How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (7 page)

Neither physically nor temperamentally is Natasha Richardson, the star of the new production, suited for this exquisitely complicated role. Part of the equipment that stage actors, far more than movie actors, must work with in creating a character are the bodies and faces that God (or whoever) gave them, and in this respect it must be said Ms. Richardson has much to overcome, at least when it comes to roles that require confusion and vulnerability. She has the unthreatening, scrubbed, pleasant blond looks you associate with captains of girls' hockey teams; quite tall to begin with, she has inexplicably been given what looked to me to be six-inch heels to wear in this new production, with the result that she clomps around the stage looming over the other actors, exuding the healthy if sexless glow of an Amazon—or, given her coloring, perhaps a Valkyrie. To my mind, the heartiness of Richardson's physique is reflected in her acting. Like Gwyneth Paltrow, another daughter of a famous and gifted actress, Richardson is a star whose performances feel more than anything like the result of an elaborate series of calculations; you feel the will, the determination behind every word and gesture. In this performance, she seemed to be compensating for a lack of natural sympathy with the character by means of exaggerated tics: in particular, her hands shook violently every time she was called upon to suggest anxiety or instability—a caricature rather than a true performance.

And indeed, as I watched Ms. Richardson on two occasions, moving around the enormous and awkwardly designed set (Stella's two-room
apartment is raised on a platform center stage, so the actors are constantly having to step clumsily up or down), I kept trying to think what the awkward bigness, the loping strides, the vague quality of caricature, the fraught avidity reminded me of. It wasn't till I'd left the theater that I remembered what it was: drag performers “doing” Blanche. In this
Streetcar
, you don't get Williams's Blanche, with all her desperate contradictions, so much as a Blanche who's been mediated by the performances we've already seen—not Blanche but “Blanche,” the quippy camp queen (Richardson plays for laughs a good many lines—as for instance her remark that “only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe” could do justice to Stella's run-down neighborhood—that, as Leigh's performance makes clear, are all the more telling if downplayed); Blanche the cultural icon of affirmation and determination, qualities we like to admire in women today.

Yet for all the obvious twitching and slurring, Ms. Richardson's Blanche looked like a powerful young woman at the top of her game. Watching her I found it hard not to draw comparisons between this Blanche and Jessica Lange's Amanda Wingfield in
Menagerie
. In both performances, the appalling, neurotic aspects of the characters (hardly mere tics) were being edged out, as it were, by the “strong” side—the side that has greater appeal, in other words, for today's audiences, the side that allows these women to be heroic in a way we want women to be just now.

 

The big, sexless Blanche of Edward Hall's new production finds her match in sexless, big Stanley Kowalski. An obvious problem of casting this part is the gigantic shadow cast by the remarkable, career-making performance by Marlon Brando, which electrified Broadway audiences and was, no doubt to the chagrin of every actor who's undertaken the role ever since, admirably preserved in the film. Hall clearly believed that the best way to avoid invidious comparisons was to avoid altogether the idea of casting someone straightforwardly sexy (someone like Alec Baldwin, who played Stanley opposite Jessica Lange's Blanche in the 1992 revival on Broadway) as Stanley.

But the perverse casting of the excellent but grotesquely inappropri
ate John C. Reilly as Stanley, while it makes us aware that we are in the presence of a director who is eager to “rethink” a classic, suggests that this director does not understand the play. Here is what Williams asks for in his Stanley:

Reilly, who has the physique of a character actor—he's a big, soft-bellied man who slides easily into roles of long-suffering blue-collar husbands, such as the one in the Los Angeles sequences in
The Hours
—fails to suggest any of the qualities Williams seeks. The problem is not that he's rather pleasantly homely, or that he appears to spend less time in the gym than Ms. Richardson does. The problem is that he isn't someone who strikes you as a cocky “seed-bearer,” or gives you the slightest impression that “pleasure with women” has been the center of his life from earliest manhood. There are large actors—John Goodman, for instance—who have no trouble convincing you that they're good in bed. Reilly is not one of them.

