Tests of Flesh
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Tests of Flesh By Raphael Shargel When asked to comment on the movies of 2004, I smile and say, "Best year of the millennium!" My tongue is only half in cheek. Over 12 months...
...His performance is as offensively reductive as Pacino's...
...He rarely associates his own actions with his race or religion...
...Frankie is an avid enthusiast of Irish literature and culture...
...After hearing Shylock's denial and reiteration of his offenses, Antonio cries out to his witnesses: Let him alone...
...The actor ignores Shylock's humor and irony as well as his sense of righteousness...
...Her mother and sister, incapable of providing for themselves, resent her success and the gifts she showers on them...
...Irons, who won an Oscar for his hammy impersonation of the morally dubious Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, interprets the merchant as the pinnacle of nobility...
...The actor seems bent on shielding the audience from Antonio's dark side...
...I'll follow him no more with bootless prayers...
...Given the potential banalities of the storyline, Eastwood and Haggis wisely focus on the drama of character...
...The script, adapted by Paul Haggis from F.X...
...In the longer passages Radford has removed, Bassanio describes his wooing of Portia as a business venture, promising the merchant that if he is successful, he will repay not only the new loan, but also the debts he owes him from the past...
...Therefore he hates me...
...While explaining the bond Antonio will sign, he punctuates his terms by flourishing this slab of meat...
...Over 12 months we were treated to more films of quality than during the previous four years combined...
...After she appears at the Venetian court disguised as a man and foils Shylock, she requests Bassanio's ring as payment for the rescue of Antonio...
...He retains Bassanio's few lines about Portia's beauty, then cuts in the midst of them to a shot of the lady gazing dreamily into space...
...A few scenes later, he purchases a pound of nonkosher goat's flesh at a public market, though the original has him denouncing the unclean eating habits of Christians...
...he sees himself as reflecting the ruthless commercial spirit that dominates Venice...
...The Christians in the play want him to treat them with mercy, but they show him none...
...Casting Pacino as Shylock would seem an inspired choice...
...Irons reads this passage wistfully, as if regretting the insults he so liberally visited on his nemesis...
...The role of Shylock offered Pacino an opportunity to give pure expression to his considerable talents...
...Shakespeare hints that Antonio jumps at the chance to gratify the young man by sacrificing himself, because he is romantically in love with Bassanio...
...Eastwood, the quintessential tough guy, excels by capitalizing on his surprising talent for conveying vulnerability...
...The two leads are nothing less than magnificent...
...Hers is the performance of the year...
...Shylock says they mock him for imitating their practices, turning him into the scapegoat who absolves them of their sins...
...Frankie's brooding, laconic surface shows flashes of wit, pain and kindness underneath, with the last clearly responsible for his inability to succeed in a brutal business...
...In cutaways, we see her smirking and jeering when others' fates are on the line...
...His precredit sequence declares, in blocks of white text on a black background, that Jews in 16th-century Venice were confined to the ghetto, subject to open hostility from fanatical Christians, and so restricted in their choice of profession that many took up usury...
...The supporting cast includes Morgan Freeman, who superbly plays Eastwood's sidekick (as he did in Unforgiven), and Jay Baruchel as a comically helpless lightweight who trains in Frankie's gym...
...Radford does little to demonstrate that Shylock's monsrrousness is a defect of his character, not his race...
...Although the drama is named for the merchant Antonio (Jeremy Irons), and boasts in Portia (Lynn Collins) one of Shakespeare's cleverest heroines, Shylock the Jew certainly ranks among the Bard's most vicious and memorable creations...
...He seeks my life, his reason well I know...
...After agreeing to commit a troubling act, Frankie vanishes, in the manner of Eastwood's Bill Munny in Unforgiven (1992) and the many other rugged heroes of the Westerns the actor cut his teeth on...
...Before Sunset, by the usually smug Richard Linklater, was that rare sequel (to his 1995 film Before Sunrise) that is more moving, and here, more romantic, than the original...
...Fiennes, who energetically impersonated the playwright in Shakespeare in Love, seems to lack an opinion...
...Million Dollar Baby is much more than the sum of its hackneyed trappings...
...Among other stateside offerings, The Incredibles was pure entertainment, Sideways a riveting comic character study, and Maria Full of Grace a painfully realistic yet surprisingly hopeful social drama...
...Despite their gruff exteriors, both are starved for love...
...Instead, Pacino caters to stereotype...
...The suitor uses words like "rich," "value," "worth," and "gold" to describe her...
...He spews hatred and values his ducats at least as much as his daughter...
