Friday, June 19, 2009

A House of David: “Away We Go” and “Oleanna”



I would love to have a glass of wine with Maya Rudolph…and cradle Julia Stiles in my arms when she is broken.

For several years, at least since Emerson, people have been telling me to read Dave Eggers, acclaimed novelist and editor of McSweeney's. For even more years, I have long admired David Mamet, as I admire any writer who can take the English language and reinvent it to suit his purposes. Until yesterday, I had never experienced Eggers, or seen Mamet performed live on stage. When you add in getting my student loans fully approved, re-coordinating the church book club potluck, and finding potential new subletters…not a bad day.

Away We Go is a collaboration between Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, who edits The Believer, another terrific magazine which Barnes & Noble actually carries. It would have been a wonderful comic novel…except for the Montreal sequence, which cries out for enactment. So it would have been a wonderful play…it's very episodic, and the tone reminds of George Bernard Shaw if Shaw had a bit more heart in him. Instead it is a movie, and a very good movie…but…

I have never seen Sam Mendes's work on the stage, but between this film and American Beauty, which I seriously dislike, I have an impression of him. In theatre, which demands a level of grandiosity so an actor can reach the back row of a very intimate setting, performers can be encouraged to amp up their styles, go larger. From clips I have seen and the testimony of others, Mendes is extraordinary on stage…the late Natasha Richardson in Cabaret, Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room, Bernadette Peters in Gypsy, all great. But film has an intimacy all its own. Projection and exaggeration are not needed because the camera gets RIGHT THERE. But Mendes doesn't seem to realize this, and he also, I feel, enjoys having a camera so he can select beautiful images he could never find on stage and dwell on them. So not only does he have the tendency to indulge in unnecessary "artsy" beauty, but even worse, unless he is dealing with really good writers and actors who are on the same page about character interpretation, he can encourage these actors to go over-the-top.

American Beauty was ruined for me because Alan Ball is not a good writer in my humble opinion, so everyone except Kevin Spacey, who somehow GOT SOMETHING and saved the film from disaster, is playing their part too broadly, Annette Bening worst of all, and Mendes filled in the thin story with self-conscious "art." I did not see Revolutionary Road but read Justin Haythe's screenplay and, while liking it, thought "Why do I want to spend two hours watching these people?" Lisa Huberman confirmed this impression, including the shocking news that Mrs. Mendes, Kate Winslet, was lost.

This is why I now want to read more Dave Eggers, and Vendela Vida as well, for their screenplay reins in Mendes…almost. They write with the efficiency of the great short story writers, or Hemingway working on a novel, leaving Mendes with no time for inessential shots. And their characters are not only well-drawn, but lovingly empathetic. What attracted me to the movie was a review stating that Burt and Verona, the central couple, are a Boy and Girl who already Got each other and never see their relationship in jeopardy for the duration. Their problems are not with each other but with an outside world where (and this is the plot) they travel from one end of the country to the other and can't find a place to raise their soon-to-be-born baby. This is a rarity in the Hollywood movie: a good relationship, where fighting occurs but is always fair and both sides can laugh with each other and love each other and seem to talk in their own language. It takes just the right actors to capture such happiness without making it look forced or pie-in-the-sky, and John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are perfect.

The flaws in the film are all in the first half. The structure is based around Burt and Verona meeting friends and family in various cities and observing their parental skills, trying to find someone they can share the experience with. Eggers and Vida give the people in each location a certain flaw with which they can comment on society, and the flaws go from comical to serious. But for the comic parts, the writing is so finely observed that a delicate touch is needed to keep things from getting grotesque. Mendes does not appreciate this. So Allison Janney, sadly, gives the worst performance of a great career as an oblivious alcoholic (though Jim Gaffigan as her suffering husband is good). Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels (Burt's parents) are little better, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton just barely avoid cartoonism. These scenes are laugh-out-loud funny when you're watching them, but in the overall context, especially when sandwiched around Burt and Verona's one-on-one scenes, they jar. Horribly.

The final sequences, where the wit gets dryer and the tears flow easier, wipe away the worst memories of the beginning. Burt and Verona visit their best friends from college, now living in Montreal with several adopted children, in four scenes which start uproariously but end…somewhere else. Then they end up unexpectedly in Miami, where they have their moment of divine revelation in a scene involving puppets, Bob Dylan, a trampoline, and Paul Schneider as Burt's brother…though he is absent for Krasinski and Rudolph's unbelievably tender, hope-inspiring conversation in the backyard. It is one of the two best scenes in the movie…the other involves them in Montreal with Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey, a pole, and the Velvet Underground's "O! Sweet Nuthin'" in five minutes where you suddenly know Messina and Lynskey could have carried a whole other movie on their own and you could never look away.

