of things: Trujillo; Dictators; The Dominican Republic; girls; boys; sex; grannies; moms; growing up, and its eternally recurring inevitability. Threaded through the book are enough literary references to keep his students happy (the flyleaf tells us Snr Diaz has been teaching). But more importantly, threaded though the book, is a warm skein of what they call, in the places they know it, humanity. Which preserves the nerds and history's losers, in spite of the power of the ones who think they're winning. 

In one of his many footnotes, Diaz mentions Rushdie with reference to the constant clash of dictators and writers. He says that the reason dictators feel threatened by writers is they recognise competition when they see it. Through telling the simple stories of good people who suffered at the hands of the bad guys, with all bad guy roads in the Dominican Republic leading to Trujillo, Diaz adds his shot to the war between writers and dictators, doing his best to ensure that history's last words won't be written by the 'winners'. So, in addition to the fact this is a beautifully written, very funny and kind of moving and all those other key novel-ticking- boxes book... The Brief Life is also deeply political, and that's just another reason why you should be reading it before you go to Montevideo, or the pub, or the succeeding phase of adulthood, or wherever it is you're headed to next.

woman in mind (w&d ayckbourn)

The heaviest snowfalls in 18 years mean that the West End has virtually closed. Ayckbourn's new, last play has corralled a few punters in from dark shows, and the Vaudeville is perhaps a third full. I'm there as I'd booked my ticket a while ago, to see Mr Paul Kemp, a Stephen Joseph regular, do his thing. It has been noted before somewhere else, long ago, that I don't normally review shows to which I have a personal connection (ie almost all the theatre I see) but a blend of the Blitz spirit and the subtly notable nature of the event make this an exception.

I have come to Ayckbourn late, seeing three of his shows in recent years, all of them featuring Mr Kemp. With the demise of Pinter, the stage is left to the likes of Stoppard, Churchill and Ayckbourn from the old guard, the writers who I might have grown up knowing their names, reading their plays, before even really knowing what theatre was. Pinter and Ayckbourn both started off as actors. They had a keen understanding of the way a stage can be used, and what makes an audience hold their breath, largely as a result of striving to achieve the latter on a regular basis. They also understood why people, from all walks of life, want to and enjoy coming to a theatre. 

Now Ayckbourn is also bowing out. Woman in Mind is supposed to be his last show. He's written thirty thousand of them, or more, perhaps. It's worth speculating on the fate of the later ones. History can't really hold up more than a dozen or so plays by most writers: the rest wither away, the province of scholars or sectarian freaks. Wise writers cut back as they get older, but Ayckbourn, like the Stones, doesn't know the meaning of the word, stop, he's kept on rolling, his plays guaranteed an audience in his Scarborough outpost, getting the odd staging in New York, or being turned into a French film.

Woman in Mind opens with a woman, Susan, lying on a grass lawn, as Mr Kemp talks gobbledygook to her. She has two families, one of them imaginary and ideal, the other real and deeply imperfect. Gradually she and the audience realise that the imaginary one is just that: no-one else can see them, they are the product of her mind, probably caused by stepping on a rake. (That old chestnut, the old chestnut chortled.) The play becomes a dialectic, these two worlds, one real, one seemingly not, interacting in Susan's mind, as she tries to cope with her disfunctional family and her own frustrations. This dialectic leads towards the most surprising and (almost) sad of syntheses, the audience no longer certain if the play has been set in her garden or her mind, as the curtain falls on a woman speaking gibberish, the last words of a man who's said so many. 

Every play I've seen of Mr Ayckbourn's has left me somewhat dissatisfied, and this is no exception. The last surreal scene might be a cop-out, meaning the narrative never quite comes to the boil it deserves. However, with Woman In Mind this really didn't bother me. Because Woman in Mind contains enough theatrical genius in its little finger to make it worth the entrance fee and the trek across an Arctic city. The punters who'd missed out on Oliver and found themselves transferred to her will never know how lucky they were.

