Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN intense passages are like the scenes in war movies in...
...But most of the time he does you back to its source in order to get a truly clear view of a life...
...Not true mind of Tommy...
...Therefore they a third character completely different from the predecessors...
...He becomes a pinball wizard, as the song says, and once his senses return in a mirror-breaking moment, he becomes a superstar, a cruel cult figure, and, finally, over the protests of his followers, a normal fellow-even as you and I. The book never understood viscerally what being outside the loop has been rewritten by the musical's chief composer/lyricist, Peter meant until I went to see The Who's Tommy, which had Townshend, and director McAnuff in a way that deeply offends been called simply Tommy in most of the preopening true believers from the past like Jon Pareles, who complained publicity until it occurred to the producers that there in the New York Times (April 27), "Their changes turn a blast might be people like a friend of mine who wondered if of spiritual yearning, confusion, and rebellion into a pat on the it was about English soldiers in World War I. The audience head for nesters and couch potatoes...
...This movie doesn't have the multifariousness of life...
...The staging ty of the man who will someday tell this story...
...When hurrying on foot is more than promising: he illuminates what is already complex not enough, there are the high-fly wires that let the adult in the boy's character and foreshadows the greater complexi- Tommy Peter Pan in to comfort his earlier selves...
...If you need None of the above is meant to shrivel the adaptation by means one, it's in the book and it's completely believable...
...I am as poetic platitudes...
...Jack deals with many ily situation, why didn't this spunky, even footloose woman people in many ways and is treated by them as variously...
...This sounds memory of it: in one ear/eye and out the other...
...If Tommy's music is not my images were plot-based, Anderson's images, except when they music, I suspect that it is also not the music of the rap genera- spelled out the words she had just spoken, were social/politiCommonweal 4 June 1993: 19...
...There seemed less music than in other Anderson shows the territory...
...The memoir's multifariousness is cringe...
...Appeal: shudder, then Pumkin made you laugh, then shudder...
...nag...
...Good horror movie...
...what most of us do: goes about his business and leisure and is I think the latter...
...not to be pulled into all that light and sound, and that, after all, RICHARD ALLEVA is what theater is supposed to do...
...De Niro's most famous characterization, Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, was the most searing portrait of male savagery in decades...
...David Watkin's The production as a whole pushes as the music does...
...Life is like awfulness from, among other things, the obliteration of life's this: routine, familiarity, boredom, common foes, all contribute variety...
...The voice should have been that of an older man look- from one corner of the stage to another...
...The stepfather, Dwight, is both a brute and a geek...
...The worst events in the book are just as miserable as toward making the intolerable tolerable...
...tensifications of plot developments or images of the confused Good movie...
...side while plotting one's entrance into adulthood...
...The book's Dwight is just as repellent as De culiar excitements...
...But you won't understand this by that is endurable, sometimes agreeable...
...Years take her son and get out...
...way, either added up to rather appealing stories or came across If I sound simply querulous in this paragraph, I apologize...
...A MARRIAGE OF CONNIVANCE Here the mortar fire is coming from Robert De Niro and you 'THIS BOY'S LIFE' can see why he got the job...
...By removing the rationale of dailiness from the story, er at us...
...So I came to the like an occasion for a bitterly ironic curtain, but the music seems new musical as a relative innocent...
...It was the technical effects, however, that not really the father from Bye, Bye Birdie, who asked in "Kids" gave the show its special quality...
...And our most brilliant fiction writers, Tobias Wolff, and he certainly the fatuousness underpins the man's brutality...
...The action shifts from clearly attached to Dwight, and since Jack soon seemed headschoolrooms to country roads to boarding houses to the imag- ed again for delinquency, very much because of his new famined places of a bookworm's fantasies...
...to be saying that now everything is hunky-dory...
...Moreover, in scenes such This film doesn't feel like a life but like a horror story...
...But since hostility stand his much-loved but slightly dotty mother and to cope with broke out so soon between the two males with most of the blame his obnoxious yet pathetic stepfather...
...De Niro and Barkin de- deaf, and dumb Tommy who stands catatonically while the churnliver the emotional goods and Leonardo Di Caprio, as Jack, is ing busyness goes on around him...
...SCREEN intense passages are like the scenes in war movies in which soldiers in foxholes exchange wisecracks between rounds of mortar fire...
...Defiance: as incredible as the following Dwight-Lawrence Welk fan, would-be Great Hunter thorstory may seem, it did happen...
...But his Rupert Pumkin in The King of true story...
...If La Motta made you function as both appeal and defiance...
...We read about young Tobias (or Jack, And all too often, perhaps...
...I did see the gaudy film helpless Tommy, and Cousin Kevin, who tortured the boy with Ken Russell made of the rock opera in 1975, but I have no clear and without the help of his fellow teen-age thugs...
...should concern you...
...It is cinematography makes the Washington state landscapes not staged by Des McAnuff and choreographer Wayne Cilento so postcard-beautiful but resonant with the spaciousness and that there is seldom a pause in the action, except for the blind, freedom that Jack so sorely desires...
...It is a lapel-grabbing show that commands attention and has been nominated for eleven Tony Awards...
...as he likes to be called) in his solitude and in the company of Why...
...I assume that Tommy's return to his family, the presumed sponded enthusiastically, often in anticipation of a song that embrace of normalcy, is supposed to make the musical more had been signaled by its opening notes...
