He, Claudius

Who, when, how long?
Derek Jacobi, 1980 (part of BBC's every-freakin'-WS-play project), 3½ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Beebish.

What's missing? Changed?
Scarcely a line--and the completeness made me wonder a couple of times whether I'd heard the lines in the Burton, and thus whether I'd given that production excessive completeness credit.

What's odd?
Nothing's particularly odd, but there are some interesting choices, perhaps most notably a simulated rape by Hamlet of Gertrude in her closet that is clearly the source for Gibson/Zeffirelli. The context is very different in this one, though, because the H-G relationship is not at all sexualized here, so the "rape" can only be about violence and--more to the point--humiliation. Gert is played by Claire Bloom, by the way.

Also notable is the production's making a virtue of budgetary necessity: often there is little or no "set," just an enormous expanse of Beckettian blankness.

Jacobi--who typically delivers his soliloquies directly to the camera--gives some unconventional readings to a few lines. In the "nunnery" exchange, e.g., he emphasizes hath in "It hath made me mad," with a complementary epiphanic mien, as if afraid that his antic disposition has stuck to him like our mothers always told us a weird facial expression would. Both principals are tearful in that sequence--though it begins with a rather obvious low-comedy moment, Ham taking O's book from her and reorienting it to show she'd been "reading" it upside down. The tokens he'd given her seem to consist only of a scarf, with which he feigns to strangle her, alluding, obviously, to a later WS tragedy.

The lead-in Ham-Polonius scene begins w/ Ham entering while Gert and Claudius are still there; Gert approaches Ham, but he recoils (wordlessly, obviously). When Pol takes his leave and Ham replies that there's nothing he'd be as glad to have taken from him, he pulls out his dagger and holds it to his breast for the three "except my life"s, driving Pol away via a threat of suicide.

Then when R&G arrive, Ham delivers "How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz!" to the same character, thus making the same joke of their indistinguishability that readers and audiences always have: he has gotten the name wrong at first stab. [1/3 update: while reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at lunch, I discover that this bit is lifted straight from Stoppard.] Later in the exchange he opens his book and reads--or more likely feigns reading, as he closes the book before finishing--the "what a piece of work" speech.

When Ham reveals his conscience-catching scheme to Horatio, he hands him a copy of the speech he's written. People watching on a 17" screen when the play was first broadcast could probably see that the page was beautifully calligraphed; those watching it in 2007 on a big screen and with the ability to rewind and freeze-frame can see that the dialogue begins:

Ham. Are you honest?
Oph. My lord?

And continues thus.

Ham dons a Death's mask to greet the court arriving for the play. The dumbshow is largely comic, partly explaining the problem of why Claudius doesn't react earlier (though one shot of his face suggests that he's already beginning to be just a bit uneasy). At least one other production that includes both dramas--as most do not--has Claud and Gert chatting and paying scant attention to this preliminary.

During the play Ham grows increasingly manic, actually moving among the players, disrupting their performance to deliver his lines. Claud's ultimate reaction is the most low key I've seen: he doesn't panic, and says "Give me some light" in quiet, measured tones, which leads to the conclusion that Ham has seen what he expected and wanted to see more than what has actually transpired--and indeed, Hor's agreement seems much less certain than is typical.

At Ophelia's grave Laertes spits at Ham in response to "I loved you ever." And in the swordfight Ham immediately knocks L's dagger out of his hand, then lunges for the first hit when L stoops to retrieve it--making L's "No!" the equivalent of a playground "no fair!" Then L wounds Ham when Ham picks up the foil L has dropped by the blade and hands it to L haft away: L takes it and in one motion nicks Ham's wrist with it.

So after this long catalogue of the "odd," I reiterate that there's little really very odd: it's mostly just bits of stagecraft defensible but not automatic from the text--mostly intelligent expansive readings.

Flesh?
Solid, and Ham doesn't jump into O's grave--I'm beginning to think I'm not going to see either variant.

Ghost?
Corporeal, hard, armored, and glowing blue.

Gert-Ham eros?
As indicated above, no.

Other characters?
Of particular note are Patrick Stewart, strong as Claudius (and, just a few years earlier, Sejanus to Jacobi's titular Claudius in the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of the Robert Graves novels about imperial Rome), and an extraordinarily melancholy Horatio--a trait that gives his threat of suicide at the end more force than in any other production I've seen.