I've never read Marivaux, but this is what I imagine Marivaux feels like. The play between the real and the unreal, the flesh and the mind, something that only a play can play at, is dazzling, funny and always disorientating. In a sense it's very simple, but that simplicity, as every fool knows, is an act of brilliant contrivance. The way in which this simple device is used gives us a sign that theatre can still be fresh, can still play with our minds; and it shows us how much fun it is to have our minds played with, by someone who knows. Who still knows how.

milk (d. gus van sant, w. dustin lance black)

The friend with whom I went to see this film found it moving - as we walked out into the night she said something about it being a wonderful film, then looked in my direction and saw I wasn't responding and said - oh, didn't you like it?

It wouldn't be accurate to say I didn't like it, but it did feel like a bit of a mess. The film itself got me thinking about all the issues it wanted me too (and even researching why the poignancy of Milk's achievement is just as great today), but it also got me thinking about what makes a good film, a good story, a good biopic. If not in that order.

Milk's story is inspirational, and in the exhortations to change, and the film's emphasis on minorities, possesses a seemingly conscious hint of Obamisation. It's one of those stories that needs to be told, and Penn's performance as Milk is impressive, capturing the fey steeliness which Milk discovered in his forties. Van Sant threads archive footage into his narrative, and the sequence when Milk first arrives in Castro with his boyfriend has a verve and energy which seems to conjure up that heady time, on the cusp of the sixties' end. Milk's transformation from rakish hippie back to clean-cut businessman who could fit into the machine, also seems indicative of the sacrifices the minority/ counter culture had to make to secure representation and status, a process which also seems to have reached a logical conclusion in the election of the US' new president.

However, and I'll comment on that word in a moment, the screenplay seems to struggle to keep up with the succession of events which comprised the last ten years or so of Milk's life. Boyfriends come and go, (there were more who were edited out) and Milk tries year after year to win political office. The confusing details of Proposition Six are fought and defeated, whilst Milk learns to become a politician, making strategic alliances and campaigning on populist issues, such as dog shit. Somewhere in it all, yoked together by the recorded monologue Penn/ Milk makes in the event of his death, there is the narrative of a man overcoming his own insecurities, his own struggle to come out, as well as his fascination with the edgier side of gay culture (personified in the film by the underdeveloped suicidal boyfriend, Jack Lira). This story - the story of the man as well as the activist - keeps getting in the way of the other story, which is the story of the activist as martyr, and to my mind these stories (and perhaps others as well) ended up cluttering the two hours of screen time to such an extent that, charismatic though many of the characters depicted were, as well as being beautifully acted, the whole never hung together, and the movie seemed to move along like a car caught in the wrong gear.

However... I spend all my days dwelling in the portals of Character, Narrative, Premise and those other touchstones of the orthodox script. Scripts are constantly being skewered on the railings of my 'however'. And it is, in part, by these terms that I choose to judge Milk. Whereas my friend found herself absorbed in the simple story, which is, without doubt, moving and uplifting. Which is all that matters, as films are not made in search of perfection, rather, they seek to strike a chord with their given audience. And there's not much doubt that Milk does this. Given this my cavils seem kind of beside the point.

+++

Briefly, on the subject of biopics. This is a curious phenomenon, and one perhaps has different rules to the usual objectives of dramatic cinema. Where most films are seeking to make entertainment, the biopic is more concerned with writing history. Which is an elusive thing to capture in a narrative-friendly fashion, (ay there's the rub), as history doesn't conform to the rules of storytelling, which recreates truth to meet its own ends. (Apologies for the amount of brackets, but please imagine a whole host of notes in the margin, or a flurry of inverted commas packaged around almost every thought herewith expressed.) Milk's flaws (in my eyes) are perhaps nothing but the determination of history to refuse to let facts work in a programmed, machine-like, manner. Given all this I started to think that it's almost impossible to create a dramatically satisfying biopic. And then I remembered how much I enjoyed Che: Part 1, earlier this month; and then, as I write, I recall how much I took from The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, which is when all's said and done, a biopic. The trick, of course, is to be subjective, and also, to have no fear of distorting the apparent truth in the quest for those truths which are not so apparent, which do not lie on the surface. If that's what you're looking for.

snow [w orhan pamuk]

In the week or so since I've finished Snow the economic crisis in the UK, and other parts of the world, has slipped another notch, a new leader of the Western world has been installed, with great fanfare, there have been no terrorist outrages, and, apropos nothing at all, I have read another ten thousand scripts.