The ending is a little sappy. But A.O. Scott was dead wrong when he called Away We Go a "smug" movie which "does not like you." Roger Ebert hits the point better in his positive review: "You can be smug if you have something worth being smug about." Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, and their counterparts John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, can all be smug for telling and enacting a beautiful story.

Julia Stiles can afford to be smug too, these days. Her Carol in Oleanna at the Mark Taper Forum…and soon Broadway…is great. Really and truly great. So great that even when Stiles has her back turned and you can't see her face, you can't take your eyes off of her.

Stiles is great in spite of the elements working against her. I was fortunate to see this with Lisa, who KNOWS theatre in ways I do not. Lisa saw her class at Rutgers perform Oleanna last year in what she called a very bad production because it focused on the people, not the ideas. But in this play, David Mamet is more concerned with the ideas. John and Carol represent two social points of view and are given only enough personality to make their conflict interesting. But Mamet understands John…he's the man who wrote American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. He understands men all too well, especially angry and/or determined men. He does not understand female psychology. Carol, as Lisa pointed out to me, has almost no specific characteristics, and the personal battle she clearly wages is kept extremely vague. The context clues suggested to me Carol is a lesbian coming from an environment where such "deviation" is intolerable. Such a solution is simple and direct…but Mamet is direct, and again, this is about ideas. However, if this is the truth…why doesn't Mamet come out and say so?

I don't know if Julia Stiles thinks Carol is a lesbian, but she DOES call upon some inner reserve of pain from her character's life which fuels her most sobbing, voice-raised scenes. But the greatness of her performance comes from a subtext she brings out…and which Lisa and I, and hopefully every other observant theatergoer, recognized.

Here's what is happening in Oleanna. Carol is intelligent, studious, and a natural for higher education, but she has some sort of problem learning in the traditional way. If she has the right teacher, she has the brains and capacity to excel. However, John is NOT the right teacher. John teaches a course involving some kind of educational psychology, and he's written an acclaimed book which says higher education is no longer about learning but about giving higher classes something they think they're entitled to. It's hazing. It's regurgitation. And it's a subtle power play. Arguably this might be true, and John SAYS he wants to teach so he can break from this system. But there's a dirty little secret…John wants power himself and enjoys being a figure of power. He lords it over his students and dresses up even casual, advising conversation to them in over-intellectual nonsense and forces them to question themselves even on the simplest things. After a lifetime of being told he was stupid and no good, he RELISHES being the almighty professor who can make others feels stupid. And in situations where he doesn't have power, as with his wife, his real estate broker, and the tenure committee, he reacts with anger and exasperation…which only fuels his urge to get more power.

Carol, as played by Stiles, starts out deceptively. She seems to be whining. Then you slowly catch on that here is a smart, ambitious girl who wants to make something genuinely positive of her life coming up against a man who refuses to show her human respect, who talks rings around her, who refuses to listen to her. She has nothing, and as she realizes this, her frustration makes her break down. But then Carol hits on something: the only way to put herself on an equal footing with John is to play the game his way. The two other scenes (the play has no intermission and runs by in eighty minutes) depict Carol finding her voice in a way where she uses all of John's techniques on him. She dissects his language and gestures, she interprets him the way he interprets her, she presents an explanation just as convincing as his but with the facts lined up on her side. Best of all, this gives her the courage to call him for what he is: a sadistic, greedy bully of a man. And being seen through by a woman he never expected to catch on only sets John more afire.

But the tragedy of Oleanna is that Carol can't stop. She turns into John. She insists she has nothing to gain from ruining his life…and she doesn't…but she is still ruining it all the same from the sheer joy someone feels when they get a taste of being in control. Carol becomes sneaky, makes demands, backs John into a corner…and then, in the final minute, makes a mistake, and she knows a split-second too late she has made the mistake and sees herself and the situation and how both have transformed…and provokes a finale where I didn't want to look anymore, but I had to.

I shall not repeat the action of the final minute, or Stiles's last line…but that line, spoken with a sobbing voice, condemns both John for the man even he now knows he is…and herself for becoming the oppressor she feared and hated the most. It is a chilling, sorrowful acceptance.

Stiles receives a great partner in Bill Pullman, who never gives John a moment of empathy and nearly erases the picture of President Thomas Whitmore from my brain, and sympathetic direction from Doug Hughes. The only thing wrong with this Oleanna is the industrial whirr of the blinds in John's office which take the place of a curtain…too noisy for a show loud enough already.

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