...The famous speech beginning "Hath not a Jew eyes" has long been misinterpreted as a plea for tolerance, for equality among people...
...he explains, and anyway she is past 30, an age when most women boxers are already over the hill...
...The devastated Frankie is continually pestered by Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) to prep her for fights, but he refuses...
...Far from signaling a change of heart in Antonio, the Bard has him broadcasting his own bloated sense of virtue and refusing to acknowledge his guilt...
...When Bassanio is betrothed to her, she makes him pledge to wear her ring as a sign of his love...
...With the exception of two brief sequences, the only Jews we meet in the film are Shylock, his colorless associate Tubal (Allan Corduner), and his daughter Jessica (Zuleikha Robinson), who is aching to elope and convert to Christianity...
...The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction...
...He sets the drama in motion by asking Antonio to borrow 3,000 ducats from Shylock...
...These matters may be factually accurate, yet besides a banal early shot of the bolt on the ghetto gate shutting, Radford never investigates them...
...Nevertheless, Radford shows Shylock at temple standing in prayer, wearing a tallit, kissing the Torah...
...It is unlikely that Shakespeare knew much about Jewish observance...
...Million Dollar Baby enters politically risky territory toward its close, causing some critics to denounce it on ideological grounds...
...I wish I could heap similar praise upon Michael Radford's adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's troubling masterpiece...
...The leisurely but deliberate pace of the film reflects Frankie's own demeanor...
...He captures the desolate spaces of Frankie's poorly attended gym and Maggie's ugly Midwestern hometown as compellingly as he conveys the excitement of a stadium on a crowded night, drawing the viewer into the world on screen...
...Vera Drake, from Britain...
...Beyond this, Swank gently unfolds Maggie's working class Midwestern roots as well as her dogged devotion to boxing and Frankie...
...Swank, who won an Oscar five years ago for Boys Don't Cry, here confirms the caliber of her talent...
...Her wittiest orations are slashed and recast as simple insults...
...Yet try as she does to capture the playfulness and intelligence of the character, Radford works against her...
...Early on she persuades us that she is an inept fighter, pathetically in need of training...
...The complete speech as Shakespeare wrote it contains no hint of regret...
...In fact, Shylock is insisting that by carrying out his plan to execute Antonio, he is following lessons he learned from Christian society: "If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility...
...Though on the surface its plot seems a rehash of rusty Hollywood clichés, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby belongs on this list, too...
...The characters who insist that Shylock act with grace never display this attribute to one another...
...Shapeless in a mound of skirt and hiding behind a white beard, Pacino puts a crick in Shylock's back and a shuffle in his step...
...Boxer and trainer fill each other's familial voids, and the strength of their mutual affection is tested in an emotionally wrought climax...
...A challenge for any actor playing Bassanio is to decide whether his character remains unaware of Antonio's ardor or knowingly takes advantage of it...
...He delivers his lines with a twinge of melancholy, as if the key to the character were contained in his first words: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad...
...In either case, adapters misread the play if they draw an absolute distinction between good and evil...
...If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example...
...This reduction of Shylock to a mere canker saps the play of its tension, for in spite of his malevolence he makes a number of valid points...
...The play deserves a thoughtful modern production, but Radford's bleary, narrow-minded approach makes hash of Shakespeare's complex meanings, particularly in the portrayal of Shylock (Al Pacino...
...BASSANIO (Joseph Fiennes) is the romantic hero, but his selfishness and obsession with money rival Shylock's...
...and Bad Education, from Spain—presented moving personal stories during shameful periods in their respective nations' pasts...
...There were a number of revelations...
...Even after he is offered three times the sum he lent Antonio, he insists on exacting a pound of his enemy's flesh, the bond the merchant agreed to sacrifice if he defaulted on his loan...
...During the climactic court scene, where Antonio pulls open his shirt in preparation to be mutilated by Shylock's knife, a huge cross hangs over his breast—an advertisement of his purity and an admonishment to the heathen Jew...
...His Bassanio is handsome but colorless, neither objectionable nor exciting...
...Maggie's father is dead...
...Tellingly, Radford cuts the lines that follow, in which Antonio articulates the reason he claims to know so well: I oft delivered from his forfeitures Many that have at times made moan to me...
...Shakespeare's Antonio is a malicious anti-Semite who spits at Shylock in the street, calls him a dog, and tries to undermine his business...
...Christian and Jew...
...He cringes, fawns and shifts, delivering most of his lines in either an abject bawl or a petulant rave...
...He hopes to sail to Belmont and woo the wealthy Portia, a woman he has seen but never spoken to...