Beside the last point, all of the above has some pertinence to Pamuk's novel. Although this is a novel set in Kars, a small town in a distant corner of Turkey, Pamuk succeeds in convincing the reader that what he is actually writing about is the great ebb and flow of ideas and ideologies which shape the margins, and therefore by definition, the very structures themselves, of this world, this world being the one within which all of the above information might seem of pertinence.

The novel describes the brief stay in the city of a minor Turkish poet, Ka, who finds himself trapped there by heavy snowfalls, as the army seize power in a theatrical coup. The coup is conducted with the aim of suppressing the radical Muslim influences in the town. It's doomed to be unsuccessful, its lifespan no longer than the time it will take for the snow to start melting. During his stay, Ka meets all the city's key political players. He falls in love with Ipek, who he later learns is a former lover of Blue, the leader of the radical Muslims. Ostensibly in the city to investigate a recent spate of suicides by girls who have refused to take their headscarves off, Ka finds himself possessed by his poetic muse, writing a flood of poetry for the first time in years.

Snow is therefore, about many things: the value of love, the nature of creativity, the curse of politics. It's a multi-layered book, which can be read from a variety of perspectives. There are all kinds of themes one could choose to highlight, and a variety of readings to be had. As such its invidious to select one, but given the week that's passing, it feels prescient to choose to nominate the way in which Snow unfurls the great dividing line that exists between the world of the 'West' and the world of those who feel alienated by this 'West' with its laisser faire morals, economics and social structures. In his travels round Kars, Ka walks the tightrope which is this fault line, understanding the need and value for belief, whilst also cherishing his right to write what he wants, and to love in accordance with the urgings of his heart.

It comes as little surprise to learn that its not a tightrope that can be walked for long. Ka finds it impossible to resist his tragic destiny, falling under the sway of what he perceives to be an inevitable unhappiness. The novel skillfully diffuses tension, constantly leaking information about what the future holds for its characters. Pamuk's book doesn't seem so much interested in the tension inherent in his plot (the survival of a hero adrift in an anarchic cut-off border town) as the tensions that collectively create a context for the hero's plot to unfold. Tensions which provoke his creativity, which force him to come to terms with what really matters in life. Tensions which underpin the aspirations of both 'Western' society, and the parallel society which defines itself in opposition to 'the West', one shaped by its poverty just as much as the West is shaped by its wealth.

slumdog millionaire (d. danny boyle, w. simon beaufoy)

There's a short interview on the Guardian website with Boyle, where he says that he doesn't want Slumdog to become this year's Mamma Mia, suggesting that any audience looking for a feelgood movie is going to find the first hour of the film hard work. It seems to me, in saying this, he's identifying the complex conundrum at the heart of the work, which we'll get to in a moment.

Firstly, though, let's talk about the grade. Boyle also mentions in the interview how much he loves digital film making. It's not every day you watch a film and get excited by the grade, more or less the last thing to occur in the film-making process. After the footage has been shot, assembled, sound mixed, comes the grade, the process whereby the pictures themselves are enhanced and an overall look can be imposed. Slumdog is a luscious visual fest. Chillies glow hyper-red; the golden hue of an evening interview room is hyper-golden. This is a world saturated in colours which seem larger than life. The colours heighten everything, giving the film a vigorous, energetic beauty which matches Anthony Dod Mantle's percussive cinematography. Boyle manipulates all the technical tools at his disposal to impressive effect, cajoling the technology to drive the narrative forwards.

The narrative is one of those too-good-to-be-true stories, both a screenplay and a marketing perfect storm. It's impossible not to admire the chutzpah of Celador: having planted themselves on the film-making landscape through the money laid by their golden goose, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, they then discover a novel manufactured entirely around their product, and turn it into a blockbuster which not only works cinematically but also re-invigorates a flagging core brand. The simple structure of each answer Jamal giving as he climbs the Millionaire ladder tying into his personal history is a wonderfully effective piece of storytelling, allowing the narrative to flit backwards and forwards in time. Beaufoy lashes this into shape, keeping the pace up, even if the film descends towards cliche in its treatment of the fraternal relationship. In the list of Slumdog's antecedents, The Full Monty is the fairy godmother. Having learnt from the rather more downbeat Yasmin, Beaufoy has gone back to the positive messages which made his name, and whilst Slumdog is very much a testament to Boyle's directorial facility, it owes a lot to Beaufoy's feelgood muscles.

