The Talkies: Bard to Death
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Bard to Death" by James Bowman Bard to Death In the past three months I have been astonished to see not one, not two, but three adaptations of Jane Austen that more or less allow Jane to be Jane;...
...It does not allow us to see Richard as the curious villain—aberrant, strange, vital, fascinating, sui generis— that he is in Shakespeare...
...On the other hand, Tim Robbins's Dead Man Walking gets to be Movie of the Month in spite of its left-wing bias on the grounds that it faces up to the same question of justice and revenge with courage and honesty...
...he has a history of childhood neglect and abuse...
...His look at the would-be vigilantes is timorously unwilling either to condemn or to glamorize them, and they are allowed simply to drop out of the film before its climax...
...Instead of being full of passionate intensity it lacks all conviction, looking like an educational TV production, undertaken for no better reason than that Shakespeare is a cultural monument...
...But then he tries to dodge the issue by making the film into a child-in-peril flick or a feminist self-discovery flick or a little-personagainst-the-system flick...
...It is likewise annoying that Matthew's last words balance contrition with a distinctly unpleasant self-righteousness...
...Ian McKellan's Richard is little more than a manifestation of militarism in its most ugly aspect...
...Is that better or worse than appropriating him for left-wing propaganda...
...Too much of the time it distracts us from the things Shakespeare wants to keep in the forefront of our attention...
...His saying "don't look at me" is a way of saying "look at me...
...You have only to look at the climactic Battle of Bosworth, in which the soldiers ride around in jeeps and tanks like kids in dodge'em cars, firing seemingly at random...
...but it is fully worthy of the company of the other two, and I hope everybody saw it...
...Sister Helen, working on the concentrates-his-mindwonderfully principle, nudges Matthew along towards finally taking responsibility for his actions just as he is about to be led off to execution...
...So far, so predictable...
...In this view, warfare is a mad irrational outburst from the depths of the psyche, terrifying and utterly incomprehensible apart from its psychosexual origins...
...The death sentence is carried out by corrupt politicians terrified of being thought soft on crime...
...None of this is necessarily had in itself, but all of it together is way too much and imbalances the picture —away from the genuinely Shakespearean and toward the monumental...
...We do, of course, but at the same time we forget Shakespeare, we forget Othello, we forget Cassio and Desdemona, we even forget lago...
...Ifelt somewhat the same way after comparing two recent crime and punishment movies—one starts out to be conservative but then doesn't quite have the courage to go through with it, while the other is unapologetically left-wing but suddenly and perhaps even involuntarily takes a rightward turn...
...A stuffed-shirt priest glibly tells Sister Helen, "You can save this boy by getting him to take the sacraments of the church before he dies...
...Laurence Fishburne's Othello is great to look at, but his lines are pronounced in an accent—half-British, half-American, half generic-exotic with elaborately rolled R's — unlike any on earth...
...But Sister Helen's naïveté and do-goodism are jolted by the pain and bitterness of the parents of the two teenage victims...
...finally Ile puts his hand over the camera like a celebrity for whom it has become intrusive...
...Gradually, the horrific murders and his participation in them are revealed in flashback...
...The film is not about Shakespeare's words, or the still living and vital themes they embody, but about beautiful people admiring themselves for paying homage to a cultural icon...
...In this, however, he is unsuccessful...
...Or he insists to Roderigo (Michael Maloney) that Desdernona's interest in Cassio is "lechery, by this hand" as the two of them are huddled under a wagon on the hed of which a couple copulates...
...No, poor thing, and she cannot say anything else either...
...It's a pity...
...Naturally Matthew denies having killed anybody...
...To the movie versions of Persuasion (Movie of the Month for December) and Sense and Sensibility (MOM for February), we must now add the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, aired on the Arts and Entertainment cable channel in January...
...Why would he have been moved finally to do right, and confess at the last minute, without seemingly any thought for the fate of his immortal soul...
...The sister is naturally very liberal and opposed to capital punishment...
...I'm not sure, but I think I'd go with the lefties, for whom at least there is a genuinely engaging artistic vision to be got out of it...
...Or he tosses the handkerchief of Desdemona (Irene Jacob) up in the air in the midst of brutal sex with Emelia (Anna Patrick) to illustrate that it is one of those "trifles light as air" with which he "may do something...
...Richard Loncraine's film of Richard III in some ways is the best film adaptation of Shakespeare there has ever been...
...But the priest is right...
...It is what I take to be a hornosexualist, left-wing updating of the play that seeks to portray the poisonous consequences of the masculine-militaristic ethos...
