On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen THE PLAY WAS THE THING BY JOHN SIMON Chekhov's Uncle Vanya is a play so beautiful that it hurts. But, as in the old joke, it only hurts when we laugh. For we find ourselves closeted in...
...and none whatever for this lovely creature to call it quits after one failure...
...The editing is amateurishly jerky throughout...
...When Vanya is shooting at the Professor, the latter is supposed to be "staggering and terrified...
...Only briefly does he linger with the aching girl and her miserable uncle, with the gentle proffering of faith in the afterlife and charity through shared burdens—of hope in hopelessness...
...The two old women are handled well, albeit without great distinction...
...Vanya is worst off: He simultaneously believes he is a potential great man, a Schopenhauer or Dosto-evsky, and knows he is a failure?even his one grand gesture turns into a ludicrous fiasco...
...Rather Chekhovianly, the play traces the dissolution of a dynamic marriage due to tragic circumstances in an almost constantly witty, sometimes riotously funny, manner...
...in the film, he calmly turns his back on his assailant...
...Instead, he promptly cuts away to the corridor outside the room, then tracks farther back through the house and finishes with a lengthy aerial shot of the mighty Russian land...
...Professor Serebryakov acquires and perfects the husk of a thinker and writer, but none of the insides...
...All this while Sonya's voice is heard wistfully, compassionately, tiredly evoking the peace of the hereafter...
...Self-entrapment is the subject of Uncle Vanya, and who among us is free of it...
...Chekhov makes his people funny: losers drunk with defeat—not exactly as if it were a victory, but as if it were something aristocratic, heroic or, at least, saintly...
...The film point-lessly shuttles between color photography so bad that it seems to have been painted in decades ago by hand (perhaps by way of an ex voto from some grateful patient whom Dr...
...She goes along with the charades mainly to humor Bri...
...others, like Vanya, for much longer...
...Yet another fine play—no Vanya, to be sure, but outstanding by current standards—Peter Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, suffers a B+ to C change in becoming a film...
...The color cinematography by Ken Hodges is, at best, undistinguished, and the recurrent bits of nudity seem needlessly dragged-in...
...Vanya is played acceptably by Russia's sole Method actor, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, who is here much more restrained than in Kozintsev's Hamlet or in Nine Days of One Year...
...But just consider what the director does with Sonya's magnificently moving final speech...
...Irina Kupchenko is not onlv, as I mentioned, too pretty for Sonva, she proves the most powerful performer as well...
...The casting, too, is unfortunate: Alan Bates tends to go hammy as Bri, and Janet Suzman is both too elegantly upper-class and too rational and svelte-looking for the opulent, working-class, somewhat slatternly Sheila...
...Peter Medak, the director, made Nichols write the scenario so as to alter the play in two ways...
...For himself, he has devised the role of the great man tripped up by the inefficiency of others, but patiently forgiving...
...Astrov, the man of experience, talent and vision, the scientist full of brave foresight, has very little sight left for the here and now, except to denounce or renounce it...
...The viewer must draw his own conclusions...
...He can fool some, like Yelyena, briefly...
...Even from Joan Hickson, who was fine on stage as Bri's honelesslv commonplace mother, Medak elicits an exaggerated, mannered performance...
...I have no notion of who the director, Andrei MikhalkovKonchalovsky, is...
...Instead of an overbearing phony who fluctuates between pontification and self-pity, we are given an inconspicuous little man—almost self-effacing when not actually whining, and barely pompous now and then...
...The result is an Uncle Van-va that is Sonva's tragedy, and not a balanced erouD portrait as comic as it is sad...
...Thus, though Act I is supposed to take place in the garden (a deliberate note of false optimism), he confines it within the house...
...it remains funny as well as earnest, and holds the interest even if it no longer grips the heart...
...In fact, it is sometimes hard to determine whether the images on the screen are in aborted color or mildewed black-and-white...
...It is into these two beings —damned or saved together—that the camera must try to penetrate, rather than proudly survey the landscape from the air...
...The trouble with the second is that it dissipates the oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere of the play and, in some cases, spells out certain actions about which the play left us suspensefully guessing...
...Only poor, plain little Sonya's resignation has true nobility...
...Surely the camera must stay with the desolate Vanya and the girl who, kneeling before him, ignores her own tears and wipes away his...
...The humor, blackish rather than black, never ignores the sadness of the situation...
...I have a pretty shrewd idea of what he is...