Which brings us back to Mamma Mia. And Los Olvidados, ie neo-realism. And a far wider discussion which I shall try to address as succinctly as possible, raising issues rather than answering questions.

Slumdog is quite obviously a feelgood movie. The guy gets the girl, and the money, and a whole nation is delighted for him. The guy, Jamal, played with a perfect downbeat insouciance by Dev Patel, is a sympathetic hero who goes on a classic journey, encapsulated by the film's title. We want him to succeed and he does. So why should Boyle be looking to play this down? 

The director talks about how he went to film in the real Mumbai slums, surprising his Indian crew, who normally build slums when they need them. This is a token of the film's authenticity. It opens with a dynamic chase sequence, as Jamal and his brother flee the police.  The brothers' mother is killed by a religious mob. They end up living on a rubbish dump. They are slumdogs, and the audience is invited into their home. This is neo-realist territory, but Boyle's filmmaking is anything but low-key. If the experience of watching Slumdog has anything to do with living in the slums of Mumbai, its purely an accident of time and place. In Boyle's version, life there is an endless riot of escapades and adventures; losing a parent here or there is a glitch to be shrugged off as you get on with the business of living in this heightened, hyperactive environment. Even Jamal's police torturers end up seeming like people you wouldn't mind hanging out with for a while, basically jovial fellows who just happen to have a car battery and some jump leads lying around. (Irfan Khan's performance, to be fair, suggests layers of subtlety which the film by and large avoids.)

The feelgood narrative kicks in, (including the only time Ricky Ponting's likely to be happy he's scored less centuries than Hobbs), and the film heads towards a Holly/Bolly ending, the final dance sequence a splendidly throwaway feather on its cap. The perils of poverty are left behind, and the whole world can delight in the power of Celador to make dreams come true. 

I'm not sure what I think about all this. On the one hand, it seems remarkable and impressive that Boyle, Beaufoy and Celador can create a globalised product out of Mumbai. Whilst Bollywood has a global reach, its likely that Slumdog will infiltrate places no Bollywood movie can. (And the film's affectionate nods towards Bollywood felt appropriate.) In a globalised world, there's no reason why the majority of international film stories should feature white casts and suburban lawns (or crinolines). Boyle, who seems to have been re-energised as a filmmaker by his bold move, has created a film which might one day stand in the pantheon of the great feel-good movies, with not a star in sight. 

On the other, there's a hint of colonialism. Not so much with the fact that a group of Brits have returned to India and used the environment to make a film there; but in the ludicrously wish-fulfilling nature of the narrative they've employed. One which would appear to re-affirm the wonderful Western dream which Celador is founded on: we can all become millionaires, no matter where we're born. We just need to learn how to find the right answers and the world can be our oyster.

bring me the head of alfredo garcia (w&d. peckinpah, w. dawson)

There are films that linger in the background, which might also be the sub-conscious. Half seen, once, on a black and white TV screen late at night in a cold Dunnington flat. Beyond remembrance. The title awaiting the day it catches up with you, nails you to the seat, and asks: what kept you so long?

The co-director is a big Peckinpah fan. I've watched Pat Garrett and Cross of Iron with him. He says Peckinpah's title sequences are worth the entrance fee alone. I'm more take it or leave it, respecting all the things for which the director is clearly to be respected, including his disreputability. However, Alfredo Garcia is another matter, a title so evocative that it conjures up films which could never be made, made out of myths which have been long since forgotten.

In other words, the film had no hope of living up to the hype my imagination had bestowed upon it. And yet... somehow, it does. Pull it off. More as a result of its rough edges than its perfection. (The quest for which dogs and demeans any film industry.) 