...That vestige of Shakespeare himself, some of the most vivid and memorable English ever written, is in this film excessively trimmed and tucked and illustrated and accompanied...
...And then he sets out to show why he should not have died...
...True, the culturally monumental settings are lovely to look at, but one soon wearies of tedious, actorly illustrations of the poetry, which has hitherto been thought adequate to carry the drama more or less by itself...
...In spite of the record of the whole of human history showing that war and threats of war are the norm —and peace and amity and easy sexual indulgence the aberration—the filmmakers share the left-wing delusion that it is the military life and patriarchal ideas of honor and manhood themselves which produce violence and associated atrocities...
...The part of the mad ex-queen Margaret is cut, and many of her scornful and hate-filled lines are given to Maggie Smith as Richard's dominant but distant mother, who thereby becomes enough of a monster-momma to drive any boy to an obsession with leather and trench-coats...
...In this story, based on an actual case, Sean Penn plays a convicted murderer and death-row inmate, Matthew Poncelet, who writes to an uncloistered nun, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), and strikes up an unlikely friendship with her...
...The film tells the story of a vicious killer let off on a legal technicality who is then pursued and killed by the mother of his innocent victim...
...That's your job...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Bard to Death In the past three months I have been astonished to see not one, not two, but three adaptations of Jane Austen that more or less allow Jane to be Jane...
...Robbins's direction makes Matthew not helpless and pitiable, but a loathsome little turkey-cock who makes a pass at the nun, joins Aryan Nation, and praises Hitler...
...He should have been allowed, at the edge of the abyss, enough of a sense of shame and dignity to realize that those words were not for him to say...
...The consistent cleverness of its setting in an imaginary fascist Britain in the 1936s, complete with totalitarian architecture and Nazistyle-uniform chic, is never less than impressive...
...At one point, illustrating how lie 5, 58 March r996 • The American Spectator plans to "turn her virtue into pitch," Branagh grasps a burning brand from the fire and smears soot on his hands...
...she does everything she can to get Matthew's sentence commuted...
...Why are they there...
...I think killing is wrong, no matter who does it," he says, "no matter whether it's me or y'all or your government...
...Oliver Parker's version of Othello has a different problem...
...Gidget herself thinks better of her extra-legal pursuit of justice and is allowed to accomplish a vigilante's end with a respectable person's means when she ends up killing only in self-defense...
...But for all the film's cleverness, this conception of the play just does not work...
...Only to the threshold, mind you: he is not shown receiving absolution or the sacrament...
...His differences from those around him —the invariably effete or corrupt nobility—are of degree, not JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Suppl em en t. kind, and he is probably meant to be seen as a pathologically repressed homosexual...
...There are affecting scenes of Matthew saying good-bye to his dirt-poor family...
...Schlesinger raises a tough question: what is justice...
...Those flaws aside, the film's portrayal of a terrible crime and its not-quite-so-terrible punishment has an authenticity that transcends the worrisome reiterations of the capital punishment debate...
...they do not patronize or ridicule either her or the quaint-seeming conventions of the Napoleonic-era England she describes...
...But a still-gidgety Sally Field as the avenging mom, brat-packer Kiefer Sutherland as the sex-pervert thrill killer, and stolid Ed44 I think I'd go with the lefties, for whom at least there is a genuinely engaging artistic vision...
...But in this monumental Euro-Shakespeare, with all the pith carefully blown out of him, none of this matters...
...But it is not Shakespeare...
...I had high hopes for John Schlesinger's Eye for an Eye...
...Shakespeare, another great conservative classic, has not fared quite so well...
...Being a TV show, it doesn't get to be Movie of the Month...
...Poncelet would have gone on denying his part in the murders forever, had the prospect of imminent death not forced him to face up to his deeds and brought him to the threshold of grace...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...The American Spectator • March 1996 59...
...For symbolic purposes only...
...I think what we have here is a failure to connect between the poor-white-trash, Louisiana Catholic subject and the slick yuppie director...
...All we remember is Branagh...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226 @compuserve.com...
...Kenneth Branagh's Iago plays with black and white chess pieces while lightning flashes in the background, and he says: "Hell and night/Must bring this monstrous birth to th'world's light...
...it is scarcely even pronounced...
...77 Harris as the milquetoast husband who doesn't realize what the little woman is getting up to down at the shooting range—this cast cannot bring it off...
...The Venetian nobility sound like comic Rumanians, and Desdemona, though lovely to look at, makes a mush of her lines: "Ah cannot say 'whore.' Eet does abhor me now Ah speak ze word...
...If ever a killer deserved to die, Robbins seems to say, it was Matthew Poncelet...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
