The Talkies/This Great Dane's a Dog
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES THIS GREAT DANE'S A DOG or me, the first principle of criticism is to assess a work of art for what it is, never for what it isn't—still less for not being what I think it should...
...For better or for worse," says Paul Newman's Mr...
...Here are joy and love and virtue—and anger and jealousy and despair—generating language by the square meter...
...we may not be in time to save him") is just silly...
...Bridge...
...It's not exactly that Macbeth's lines on the fulfilment of the first of the witches' prophecies, . . . Two truths are told, As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme...
...Unhappily for most of us, the language is French...
...At the end, when the psychiatrist, of whom Mr...
...By surrendering to this authorial authority we may be given access to a powerful individual vision, but we miss the richness, the variety, the ambiguity of reality itself, which poetry alone can convey...
...Even the most esoteric code of honor is composed of those universal elements—discretion and loyalty, self-sacrifice and courage—plus the words appropriate to them...
...And once again I strive in vain to overcome my phantom limb syndrome after the amputation of Shakespeare's language...
...Claudius is not even present...
...the character of its hero...
...The audience, like the psychiatrist no doubt, wants to shake him and say, "NO...
...But de Palma has made them into cartoon figures and reduced the whole disturbing tableau of modern urban life to a moral fable, a ludicrous lecture on "decency" ("Decency is what your grandmother taught you, it's in your bones") from a black judge who is more Uncle Remus than Uncle Tom and quite undiscoverable as a character in the book...
...The Bridges are decency personified, but they are so heartbreakingly stifled by their conventionality that they almost seem heartless...
...Depardieu really is an extraordinary actor, the range of whose talents can be sampled by Cyrano fansin the delightful but rather frothy Disney comedy, Green Card, to which he lends an unmistakable gravitas...
...And when Hamlet says, "I shallin all my best obey you, Madam," it is not, as in the play, a vicious insult directed at his Uncle Claudius but a dutiful submission to a loving mother's entreaties...
...It isn't...
...If decency could ever be as lovely as virtue, this film would convince you of it...
...Like the greatest of satirists, he makes us see ourselves, and especially our hypocrisy about race, in them...
...Bridge...
...How all occasions do inform against me" is cut (as is Fortinbras) and "To be or not to be" is left in, one suspects, simply because it is so famous...
...But if Mr...
...Bridge, "I turned out to be an attorney and not a poet...
...Well, credits where credits are due...
...Ilead up to Cyrano de Bergerac...
...Wolfe's remarkable achievement was to make us understand and sympathizewith most of the characters whose pretensions to various sorts of decency and respectability he so savagely punctured...
...Godfather III does not repeat this success...
...Partly this is because Depardieu brings to the role all the intensity that Mel Gibson doesn't bring to Hamlet...
...THE TALKIES THIS GREAT DANE'S A DOG or me, the first principle of criticism is to assess a work of art for what it is, never for what it isn't—still less for not being what I think it should have been...
...If you want a definition of decency that is less glib and more compelling than Brian de Palma's, this film will provide it—without making that quality seem more attractive than it really is...
...Of course you aren't, dear...
...All this simplicity lends itself to cinematic treatment even if the poetry doesn't...
...In this context it is interesting to look at a film founded upon inarticulacy, like the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Evan Connell's two novels about Middle America between the World Wars, Mr and Mrs...
...And, come to think of it, maybe that's not such a difference after all...
...and when he meets death with defiance—"A man doesn't fight to win...
...Decency to me . . . " maybe, but, as Bart Simpson would say, who the hell are you...
...Horatio's tribute to his "sweet prince" should fall upon our ears with a shock: "sweet" is the last thing that Hamlet ever was to anybody, least of all himself...
...His presence also underscores the fact that the character of Cyrano is oddly understandable to us...
...Hamlet's bad behavior to Ophelia is explained not once but twice as the consequence of his having spotted Polonius spying on him...
...I confess that I liked the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, but his Hamlet, with Helena Bonham-Carter's affecting Ophelia, even casts by James Bowman a shaft of light backward on that: Mr...
...Instead she says: 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 . . . Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valor As thou art in desire...
...All this makes the prince more sympathetic, more like a standard movie hero, than Shakespeare intends him to be, but it also vitiates the tragedy...
...Maybe that's because joy and love and virtue generate poetry while decency, a fundamentally negative attribute, necessarily generates inarticulacy...
...Decency is not a deal or an angle or a hustle," he says, when what he means (I suppose) is that it shouldn't be any of these things but it's hard to escape the conclusion that they are just what it is...
...That it does not set out to be Shakespeare is advertised in the opening credits, where we are told that the screenplay is by Zeffirelli and Christopher DeVore "based on the play by William Shakespeare...
...When in the final scene Cyrano laments that it has been his fate to give words to others, from the foolishly inarticulate Christian to the "genius" Moliere, and be forgotten himself, we know in our own petty ways what it feels like...
...Maybe it's easier to understand, however, when the words are a little vague...
...His words are dud words...
...Alas, we know that already, too...
...That's why Fidel Castro liked it so much...
...But Cyrano is exciting and moving all the same...
...But it has never been less believable than it is here...
...And the docudramatic denouement ("This pope has powerful enemies...
...Nevertheless, prose as powerful as Tom Wolfe's in The Bonfire of the Vanities is not a linguistic experience to be sniffed at, nor one unsuitable for translation to the screen...
...Even the seventeenth-century conception of honor presents us with few difficulties, because there is a kind of brotherhood of defeat that spans the ages and the cultures in between...