Overall, a fine production and in line w/ my grad school-era recollection of that BBC series of the plays: respectful of the texts, but with a blessed lack of awe. Four cetaceous clouds.

Mad Ham

Who, when, how long?
Mel Gibson (dir. Franco Zeffirelli), 1990, 2¼ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Maximal.

What's missing?
As with Olivier's version, Norway is excised, and so all that political stuff; unlike Oliv, Zef doesn't salvage the final Fortinbras speech: the film ends with "Good night . . . to thy rest!" Then an overhead shot pullback.

Anyway, lots is missing, full scenes and lots of lines within scenes. Far more than anything else I've seen so far, this is a movie (w/ a movie star) first, a Shakespeare play second.

As w/ the Russian film, no I.1 Ghost scene--we start w/ an extratextual funeral scene, w/ some lines incorporated from elsewhere. Claudius's line to Laertes about his confidence in Polonius is cut, and this seems to the point, as Claudius does not, in fact, seem to have confidence in Pol, but rather seems only to humor him.

No "rogue and petty slave," no "hoist with his own petard," no "very like a whale," no lecture to the players (we see the Player King studying the lines on a page, and Hamlet walks by and confers momentarily and inaudibly), no mention of the question of Ophelia's burial in consecrated ground.

What's changed?
I had made notes about other omissions but had to revise them when lines turned up in unfamiliar contexts. "Get thee to a nunnery" is razored out of Hamlet's early-act III confrontation w/ Ophelia only to be blurted suddenly amid the dialogue between the two before the play-within-a-play. Most of the nunnery stuff is inserted there, saving the final "Get thee" until after the play, when Ham is positively giddy w/ the success of his plot. Then he reprises the line to O (who is inexplicably still at her seat in the wake of the uproar following Claudius's panicky exit), kisses her long and tonguily, then, "Farewell."

Similarly, we hear no specifics of the Claudius-Laertes plot until after an extraordinarily bland Osric broaches the bet to Ham. Then when we do hear about the plot, first it's Claudius's poisoned wine, then Laertes's anointed blade--the unkosher lack of a safety tip for the foil isn't mentioned at all, though after the fencers are injured and Gertrude poisoned, Laertes mentions the "unbated and envenomed" sword.

Besides moving lines from scene to scene, Zef also shuffles them within a scene, usually with a guessable reason. E.g., all of Gert's conversation w/ Ham in I.2 is grouped after all of Claud's so that he can leave and the mother-son interview can be private (though that means there's no court audience for "Seems? Nay, madam . . . ").

The order of "To be," the interview w/ O (or most of it), and the arrival of the Players is per Oliv, and here almost none of the dialogue w/ the Players is kept--pity, as the Player King is played by the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite. Pol's "the best actors in the world" bit comes as an intro to their performance, which substitutes thematically unrelated antic acrobatics for the dumbshow. (And oddly, Claudius, not Ophelia, complains of Ham's chatter, "You are as good as a chorus, my lord.")

As in the Russian version, we see Ham on board the ship pulling the old switcheroo, and in stark contrast to Gielgud's apparent squeamishness about Ham's petard-hoisting, Zef cuts directly from this extratextual scene to another: R&G being led to the chopping block!

What's odd?
Geez, what's not? Some of the odd (or at least unusual) is quite good: "To be" is delivered in a crypt (though one wishes Zef had trusted the viewer to get it w/out the repeated line-linked shots of a skeleton); O in her first mad scene (dark-eyed and effective Helena Bonham Carter) is openly accusatory toward Gert; the "herbs" in her second mad scene are chicken bones and straw, and she runs off into the country after, last seen alive sitting on a bridge, with a cut then to Gert's narrative of the suicide (then an overkill shot of the by-now-clichéd O-in-the-wet).

Some of it is defensible if arguable interpretation: this is the most violent Hamlet I've seen--like Gibson's Mad Max or Martin Riggs, always a hair's breadth from killing anyone long before he actually does: he slams O against a wall, kicks a stool out from under Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern?) and later assaults one or the other, and he nearly chokes Gert w/ the chain bearing her miniature of Claud before simulating rape in speaking of her in Claud's bed.