An intelligent actor, Reilly compensates by giving a performance that emphasizes another much-discussed aspect of Stanley's character, which is the fact that he's a working-class American of Polish descent. His Stanley is loud, bearish, crude—someone who corresponds more or less exactly to what Blanche clearly has in mind when she refers to him, contemptuously, as a “Polack.” But the horrible irony of casting Reilly, or of Reilly's understandable default decision to play him as a crass vulgarian, is that the Stanley you end up getting in this
Streetcar
is itself a kind of delusion. As the entire action of the play makes clear, Blanche's harping on the class issue—her insinuations that the “Polack” is an inappropriate match for a DuBois—is a cover for what's really bothering her, which is his raw sexual allure, to which she responds flirtatiously from the very start and which of course comes back to destroy her in
the latter part of the play, when Stanley finally rapes her. (“We've had this date from the beginning,” he gloats, and he's right.) To play Stanley as more vulgar than sexy is precisely to shy away from what's at the heart of the play—sex—as determinedly as Blanche, in her delusional mode, does.

It's unfortunate that neither of the leads in the current production is able to convey sexual heat, since there is evidence that Williams himself recognized that it was precisely that energy, flowing across the stage, that could dissolve some of the objections to the play's ostensible inconsistencies. In the memoirs, he tells an amusing anecdote about the 1948 New Haven tryout of
Streetcar
:

Wilder's objection arises out of the same critical impulse that fueled McCarthy's. (“She must,” she complained of Blanche, “also be a notorious libertine who has been run out of a small town like a prostitute, a thing absolutely inconceivable for a woman to whom conventionality is the end of existence….”) But the power of “a good lay”—and, indeed, of desire—explains a lot of what happens in the play, from Stella's connection to Stanley to Blanche's pathetic behavior: her confusion of sex with desire, of desire with love, an emotion to which, in her life, only generic “kindness” has ever come close.

You could, indeed, say that sex is the very core of
Streetcar
's commentary on illusion, reality, truth, and lies, since it's the object of Blanche's hypocrisy, the vehicle of her undoing. Sex and desire serve the same purpose in this play that poverty and vanity do in
The Glass Menagerie
: they are the solvents that corrode the characters' pretensions, the hard surfaces against which their delusions shatter, leaving the vulnerable
and pathetic interior visible to our shocked, and ultimately sympathetic, gaze. (The final scene of
Streetcar
should leave you with the same almost shamed horror that the final scene of
Menagerie
does.) For the revelation to which this drama leads is that despite her veneer of plantation-bred gentility, Blanche is not as white as her name so famously suggests; she was, we learn, run out of Laurel, Mississippi, for her promiscuity, which culminated in her seduction of an underage boy.

This is why it's important for the actress portraying Blanche to be able to convey the confused sexual avidity that lurks beneath her blurred and desperate gentility. She may denounce Stanley as an “animal,” but she herself is all too familiar with the animal pleasures he represents. (Similarly, she chastises her relatives for having bankrupted the family through “their epic fornications”—“the four letter word deprived us of our plantation”—although, as we know, she too is an epic fornicator.) Our desire to see Blanche simplistically, as a heroine of the poetic, has made it easy to forget about her carnality, about the fact that she is, in many ways, not the opposite but the double of Stanley. What's moving about Blanche is what is moving about so many of Williams's pathetic, tortured females: not that she isn't what she claims to be—some kind of virginal “beauty” violated by Stanley's reductive, goat-like “reality” (Stanley, after all, has intense romantic feelings, and waxes poetic about lovemaking)—but that she can still cling to her notions of beauty after wallowing in so much ugly reality herself.

The tortured complexity typical of the play's characters extends to its presentation of sex: the action leads to a climactic sexual encounter between the two that is at once a rape and the inevitable culmination of Blanche's hidden desire. In the film, the sexual energy between Leigh and Brando crackles from the minute she drinks in the sight of him; the fact that Brando—it can be hard to remember this—looked almost shockingly, prettily boyish in the film, despite his muscles, gives texture to the relationship, since we know that Blanche has a special interest in teenagers. At one point, she makes a play for a newspaper boy.

 

But on the stage of Studio 54, there's no sexual energy, and hence no climax, no provocative complexity—there's just a lot of noise. Reilly in particular compensates for his lack of allure by turning up the volume,
with the result that you feel the potential for violence in Stanley (a character who, as even his wife admits, loves to smash things) but not the potential seductiveness, the thing that got Stella to come down off of them columns. At a certain moment during one of the performances of this
Streetcar
, I realized that Reilly reminded me of Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in
The Honeymooners
—another big galoot who's rough with the women around him. Without the transformative power of sex—the power that for Williams, in so many plays, can effect the metamorphosis of the ordinary into the sublime, a power that is, like so much else in this author's work, like Blanche herself, at once base and exalted—the play had indeed become precisely the play that Mary McCarthy said it was: a simplistic farce about annoying in-laws who outstay their welcome.