...it is rather that the demotic language further disconnects Mike Battaglia and Matt Duffy (get it...
...Al Pacino's Don lacks the verbal resources to show us more than his love of family and his canniness in street-fighting...
...The first third of the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy is cut out (because the player's account of the death of Priam, which inspires it, is too), and so the part which begins "Am I a coward...
...Hamlet without the prince" has become a catch-phrase for leaving out the essential...
...That Brian de Palma has made such a thorough mess of it makes me fear that the cinema cannot deal with social satire anymore, either...
...I shall now proceed to violate that first principle...
...His discovery and exploitation of corruption in the church is gratuitous and unconvincing: the equivalency thesis—that the legitimate power-structure is both continuous with and, if anything, more corrupt than that of the Mafia-dominated underworld—has been part of the subtext of the Godfather saga from the beginning...
...Shakespeare's poetry is what ultimately lifts this lurid melodrama above the level of the traditional revenge tragedy, and Zeffirelli, by chopping it all up, sinks it back down to this level...
...Jean-Paul Rappeneau's new film, with Gerard Depardieu in the title role, is at once a successful cinematic version of a classic play and a paean to articulacy over inarticulacy, to the power of language to convey feeling and to define character...
...Franco Zeffirelli's new Hamlet is not Shakespeare...
...He's done this number before...
...And, when the latter replies "I dare do all that may become a man," he is appealing to a more estimable standard than Mikey's ridiculous "I'm as vicious as the next guy...
...from "the imperial theme" in whose context Macbeth and Macduff are something more than squabbling street hoodlums...
...The first soliloquy is fragmented and made to seem no more than the natural mourning of a son for his father...
...This standard, of honor and degree and propriety, apparently does not translate well to the silver screen, although the first two Godfathers came close to making us believe in Sicilian omerta as its modern-day equivalents...
...Would'st thou have that Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, And live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,' Like the poor cat i' th'adage...
...Brian de Palma and I claim my prize for recognizing you...
...translated into "The old broad was right on the money" is repulsive in itself...
...It was no easy job, either, since such a banal and merely wishful definition of decency could have proceeded from any of a million sources of lesser provenance than the adapter of Tom Wolfe Words may not be as essential to a film as to a Shakespearean drama, but the lack of them can still ruin one...
...What is disguised, moreover, is in no way mysterious: it is simply love for a beautiful woman and shame at his own ugliness...
...If we cease to care very much about Hamlet or Macbeth/Mike Battaglia because they are not verbally—and hence spiritually—imposing enough, we cease to care very much about Michael, Don Corleone, because we've seen too much of him already...
...Almost...
...M aybe that's because the cinema itself hasn't...
...Z does the "untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field" well enough, but he hasn't really got much idea about tragic grandeur...
...Oh, it has mellow Mel Gibson looking the debonaire leading man, but what has that got to do with the tortured young man in his cloak of inky black who appears in Act I, scene ii of Shakespeare's play, before he knows anything about the murder of his father, and is eaten up with the poison of grief and hatred...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 31...
...words which resound with terrible reproach in nobler minds than Macbeth's...
...Ibegin to believe that the cinema, like the novel, simply cannot deal with poetry...
...At any rate, it has little or nothing to do with the action of the play as Zeffirelli presents it to us...
...well, here is Hamlet without the prince...
...it's better when the fight is in vain" —we can imagine for a moment what it would feel like to be so brave...
...Anthony Burgess has undertaken the bizarre task of translating Rostand's verse into English subtitles rendered on the screen as prose but in fact approximating to octosyllabic couplets—as if it were possible to shut one's ears to the voluble Cyrano's Gallic eruptions and mouth that jaunty English meter to the inner ear...
...it hardly seems more than a laudable self-doubt...
...but somehow, I still don't think it can...
...If you make him genuinely sweet, as Mel Gibson does, his death is only another version of Ophelia's: it has pathos but not tragedy...
...Bridge has always disapproved, asks him if he's ever known joy, the attorney replies: "I've known contentment, if that's what you mean...
...In this he is more like Mr...
...As it happens, this month has also seen the release of another Shakespeare adaptation: Macbeth transplanted into the streets of Little Italy in William Reilly's Men of Respect...
...You are Mr...
...Such dry, self-depreciatory wit, which is insufficiently ironic to remove the suggestion that to him being a poet must be something very much like being an attorney, could stand as a motto for the whole film...
...But why should it matter to us then that the movie is not Shakespeare's play...
...That's not what I mean...
...For, like the novel, it is inherently prosaic and manages its audience's attention...
...Bridge, in whom reticencehas hardened into inarticulacy and who has no vocabulary for joy or love or any of the deepest feelings of the heart, could understand that, he would not be Mr...
...Bridge than that other avatar of articulacy, Hamlet...
...It is not Hamlet without the prince that I mind so much as Hamlet without the words...
...And, on the whole, we are inclined to think it is for the better...
...seems to have no connection with morbid hesitation...
...Similarly, Lady Macbeth never says anything remotely equivalent to Ruthie Battaglia's feeble "you have all these reasons to hesitate when you should be tryin' for sumpin...
...Because in its attempt to make the story of Hamlet look more smoothly naturalistic (that is, more like a movie) it has robbed it of its most compelling element: the problematical nature of James Bowman is The American Spectator's movie critic...
...He is at heart a simple fellow whose internal life is as hidden away from public view as the Kansas City attorney's, but whose disguise is panache rather than blandness...
...For it is the film's great achievement, repeating that of the novels, that it can take these boring Babbitts and make attractive characters out of them...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