Once again Mexico plays its weird role in the Gringo psyche. The other side of the border, where lawlessness is the norm. Just like a McCarthy novel, the film opens in a seemingly timeless epoch, a girl sitting by a lake, approached by peones on horseback. Only when there's a brutal cut to a plane taking off do we realise this is the twentieth century. This Mexico is the place to go to lose your soul and see if there's anything left at the end. Warren Oates' character, Bennie, has already lived in Mexico City a number of years, his soul a thing of the past. Somehow the quest to locate and deliver a severed head offers him the chance of redemption. It comes as no surprise, however, that Peckinpah decided to change his ending, and ensure the pay-off that was always awaiting Bennie after his dance with the devil. A website informs that the thick shades Oates wears throughout belonged to Peckinpah: it's clear that the director of this film knew a thing or two about flirting with damnation.

But it doesn't seem entirely appropriate to talk too much about the film that exists, the one I saw on Saturday. I prefer to believe that the head Oates lugs around like a curse isn't Garcia's at all. Alfredo Garcia never existed. That head belongs to someone else, someone who's waiting to meet you, or me, at the end of some kind of line. The film's merely pointing us in the right direction. It's up to us to climb into the grave, get dirty, get thrown out of a dustcart with the love of our life, smelling of nothing like roses, get up, keep going, knowing it's only a question of time before we die in a hail of gunfire (if we're lucky) or from some other terminal conclusion. (Please, Bennie, not quietly in our sleep.) Who knows, if we're lucky, some avatar, seeking to save his or her soul, will come for our heads when we're gone, knowing they contain some kind of value which was never reckoned upon whilst they sat, proud but inane, on our shoulders.

august: osage county (w. tracy letts, d. anna d shapiro)

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Thus ends this three and a half piece of drama, employing possibly the most portentous line of anglo-saxon twentieth century poetry, in the mouth of a native american indian, the words being sung to the distraught learesque matriach as she finally comes to terms with her isolation on the great plains of america.

The play opens with Eliot as well, as Beverly, the patriarch, (so say the cast notes), talks to the same native american indian, the homely Johnna, about his work and offers her a job as housekeeper in his old, three storied home. 'The last thing one discovers in composing a work' Eliot also wrote (a rapid google search reveals), 'is what to put first'. August: Osage County seems to have put its beginning firmly at the beginning. This is going to be a big play about poetry, the american soul, and last, but not least, the great american play. 

Which is where the problems begin. Osage knows exactly what it's about: what it doesn't know is how to weld these notions into a comprehensive piece of theatre. Length alone does not stature grant. (Wild Bill Hickock). Neither does a solid agenda. Just because you write a play with three sisters set in the sticks doesn't mean you're making Chekhov. (Lou Reed)

Which isn't to say that Letts can't write. There's a great deal of snappy dialogue and one-liners which wouldn't go amiss on Frasier. However, the increasing tendency to resort to a joke as the play ploughs on into the night eventually seems to indicate a lack of faith in the weight of the material as much as a handy comic turn of phrase. The acting likewise seems to suffer from a lack of clarity over which furrow is, in point of fact, being ploughed - light hearted family drama or eviscerating examination of the american malaise? The tendency of the script to throw in moments where characters lament the way that america has changed and is no longer the place it used to be help neither the actors nor the audience.

Some might see these tonal inconsistencies as a strength, and the audience seemed to be lapping it up, so maybe I've missed something. Osage isn't unenjoyable, it's just not particularly powerful or moving, and fails to live up to the agenda it appears to be setting for itself. One feature of the play, above all, seemed to encapsulate this. That opening scene indicated a drama exploring the divisions between a european america and the native american one that existed before it: and the way in which america the land creates inclusivity (or not) for all those people who have lived off it. However, rather bizarrely, as the play unfolds, Johnna is given nothing to do, and no dramatic weight. Indeed, her role as cleaner, cook and housekeeper is mirrored in the staging: when a fold-up mattress needs to be moved offstage, it's Johnna who does it. The ambition of including a native american in the drama seems like it will prove to be elucidatory, but in the end Letts has no more idea of what to do with the character than the European immigrants have known what to do with the peoples they have displaced, and Johnna's presence feels tokenistic at best and exploitative at worst. Having her sing Eliot's lines at the end feels like a cheap trick rather than a piece of theatrical nuance.