Stripped of its key element, stranded between the “daring” pretensions of its director and the subtle text of the play itself, between the tragedy it is meant to be and the comedy into which it can so awkwardly descend, this
Streetcar
doesn't take you anywhere—not to desire, not to cemeteries, certainly not to the blissful Elysian Fields. You leave Studio 54, in fact, with no strong emotions at all—certainly none of the deep feelings that Williams at his best can evoke: the odd and illogical admixture of horror and pity and shamed pathos, those tenderer and more awkward emotions the unflinching exploration of which is his great talent as a dramatist, his great accomplishment as a humanist.

And a
Streetcar
thus denatured, one that leaves you politely tepid, that's about people with no particularly interesting passions, is not only a play Williams wouldn't have written—it's a play he went out of his way not to write. What else, after all, can you conclude from another, final oddity in the text of this play that has to do with the meaning of names, with the way in which verbal conventions can get elided by wishful thinking? I have always wondered why, if Blanche DuBois was indeed married at an early age to a tragic young homosexual—and if she is as invested in social propriety as she claims—she is not known, in the play, by her married name. But then, who would want to sit through a drama about a character named Blanche Gray?

—The New York Review of Books,
June 9, 2005

I
n the 1995 Almodóvar film
The Flower of My Secret
—a work that stands at the chronological midpoint between the director's earliest movies, with their DayGlo emotions and Benzedrine-driven plots, and the technically smoother and emotionally subtler films of the past few years—a successful middle-aged writer called Leocadia (Leo) Macìas is caught, as Almodóvar's characters so often are, between the exhausting emotional demands imposed by a complicated life and the equally exhausting demands imposed by what you might as well call Art. Leo is an author of a series of very popular
novelas rosas
, romance novels (literally, “pink novels”), but her life of late has been so tortured—her handsome army officer husband is leaving her, very likely for another woman; her impossible mother is driving her and her put-upon sister nuts—that, as she tells her bemused editor, whatever she writes comes out not pink, but black.

This wry pun is meant by Leo to explain the manuscript she's just submitted, to which the editor, Alicia, has reacted not at all well. As Alicia points out to a weary Leo, the new novel, a violent tale of murder and incest whose female protagonist “works emptying shit out of hospital bedpans, who's got a junkie mother-in-law and faggot son who's
into black men,” not only is appallingly inappropriate to the publishing house's “True Love” series, but violates the terms of Leo's contract, which stipulates “an absence of social conscience…. And, of course, happy endings.” The plot of the new novel smacks less of Barbara Cart-land than of Patricia Highsmith; as a sputtering Alicia puts it, it's about

When Leo, defending the artistry of
The Cold Storage Room
, gently protests that “reality is like that,” Alicia launches into an outburst about “reality”:

But it's clear that to Leo, the gritty reality of her lower-class characters is far worthier of artistic representation than the rose-hued, gossamer fantasy world of her earlier work. When Alicia glumly asks why Leo's writing has changed, Leo shrugs. “I guess I'm evolving,” she says.

 

Pedro Almodóvar is a director who, over the course of a career that now spans a quarter century, has famously loaded his films with references to mass entertainment, its producers and consumers; his characters tend to be directors, talk show hosts, novelists,
toreros
(and, in
Talk to Her
, a
torera
), actresses, journalists, publishers, dancers, fans—people who are frequently shown in the act of watching dances, plays, television shows, movies, bullfights, concerts. For this reason, exchanges in his films about the nature and merits of popular genres and their ability to represent reality are not to be taken casually. And indeed, it's hard not to think of the argument between Alicia and Leo as one about Almodóvar himself—about his own evolution as an artist, a progress in which
The Flower of My Secret
seemed, as critics at the time and Almodóvar himself have commented, to mark a watershed moment.