...As for Yelyena, she has been made an ordinary, quite unmagnetic woman, and Telyegin is deprived of all significance...
...This autobiographical play told of a young provincial English schoolmaster, Brian or Bri, of his somewhat older earth mother of a wife, Sheila, and of how their 10-year marriage finally collapsed because of their daughter, Josephine...
...The trouble with the first device is that it makes the fantasies look almost real...
...First, the parlor games were moved to their supposed locations, e.g., a hospital or a church...
...It does occasionally surprise us with subtle touches...
...There is little reason for Astrov (or Vanya) to hanker after this Yelyena...
...it does address itself to a genuine problem intelligently...
...Chekhov desperately needs to be saved from the Russians—and from reviewers like Vincent Canby, Penelope Gilliatt and those others who bowed down enraptured before this abortion...
...as a woman overflowing with maternal love—extending to cats, birds and goldfish—Sheila can cherish Joe even as a vegetable, and refuses to farm her out to an institution...
...Chekhov himself had cured), and monochrome that leaves one unsure of what shade of black, brown or bilious it might be...
...Together, the horizontal bars of social inertia and the vertical ones of the daily routine form the window of a prison, a grille on which hope plays tick-tack-toe with reality and always loses...
...For we find ourselves closeted in the theater with people who are so absurd as to be resoundingly funny, yet even as we respond to this we realize the boundary between such ridiculousness and ancient tragedy is as tenuous as that between these characters and us...
...still less for his spurning such a Sonya...
...He finally accepts the inevitable, although it may not really be inevitable and the acceptance is not a true one...
...but Bri's escape is made no more attractive than Sheila's persistence...
...For Joe Egg, as Bri has nicknamed her, is a spastic, a vegetable, a drain on her parents' time, energy and joy of living...
...it is a gritty, brilliant, finally doomed attempt at living with that irrefutable sadness...
...The locked-in, ingrown complexities and paradoxes of the play may be impossible to transfer effectively to the screen...
...The twin vices of these people are acquiescence in the dullness of their milieu and giving in to the force of habit they generate...
...More comedv is what Chekhov kept vainly asking from Stanislavski, and what this film, like recent Moscow Art Theater productions, continues to deny him...
...and fools, like his former mother-in-law, forever...
...He and Yel-yena can toy with the idea of love, yet cannot play that happy game itself...
...secondly, formerly narrated episodes were shown, and additional outdoor scenes created...
...The current Russian filmization, however, is thicker in disasters than the unsuitability of the medium and ordinary bungling could explain...
...desperate, funny play-acting begins to look like not-so-funny actual events...
...The consequence, granted, is misery for both parents...
...The young British playwright gave us an incisive but sympathetic study of the mercurial, intellectual father who invents clever little parlor games for himself and his wife to play: satirical skits, either travestying certain episodes from the couple's life and struggles with their daughter, or actually inventing brand new absurdities...
...Still, people who missed the stage play should see the movie...
...To begin with the most obvious: Anyone who would cast the enchanting Irina Kupchenko as Sonya and have the rather horse-faced Irina Miroshni-chenko play Yelyena, is either blind, stupid or an insensitive clod...
...the pace is unendurably slow...
...I shall pass lightly over the obtrusive propaganda that repeatedly sneaks grim snapshots of life in Tsarist Russia into the film to explain the frustrations of the characters and imply the need for the cure that was to come...
...What makes Joe Egg remarkable is that the strong and weak points of both positions are honestly and appealingly stated, and no argument is weighted unfairly...
...Indeed, his occasional Method twitches provide a welcome distraction from the old-fashioned ponderousness of Sergei Bondarchuk's altogether beefy As-trov...
...a stuffy married couple, friends of the family, are pushed even further into caricature...
...This provides the film with two Uncle Vanyas...
...She is the play's one exultant loser, but what happiness is there in patiently ebbing away...
...For example, a Viennese specialist who examined the child and pronounced her incurable, and a swinging, radical Church of England priest who offered to do some faith-healing, are devastatingly parodied by Brian, with Sheila assisting...
...The director plays havoc with Chekhov's stated intentions...
...The directing of Serebryakov is consistently wrongheaded...
...the camera setups are consistently unimaginable...
...Underneath the hilarious horseplay, the play becomes an impassioned contest between Bri's growing belief in euthanasia and Sheila's dogged, unreasoning love and need to shelter and mother a life, however wretched...
Vol. 55 • June 1972 • No. 13