Some of it is just odd: Gert escapes Ham's assault by kissing him passionately on the mouth--Glenn Close is nine years older than Gibson and looks much closer to his age: easily the hottest Gert I've seen. The eros is there in the Oliv, of course, but here it's consistently more of the point. But OK, let's grant that even that's a legit interpretation. But what's the damn deal w/ Ham's slapstick in the swordfight? In this version each pass requires different fencing gear, and the second pass is with broadswords--Ham feigns inability to lift his, and from that point to his wounding, he's more concerned w/ getting laughs from the court than w/ his swordplay. Just weird and out of place--hey, this ain't the time, right before everyone ends up mincemeat, that we want comic relief.

Flesh?
Solid. And not only does Ham not jump in O's grave, neither does Laertes.

Ghost?
Corporeal--simply another character.

Gert-Ham eros?
Duh. An interesting difference: in each of the previous three, Gert seems to have some suspicion of the chalice when carousing to Ham, but this Gert is oblivious, even offering Ham a drink after she's had her taste.

Other people?
Claud is the too, too solid Alan Bates, relishing his role as heavy. Polonius is Ian Holm, who can't help but be Bilbo Baggins to me henceforth. He's fine, though there's little surprising, save some real heat in chiding O re Ham's tenders. O, for her part, is less obsequious than usual in acknowledging her duty to her father (in line w/ her later aggressiveness toward Gert).

This is probably the least good of the four versions I've watched so far, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's not good--and golly, just its oddness ensures that it's as interesting as the others. Three petards.

Big Dick

Who, when, how long?
Burton, dir. Gielgud, filmed on stage at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 30 June-1 July 1964, 3¼ hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Huuuuuge.

What's missing?
This suddenly became a very interesting question late in the play. For most of four acts, the answer was scarcely anything, or scarcely anything I missed, anyway, save to odd flubbed line. (Likewise, next to nothing changed--most significant I noticed, e.g., was the Ghost's "Adieu, adieu, Hamlet, remember me," subbing the name for "adieu" #3.)

Then suddenly, we go straight from Claudius and Laertes after Ophelia's second mad scene to the scene in which arrive first Hamlet's letter announcing his return, then tidings of O's death. Lost is one of the shortest scenes in the play, if not the shortest (go ahead: look it up if it's important to you), thirty lines in which Horatio receives Hamlet's letter of return, containing the story of the pirates. Then in V.2, the long, long final scene, c. 50 ll. are struck in which Ham gives Hor the rest of the story--stealing the letter and forging a replacement--and finally the payoff: ten lines or so at the end, including the Ambassador's speech announcing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's demise. The only suggestion of that survives right after the long stretch of deletion, when Hor does still say, "So G & R go to't" and Ham replies that they asked for it. But "it" is not specified.

If you're cutting only 100 ll. or so from the play, why those lines, that subplot? So that Ham doesn't intentionally kill anyone who doesn't unquestionably deserve it? Would Guilgud really bowdlerize thus? At first I thought maybe he was feuding w/ Tom Stoppard and didn't want to plug his new play, but in fact Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was still two years away.

What's odd?
Costumes and furniture are contemporary and quite bland, save for Osric's feathery hat. The one period costume is worn by the Ghost, about which more anon.

Flesh?
Too too solid. Ham doesn't jump into the grave, which is raised on the bi-level stage.

Ghost?
Wonderful! Gielgud voices him, but he is seen only as an enormous shadow on the backdrop, in helmet and armor. If the nondescript modern dress of the production is meant to be a disconcerting reminder that we're viewing a play performed by our own contemporaries, the violation of that norm for the one otherworldly character whiplashes us from that ordinariness. Of course, it's a device that can work brilliantly on stage but might be hard to analogize on stage.

Hamlet-Gertrude eros?
Zero.

Other people?
Hume Cronyn as Polonius gives the only consistently distinguished performance other than Burton. I'd thought there's only one way to play Pol, but Cronyn portrays him in the first couple of scenes as weightier than usual--in other words, gives a sense of why shallow people might indeed respect him and think what he has to say is worth listening to. After that, his silliness is more interesting because it's a contrast to the better front we've seen he's sometimes capable of presenting.

Sadly, the rest of the cast is thoroughly pedestrian--the guy playing Claudius is an embarrassment--with the notable exception of the woman playing Ophelia, who, without any earlier indication of talent, is superb in the mad scenes, bending her body in various tortured directions and generally manifesting a kineticism that Kate Winslet may have studied when her turn came.