...Collins, as Portia, offers the most spirited performance in the film...
...In an election season rife with partisan documentaries, Fahrenheit 9/11 stood out...
...He is not justified in exacting revenge from Antonio, but the film suffers by refusing to explore the impetus of Shylock's desires...
...For centuries lovers of the play have debated whether its various strands form a pleasing whole or twist into a knot...
...Frankie has only one living relative, a daughter who, for reasons never disclosed, has cut ties with him...
...Why, revenge...
...Fragile as she looks in the opening scenes, her growing knack for knocking out her opponents in the first round is delightful and credible...
...From China, Zhang Yimou's Hero and House of Flying Daggers provided entertainingly complicated narratives and some of the most dynamic combat sequences ever shot...
...The actor forged his reputation in the Godfather movies portraying Michael Corleone, the ultimate Italian gangster...
...I cannot think of another actress who could play Maggie half as convincingly...
...He studies Gaelic and reads Yeats, hobbies that play a crucial role in the tale's unraveling...
...Without question, Shylock is the villain of The Merchant of Venice...
...Indeed, Frankie's priest (Brian O'Byrne), the object ofhis sarcastic quips throughout, appears near the end to remind him about the dangers of sin and damnation, and he takes the warning to heart...
...David Mamet's underrated Spartan was the most gripping thriller to reach theaters in a long time...
...He refers once to the synagogue, speaking to Tubal, as a place where he will transact business...
...The overall effect is an emphasis rather than a downplaying of the text's sick prejudice that Jews lust after Christian blood and flesh...
...His Shylock is not a native Italian, but, from the sound of his accent, a middle European immigrant who came to Venice by way of the Bronx...
...He includes glimpses of Venetian scenes that the play does not explore—brothels and eating houses, gondolas and underground tunnels—but Jews and Jewish life have virtually no part in the action...
...But the film's conclusion is powerful precisely because it reveals the many sides of a painfully fraught issue...
...Money and revenge seem the usurer's twin gods...
...Revenge...
...The acting is ultimately what makes Million Dollar Baby a heartrending experience...
...Later she is believable as a pugilist with a real shot at a title...
...At the outset, Radford seems to beg for tolerance from the audience...
...Bassanio is present when Shylock proposes the sinister terms of the bond, yet his protests about Antonio putting his life at stake are brief and mild...
...Radford does precisely that by slashing the text and casting his most attractive actors in the key gentile roles...
...Later, in Belmont, Portia torments Bassanio for betraying her trust, before revealing that she has the ring in her possession...
...Admittedly, Portia herself is not above perversely self-serving behavior...
...Radford's deletions and camerawork flatten the character's questionable morality...
...Eastwood moves his camera with the confidence of an accomplished craftsman who has nothing to prove...
...Thus their marriage begins with the husband's public humiliation at his wife's hands...
...A trio of magnificently directed European films—Rosenstrasse, from Germany...
...Toole's stories, also contains lovely details that give the characters three-dimensional lives...
...The role's physical demands are considerable...
...When Antonio falls into violent outbursts against the Jew, Irons speaks with a sometimes inaudible softness...
...It never seems tired or predictable and is beautifully directed...
...Yet she persists, and her tenacity and loyalty win him over...
...Radford is complicit in the self-aggrandizing piety Irons brings to the role...
...Without giving the ending away, I will note that both Frankie and the film arrive at his final decision after serious thought...
...Over the last dozen years, in minor films like The Devil's Advocate, he has been slyly entertaining as a Satanic figure seducing innocents into a web of deceit and has somehow managed to draw audiences' sympathies...
...When Shylock determines that he will impose the penalty written in Antonio's bond, the merchant begs for mercy...
...To argue this is demonic logic, not meant to be taken at face value, is to ignore the cruel and selfish transactions that mark most Christian dealings in the drama...
...A la Danny Rose or Jerry Maguire, Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), an excellent boxing coach but poor business manager, loses his only promising charge to a cannier agent on the eve of the protege's championship triumph...
...He does not train "girls...
...The dialogue is punctuated by a number of phrases that are later repeated at comic or poignant moments...
...No other work by Shakespeare so deftly combines a fairy-tale plot and lush romantic language with moral ambiguity and dark mercenary behavior...
...But to see him as the sole locus of greed, selfishness and betrayal is to encourage an anti-Semitism Shakespeare never conceived...
...On the contrary, Radford goes out of his way to link Shylock with devout Judaism and spiritual hypocrisy, even though the play's text hardly suggests that Shylock is a religious man...
Vol. 88 • February 2005 • No. 1