Before then, when you talked about “an Almodóvar film,” it was pretty clear what you were referring to: something with an exaggerated aesthetic, imbued with the lurid neon glare that you associated more with certain genres of entertainment—radio and TV soap operas, film noir, pop lyrics—than with anything recognizably “real.” There was the flashily self-conscious penchant for hyperbolic (and sometimes, you couldn't help feeling, ad hoc) plotting: murder, suicide, and hostage-taking were favorite mechanisms to keep the action going (in the 1987 gay stalker melodrama
The Law of Desire
, you get all three). And—as with soap operas—hospitals and police stations were favorite settings. There was the hysterical pacing, which only occasionally was intentionally amusing (
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
, the director's 1988 breakout hit, was self-consciously constructed as a filmed stage farce). Above all, there were the demimondaine characters—drag queens, transsexuals, prostitutes, junkies—who were handy, vivid symbols of the transgressive themes the then-young Almodóvar, during the heady years of the post-Franco cultural explosion, was clearly eager to explore—and to flaunt.

Such style and such material ideally suited the over-the-top passions that have always been this director's subject, passions that, like those in soaps, were never less than excessive—and, too often, excessively symbolic. (In
Matador
, the male and female leads are a former matador and his icily beautiful lover, both of them serial murderers who can achieve orgasm only in the act of killing.) The very titles of the early work have a hysterical or camp edge:
What Have I Done to Deserve This?
(1984),
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
(1990),
High Heels
(1991), and, most famously,
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
. It comes as no surprise that the director's earliest champions in the United States were to be found among urban gay men, who were also enjoying, during the mid-and late 1980s, a newfound sense of political power and social visibility—and, of course, were feeling no little anxiety as well just then. Because a kind of hyperactive ebullience mixed with an edge of hysteria was the hallmark of Almodóvar's early style, too, the appearance, back then, of a new Almodóvar film felt to many of us obscurely like a confirmation. This perfect concentricity of the films' style and their historical moment no doubt explains why those early films, celebrated as being so gratifyingly “fabulous” at the time, feel today a bit overwrought—a bit dated.

 

When it came out,
The Flower of My Secret
—a film about an artist's need to outgrow an earlier, insufficiently serious aesthetic—was felt, with no little relief by Almodóvar's admirers, to signal a welcome renewal of creative energies after a number of films (
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
,
High Heels
,
Kika
) in which the deliciously outré boldness or the archly knowing camp fun of earlier work like
The Law of Desire
or
Women on the Verge
had hardened into shtick. Leo, to be sure, is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown—her attachment to her wayward husband has a familiarly hysterical edge to it—but what's interesting in this film is the way in which that mad passion fails to lead to the kind of emotional and narrative carnage with which the director had earlier liked to conclude his films.

The Law of Desire
, for instance, is also about an obsessed, rejected lover (an ostensibly bisexual young man, played by Antonio Banderas, who stalks and eventually seduces a famous film director and then kills the film director's boyfriend); but whereas the earlier film's melodramatic ending had the stalker shooting himself in his lover's arms—after a police siege and a hostage crisis, no less—
The Flower of My Secret
rejects luridly dramatic death scenes in favor of something subtler and truer. Leo's impulsive suicide attempt is foiled when, having swallowed a bottle of pills, the semiconscious woman hears her crazy mother's voice on the answering machine—at which point she races into the bathroom, forces herself to throw up, and gets on with the painful, messy business of living. The theme of eschewing melodrama for the mundane realities of everyday life is implicit in the film's trick opening, in which we see a distraught woman, whose husband or boyfriend, we are given to understand, is brain-dead, being gently pressured by two doctors to sign a donor consent form: the camera pulls back to reveal that the woman is merely an actress participating in a training exercise for physicians at a transplant clinic run by Leo's best friend.