This production falls into the category of more interesting than good, but it's pretty good at that. Burton plays to the people in the cheap seats, and while, of course, the Olivier I saw wasn't playing to any seats at all, it's still about as opposite an approach to the role as is imaginable. "Understatement" clearly was not in Burton's vocabulary. If the film of the play--which, by the way, is not bad: obviously camerawork is limited, but there are a few useful closeups--is interesting, I'll bet a "making of," including unguarded footage from rehearsal, would be fascinating. I can't but think the Gielgud-Burton mixture was a volatile one. Oh, one other note: for all his sawing the air and splitting the ears of the groundlings, Burton excels in simply conveying the meaning of the partly archaic language. Four nunneries.

Russkies

Who, when, how long?
Innokenti Smoktunovsky, 1964, 2¼ hr.

What sort of Hamlet?
Siberian.

What's missing?
Presumably about half the lines of the play, since this version, ten minutes shorter than Olivier's, is marvelously unhurried, stopping to dwell on the waves coming to shore, or Ophelia's maids dressing her for Polonius's funeral, or the makeshift construction--two parallel lances, three swords laid across, a banner draped over--of a pallet to carry dead Hamlet in procession, two or three magnificent minutes of silent film after the delivery of the play's final lines. The translation is by Boris Pasternak, but presumably the credit for the extraordinary pacing goes to the director (looking it up now), Grigori Kozintsev.

The approach is in stark contrast to Olivier's: where O boldly slashed three important characters (or two if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are [fairly] counted as one; maybe two and a half?), this production trims at the margins but hangs onto almost everyone (still only one Clown/Gravedigger; and I don't believe we see the ambassadors to Norway; and the guards who first see the Ghost may not have speaking parts: scene 1 is cut, the film beginning with Hamlet galloping to Elsinore and embracing Gertrude, and his first meeting w/ the Ghost ends with him solo, so no demand for secrecy or sharing of his plan to feign an antic disposition. The result is that while you're aware of cuts--"Neither a borrower nor a lender," e.g. (Communist censorship?), and Ham's entire death scene boiled down to "The rest is silence"--you don't see the film as missing entire plot and thematic limbs, as Olivier's does.

There is almost no theology--this omission almost certainly political: no mention by the Ghost of his purgatorial status, no scene with Ham seeing Claudius at prayers and thus forgoing an easy kill. We do have the canon curtailing Ophelia's funeral rite because of her questionable death.

Oh, also: no pirates.

What's changed?
Very little, distinct from the previous issue. Most notable is that we see several scenes only described in the play. We see Ophelia at her sewing when Hamlet comes into her closet and plays out, in dumbshow, almost a dance, the scene she describes to her father in the play (and thus the description is cut). Oh! And before that, she reads, from the back of a small portrait of Ham, his "Doubt thou the stars are fire."

Incidentally, the subtitles are for the most part simply WS, not an attempt to render Pasternak's rendering back into idiomatic (or non-) English. So, when Claudius asks Gertrude for her opinion of Polonius's assertion that Ham's melancholy is down to thwarted love, the subtitle gives her response as "It may be, very like." What the Russian Gert has actually said is "Da." Magnificently rich language, Russian!

We also see Ham, at sea, steal and counterfeit the death warrant R&G are carrying, with the descriptive speech to Horatio, seasoned with the "hoist with his own petard" line to Gert, as voiceover, following a reprise of the Ghost's "Adieu, adieu, remember me." Similarly, a much-truncated "rogue and petty slave" soliloquy is delivered as interior monologue in the presence of the players.

What's odd?
I recall nothing that seemed to violate the spirit of the play or, as with Olivier's prologue, brand the film as the director's work rather than WS's. Moderately odd: Claudius briefly applauds the play before getting it (there's no dumbshow), then leaves in haste, calling for a light only when he reaches the corridor. Ham, who is in general an even icier version of Olivier's character, laughs maniacally while dragging dead Pol from Gert's closet--then cut to the castle's exterior, where Ham's muffled laughter can still be heard. At the duel, Gert shows up only after the action has begun.

The oddest thing for someone who knows about three words of Russian is the subtitling. I've already mentioned the decision for the most part to revert to the original language--nothing wrong with that. But the titles miss a lot: sometimes in dialogue character A's lines will be rendered but character B's not. Since I'm probably as attuned to the play as at any time in my life, having reread it and seen another film version in the past week, it wasn't a problem, but it might mess w/ someone who doesn't have the text fresh in mind.