...The marriage lasted for years...
...There's no satisfactory answer in the movie...
...But it was a is a wonder of high-tech graphics-projections, videos, spemistake to have Di Caprio read the narration on the sound- cial effects-that keep the eye darting from screen to screen, track...
...Or, at least, it's based on a memoir by one of of everything in the 1950s that was tasteless and fatuous...
...While the show is in progress, it is difficult enough...
...Unlike Tommy, in which the what's wrong with Sammy Kaye...
...I often Theater Festival presented the world premiere of Stories from found it difficult to understand the lyrics, as in Paul Kandel's the Nerve Bible with words, images, and music by Laurie rendition of Uncle Ernie's "Fiddle About," but that goes with Anderson...
...We swear it...
...of invidious comparison, but as a qualification of what the Monsters spend a relatively small part of their waking lives moviemakers have done...
...direction aims for the gut and lands, repeatedly...
...such witticisms as "You can call me anything you want but And This Boy's Life is indeed "a true story," just as its open- don't call me late for dinner"-is like a walking compendium ing credits state...
...part of the book's truth...
...This Boy's Life is truly a life...
...Still, the could hardly be expected by someone like me, who grew up family consists not only of the parents, who committed or conon Harry James and Larry Clinton and for whom The Who was doned a murder, but of Uncle Eddie, who sexually abused the little more than a recognizable name...
...The music, as one Ir he row of television screens across the top of the would expect, is played at very high volume, appropriately for stage at Tommy seemed familiar, and then I resongs like "I'm Free" and the somewhat extraneous "Acid called that a few days earlier I had seen a similar Queen...
...Most of them are ining back on his youth...
...Of course, screenwrit- watching the movie...
...If so, it is an odd turnwas full of aging young people who knew the music and re- ing...
...Of as the one in which stepfather and boy go on a painting binge course, real lives do contain horrors but the word "contain" makes in the living room, or the one in which the two unite with the my point: horrors are contained, slightly mitigated or dulled by rest of the family to fend off the smarmy suitor of the daughthe flux of everyday life...
...Caton-Jones's within the show...
...So nostalgic a reaction appealing in a less questioning time than the 1960s...
...Whenever those words appear in Comedy was a masterpiece in quite another vein: a comic pora movie's ad or in its opening credits, they trait of a loser of monstrous proportions...
...But does it stand by itself or does it drive Niro's when he's being repellent...
...Ellen Barkin's juiciness and wit, both pass in the book, attitudes change, and no relationship is set in as an actress and physical presence, only make the question stone...
...perfectly innocuous while doing so...
...As the events and characters you are about to Dwight, De Niro combines La Motta and Rupert but achieves see are as real as you are...
...But these less Robert Getchell's dialogue is idiomatic and taut, and this 18: 4 June 1993 Commonweal writer knows how to begin a scene on a deceptive note of calm tion...
...Tommy is the story of a young boy, the witness of a murder, THE WHAT, THE HOW, THE WHO who, exhorted to silence by his parents, becomes deaf, dumb, 'TOMMY' & 'STORIES' and blind...
...But even songs like "See Me, Feel Me," which seems row across the bottom of the stage at the Annenberg to me both musically and lyrically sentimental, and the uplift- Center in Philadelphia when the American Music ing "Welcome" assault rather than tickle the ear drums...
...You will instead feel, from time to time, er Robert Getchell and director Michael Caton-Jones are far like screaming at Ellen Barkin, "Good God, woman, pack your too skilled and sensible to hurl one scene of abuse after anoth- bags...
...It was only as I left the theater, my ears and eyes settling down, that I began to wonder STAGE what all this flamboyance was in aid of...
...A "true story...
...We laugh but all too soon we will and occasional brutality...
...I have spent decades failing to hear lyrics that young I have seen, but it was the usual electronically manipulated sounds, listeners seem to have no trouble learning, and, when they have and the words, delivered in her conversationally charming been repeated to me, that hardly seemed worth remembering...
...and thus do four years what's shown on screen, but they are embedded in a larger life of incompatibility pass...
...For us outsiders, its acceptance depends on the way it works before making it gradually mount to violence...
...We are privy to his dreams of adventure, his er initially was sacrificing herself in order to give the boy a falust for older girls, his petty thievery, his attempts to under- ther and a respectable middle-class existence...
...That is where the book comes in...
...This Dwight,who makes the events of his remembered childhood ring about what preens in front of a mirror in his new scoutmaster's uniform happened when his divorced mother, fearing that the impro- while letting his stepson flounder in a suit several sizes too vised, roaming existence she was leading with her son was turn- big, may be a joke but he's clearly insensitive enough for the ing him delinquent, married a man of unquenchable meanness greater cruelties to come...
...Extreme horrors like concentration ter of the house, it becomes clear to the reader that a sort of camp experiences or episodes of torture, draw their particular bond did occasionally form between the antagonists...
...Both the book and the movie clearly show that the mothkids and adults...
...Truth is stranger oughly bested by his wife at a turkey shoot, proud coiner of than fiction...
...They vary their movie's mood with scenes of humor the moviemakers have changed well-rounded characters into a and idyllicism: Jack goofing off on the piano with a pal, walks monster and his victims and have turned This Boy's Life into through town and rides around the Washington state country- Raging Stepfather...
...The film is good and has its own pe- being monstrous...
Vol. 120 • June 1993 • No. 11