The self-conscious turning away from hyperbole that seems to be a consistent theme in
The Flower of My Secret
—the transplant clinic feint, the rejection of
The Law of Desire
's dénouement in suicidal violence, the shift in emotional interest from an erotic, solipsistic obsession with the lover to the dutiful relationship with a mother—looks forward to a larger change that's been in evidence over the past decade or so. Among other things, since 1995 the writer-director has seemed to real
ize that invocations of and allusions to pop culture can be more than idle postmodern games or advertisements for one's own cleverness.
All About My Mother
(1999), about a woman seeking emotional meaning (not least, in mothering other people's children) after her adored teenaged son is killed in a car accident, is beautifully organized around a series of echoes of
All About Eve
, with its theme of stolen identities, and of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, with its overriding preoccupation with fragile female psyches.
Talk to Her
(2002), which begins and ends with characters watching performances of Pina Bausch works, contains a brilliantly original set piece in which we get to see scenes from a bizarre 1920s silent film—Almodóvar's invention, amusingly evocative of that era and genre—whose plot comments suggestively on his characters and their motives. (An obsessive, sexually repressed male nurse describes the film—in which a man who's been shrunk to the size of a human finger as the result of a botched experiment enters the vagina of his sleeping mistress—as he himself finally enters the body of a comatose patient with whom he's been obsessed for some time.)

Since then, too, there's been an emphasis in the films on intense feelings that somehow do not lead to seduction, murder, and suicide. (The will to survive, the desire to nurture, and the need to commemorate, for instance.) If the Oscar-winning
Talk to Her
, like
Matador
sixteen years earlier, is about bullfighters and gorings, the tone of the movie, the passions that animate it—that of a journalist for the
torera
, and of the great
torero
who is his rival for her affections—are restrained, almost somber. It's as if Almodóvar were daring himself to make a film about that aesthetically and symbolically loaded cultural institution without going over the top, as he did so gleefully in the earlier movie (which opens with a scene of the sadistic retired bullfighter masturbating to slasher films in which women are dismembered, beheaded, hanged). Indeed one of the sly surprises of the later movie is that the famous
torero
turns out to be rather sweet and nice, and touchingly attentive to his insensate lover—talking to her constantly—as the skeptical journalist, ostensibly the less macho character, does not.

 

The newfound emotional subtlety and technical restraint that you get in these film seems connected to a deeper appreciation of women than
was previously evident—women not as camp harpies or hysterics or vamps (which is to say women as drag icons), but as something closer to the women of real life. This is so even in
Talk to Her
, where the women are more the objects than the subjects of deep emotions; it's as if his two principal male characters' fraught attention to the comatose women they adore has elicited from Almodóvar some deeper feelings of his own. It is surely no coincidence that the most disappointing film of the director's recent period, the overwrought and overrated
Bad Education
—with its frenetically convoluted temporal layerings, its frantic Highsmithesque plot about a handsome and amoral young man whose masquerade as his own dead brother leads him to seduce both the priest who had once abused the brother and the gay film director who'd had a crush on the brother in school years before—has almost no female characters at all.

Almodóvar's finest film,
All About My Mother
, is in fact exclusively about women, of all kinds: young, old, successful, troubled, confused, strong, weak. The film follows Manuela, an employee at a transplant clinic (here Amodóvar once again recycles a motif from an earlier film) as she tries to rebuild her life after her precocious son's tragic death. The shift from men to women, male homosexual desire to maternal feeling, is signaled by a narrative feint with which the film begins. Early on there is a strong suggestion that the woman's fatherless son—with his fierce attachment to his mother, the prized Truman Capote book he's received for his birthday, and his love of camp classics like
All About Eve
—is on the verge of discovering his homosexuality, or perhaps announcing it to his mother; between those hints and the way in which the camera lingers on the beautiful face of the young actor who plays him, the film looks as if it might be the story of his coming-out.

And yet soon after meeting him, we see the boy being run over by a car after trying unsuccessfully to get the autograph of a famous actress, whose car he chases after in the pouring rain. Here we realize that it's the mother, not the son, who will be our emotional focus; it becomes, so to speak, a story told by him, rather than about him. (Almodóvar has talked about the enormous impact that
L'Avventura
had on him as a young moviegoer, and the narrative dislocation that comes in the first third of
All About My Mother
bears him out.) It's tempting to see the shift from the world of (gay) men to the world of (mostly straight) women
as parallel to another, larger evolution that occurs in the movie, and in the director's work overall—the abandonment of camp melodrama for something at once subtler and more emotionally profound. This shift is evoked by yet another narrative feint: after the boy's heart is transplanted and Manuela (who because of her job has access to confidential records) goes to spy secretly on the recipient, there's a brief moment when you think the movie is going to be about another sentimental cliché: the mother's relationship with the beneficiary of her dead son's organs. But this, too, comes to nothing, and Manuela returns home to rebuild her shattered life