Flesh is "too too" what?
It's too too cut from the script. Ham doesn't jump into Ophelia's grave, and, oddly, Laertes jumps in while O is still waiting to be lowered into it. Another oddity of that scene: Ham asks "What is the reason you use me thus? I loved you ever" not of Laertes but of dead O.

Ghost?
Bergmanesque, trailing a long black cape in the wind. We see his human eyes briefly. But his first scene is cut, and his presence in Gert's closet is signaled only by a musical crescendo, Ham's face, and Gert's question about why Ham looks on empty air.

Ham-Gert eros?
I'd say no, or at least much less than in the Olivier. Interesting that between her opening embrace of Ham and the scene in her closet, she makes not the slightest attempt to seem conflicted about her situation. But as in the Oliv, she is completely turned against Claudius after the latter scene.

Other people?
Laertes has a bit more gravitas--there's another nice extratextual scene in which he retrieves a presumably heirloom sword from a casket before storming Elsinore with his cronies after learning of his father's death.

Oph--played by the absolutely luminescent Anastasiya Vertinskaya--is infinitely more interesting here than in the Olivier. In her mad scenes she has none of the manic quality that is routinely (one might say textually) brought to play; instead, she seems to be in a fog, as if she's taken a drug whose effects are unfamiliar to her. As in the Oliv, we have the image of her on her back in the water, but here she's at the bottom of a crystal-clear stream, which is carrying away the herbs from the second mad scene. Where the other scene is a little weird, this one is chilling.

In fine, this may or may not be a better Hamlet than Olivier's; it is most certainly a better, more assured film. I guess I haven't mentioned yet (though perhaps have hinted at) the gorgeous b/w cinematography. Another plus is a score by one Dmitri Shostakovitch--wonderful music, but music in service of the film, not itself; some of the best sound, in fact, is silence. Five Yorick's skulls.

Larry

My melancholy month
A dozen Hamlets

The project that gave birth to this blog was a plan to screen as
many DVD versions as I could find of Shakespeare's tragedy of the melancholy
Dane, but if that was the birth, then the impregnation (or rather, farther back,
the foreplay, or even the first flirtation--but enough of that metaphor) was a
decision this winter to forgo my annual screening of the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius in favor of rereading the Robert Graves novels on which the
series was based. Yes, that's right: every winter for the past, I don't know,
eight? ten? years, I've devoted eleven-plus hours of my winter
entertainment to what is essentially a soap opera about the imperial family of
first-century Rome. But not this winter.

That decision left a void in my wintertime weeknight dinnertime
viewing. (Let's strive for One Element of My Anality per paragraph: Monday
through Thursday, I typically watch a TV show on DVD with dinner; Friday through
Sunday evening, I watch a dinnertime DVD movie.) No problem: having completed my collection of the HBO western Deadwood, I was ready to re-view the entire run.

That in turn meant that I'd have thirty-six nights
worth of weeknight dinnertime entertainment reserved from my own DVD library,
rather than the usual thirteen. And that meant (here comes this
paragraph's anality fact) that instead of my standard employment of my
two-at-a-time-unlimited Netflix subscription--one TV disc and one movie per
week--I'd have both slots free for movies for the majority of the winter. So why
not do something unusual with that freedom?

Now at about this time I was reading a story in the New
Yorker--while on the stair machine in the morning, as is my wont (a.f.
#4)--about the contrast between Laurence Olivier's and Orson Welles's treatments
of Shakespeare when I thought, "The play's the thing!" Well, not in those words,
exactly, but I did decide right then to dine whole-Hamlet. So I loaded
my Netflix queue and reread the play, jotting a set of questions to ask about
each production.

Since I started the project, a friend has directed me to an existing Nine Hamlets, and then I stumbled onto the Hamlet Weblog. I'll read these once I've finished my own, and I'll look for the 15 or 20 more such sites that are probably out there, but for now, enough prologue; to it:

Who, when, how long?

Olivier, 1948, 2½ hr.

What sort of Hamlet?

Pretty.

What's missing?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and thus "I have of late . . . lost all my mirth"--the "What a piece of work is [a] man" bit that, because of Hair, is for my generation the most familiar, if rearranged and imprecisely quoted, passage); Fortinbras, and indeed any notion of Norway or the threat of war; Clown 2 (and thus the Gravediggers' dialogue before Hamlet and Horatio arrive).

What's changed?

The "nunnery" encounter preceded "To be," which is in turn followed by the (R&G-less) arrival of the players, whose scenes are thus consecutive. Ham's instructions to Hor to observe Claudius during the inserted speech are truncated, and the play is dumbshow only. Hor. gets some of Ham's lines with the Gravedigger, and he gets the nonexistent Fortinbras's final speech of the play dictating funeral arrangements for Ham--but that speech is then followed by "Good night, sweet prince/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" as the final lines of the film.

What's odd?

• Ophelia floating on her back in the river, singing.
• The sets, especially the (obvious) miniatures, seem to have been made of papier-mâché in Mrs. Willoughby's fourth-grade classroom.
• Ham's Howard Beale-like swoon after each encounter with the Ghost.
• A prologue, employing the "So oft it chances" line from act I, scene 4, followed by the utterly twentieth-century "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind"--bizarre.
• The "bare bodkin" looks like a letter opener; Ham drops it into the bay at "thus conscience."

Flesh is "too too" what?

Solid. And in another element with a significant variant, Ham does not jump into Ophelia's grave.

Ghost?

Zombiesque, or maybe a Greek tragedy mask. He's invisible in the scene in Gertrude's closet, but for a blurry moment.

Hamlet-Gertrude eros?

Yes, à la Lesbos. Claudius sees the mutual attraction, incidentally, and is jealous as hell. Also, Gert is completely convinced by Hamlet after the killing of Polonius and rejects Claud's touch thereafter.

Other people?

Ophelia and Laertes are sweet, dumb children of their father. Osric is an over-the-top fop--even gets to take a pratfall down stairs.

Olivier's approach is clearly to understate and subtilize the hero, allowing him anger only in his mother's closet and obvious disorientation only in the meetings with the ghost (where the focus-fucking camerawork anticipates Vertigo). Soliloquies presented mostly as voiceover. Approach to cutting is brave: rather than nibble at the edges, hack w/ a broadsword. Four bare bodkins.

November 2005

• Shopgirl (11/4, Crit. $9.75 [$1,568.01])—A big surprise: didn’t expect to love it, but did expect to like it; certainly didn’t expect to loathe it. The Danes and Martin characters are both just completely vapid, and the Schwartzman character, marginally more interesting, is completely irritating at the start, then pretty much disappears for an hour, leaving us with just the two bores. On the rare occasion that the Martin character isn’t boring, he’s an asshole: no wonder women expect the worst from us.
• North Country (11/12, Cine $12 [$1,580.01])—Yes, it stacks the deck, and yes, the over-the-top triumph verges on grotesque, but the performances by Theron, McDormand (joining MacLaine on my list of guaranteed supporting actress Oscar nominees), Spacek, Richard Jenkins, et al. make it work, mostly—and the soundtrack dominated by a native Minnesotan helps, too.
• Pride and Prejudice (11/13, Crit. $6.25 [$1,586.26])—Delightful in just about every way, with only a few moments of unfortunate "modernness." Knightley, whose career I have admired since Beckham for her series of ballsy-chick roles, acquits herself beautifully as the mother of all ballsy chicks, Elizabeth Bennet. I like Knightly so much that it’s hard for me to judge her work objectively, but I love the little resistless laugh that she lets escape from time to time--seems like something Elizabeth would do: a recognition of the absurdity of it all. Also nice to see the younger Bennet girls portrayed as they were: silly girls, not young women (including Mary, whose seriousness goes to silly lengths).
• Bee Season (11/18, Crit. $9.75 [$1,596.01])—The trailer made it seem as if the Kabbalistic mysticism—in fact, all trace of Jewishness—had been stripped from the film, but that was not the case, which is both good news and bad. Good because I’d hate to think they’d be so cynical in adapting the novel (though obviously they are that cynical in marketing it), bad because that was the part of the novel to which I responded least happily. It is, in fact, a very faithful adaptation of a novel I didn’t like as much as I expected to. At least with the film, my expectations were realistic.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (11/19, NoHa $6.75 [$1,602.76])—It is what it is, and that’s pretty darned good. The onset of adolescence is the key special effect here, and it’s handled well.
• Walk the Line (11/19, NoHa $16.08 [$1,618.84])—We pretty much saw this a year ago, except that that musical genius–junkie was black, the central acting performance was more impressive, and the rest of the acting was less so. The reviews had lowered my expectations, so I wasn’t disappointed. Goldfinger at Crit. on Sunday ($4 [$1,622.84].
• Rent (11/23, Crit. $6.25 [$1,629.09])—Although I absolutely despised the trailer for this, which I think I must have seen a thousand times, I went because the reviews did not confirm my prejudice and—crucially—because it showed downtown, and I must say it was one of my most pleasant surprises of the year. Some clever songs and wonderful Hairlike energy.
• Paradise Now (11/25, Cine $12.75 [$1,641.84])—Very smart, very tough depiction of Palestinian friends, one of whom is kneejerk eager to be a martyr, the other of whom is more thoughtful, and moreover finds what may turn out to be love just before their martyrdom. The result is predictable in an unpredictable way.
• The Ice Harvest (11/25, Cine $11.25 [$1,653.09])—Yeesh! I didn’t let the reviews chase me off of this one because I so like many of the people involved, but it’s about as sour a film as I’ve seen all year.
• Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (11/27, Union Sq. $10.75 [$1,663.84])—Another one I saw in Manhattan only to discover the next day that it was coming to New Haven. Oh well. Parts of this are wonderful, and she’s to be saluted for her obsessive need to destroy all borders of taste. Sometimes, though, just destroying those borders isn’t enough to make it funny. [160]
• Down to the Bone (11/27, Quad $18.50 [$1,682.34])—Wonderful performance by an actress whose name I don’t know offhand but who sometimes looks a bit like Cate Blanchett [this was my first look at Vera Farmiga], but there’s nothing much new in the story: it’s hard to stop being a junkie.
• Žižek! (11/27, IFC $10.75 [$1,693.09])—Exhilarating portrait of an iconoclastic (and often hilarious) Czech leftist (Stalinist, he would say) philosopher.
• Classe tous risques (11/27, FF $10 [$1,703.09])—Another French noir—good, but no Ascenceur. It's a Wonderful Life the following Sunday at Crit. ($4 [$1,707.09]), and Miracle on 34th Street on 12/11 ($4 [$1,711.09]).

December 2005

• Syriana (12/11, Crit. $15.47 [$1,726.56])—My best advice: don’t eat popcorn or do anything else that will distract even the slightest share of your attention from the screen. A bit like The Big Sleep in that you can’t expect to figure out all the complexities on your first viewing, but also in that figuring everything out is less the point than simply recognizing and appreciating the complexity itself. Seems a certain top-ten for me this year.
• King Kong (12/17, NoHa $16.08 [$1,742.64])—This will be #1 on my list this year—if I make a list of biggest disappointments. Dreadfully slow pacing is the biggest of my complaints—somebody tell Mr. Jackson that not everything needs (or wants) the The Lord of the Rings treatment. Don’t get me wrong: there were things I liked—wonderful special effects, a beautifully developed relationship between girl and ape—but my expectations were too high.
• White Christmas (1954; 12/18, Crit. $4 [$1,746.64])—Never even occurred to me when going that this fits the rules for my counting it: seen in public, never seen before. I went because I’d been given to believe it wasn’t awful, and it wasn’t, but Crosby and Kaye are no Kelly and O'Connor. Best feature was the dance numbers, and that was a surprise: credit Vera-Ellen and a young (uncredited, actually) choreographed named Fosse.
• Brokeback Mountain (12/23, Crit. $15.47 [$1,762.11])—Well, yes: I hate to parrot what everybody else has been saying, but beautiful, heartbreaking. Ledger’s performance is amazing, but Gyllenhaal isn’t exactly chopped sheep’s liver. I wonder whether Ang Lee is second-guessing himself for not making the Hulk gay.
• The Producers (12/25, Crit. $15.47 [$1,777.58])—Pretty much the same reaction to this as to the original: some moments of brilliance, lots of tedium. Matthew Broderick can do anything but convince me of his heterosexuality.
• Memoirs of a Geisha (12/29, Crit. $0 [$1, 777.58])—Not disappointed because (1) reviews have been lukewarm and (2) I didn’t love the book. It’s long, it’s beautiful, it’s mechanical. Did I mention it’s long? [169]