Theatre Revue

Greetings, all! Today's issue is about The Theatre, about which 2024 had an unusual concentration of movies, some of which were highly regarded and are even in the Oscars conversation. I've been waiting to get my thoughts out on some of these for a while and am glad to get them bundled together. Read on for a look at The Critic, Ghostlight, and Sing Sing, plus a few thoughts on the comedy classic His Girl Friday.

When the Bad Bleed, Then is the Tragedy Good

The Critic
(dir. Anand Tucker, 2024)

There's something almost subversive about taking an awards bait framework—a period piece about a gay man persecuted in unenlightened times—and wrenching it into a giddily mean revenge tragedy. That is what The Critic ultimately is, though it takes its time getting there and it doesn't fully commit. It remains too lushly tasteful when the fun of the Jacobean drama it pulls from is in the lurid psychology and baroque murders.

A revenge story starts with an unpunished offense, and this one begins with the fall from grace of English theatre critic Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellan). A viper of letters with the power to mend or end careers on the 1934 English stage, Erskine finds himself sidelined when the owner of his newspaper The Daily Chronicle dies. His son Viscount David Brooke (Mark Strong) assumes control and tries to refashion the tabloid rag into a family paper, putting Erskine on notice about his savage reviews and then cutting him loose entirely when he is arrested for homosexuality. Erskine enacts his vengeance through young actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), who has long been the victim of his pen despite also seeking his praise, by having her seduce and destroy Brooke in exchange for glowing reviews.

This feels like a last supper for 85-year-old Sir Ian, who suffered a very real fall during a stage performance last summer, and he makes a meal of Erskine. He plays it all: warm sincerity, curmudgeonly bitchiness, and cold ruthlessness. It's the kind of playful, knowing villainy he brought to his Mosleyan fascist Richard III, but with a patrician haughtiness. Erskine, and McKellan's performance of him, is the element most responsible for twisting the premise from 'gay seeks justice' into 'be gay, do crime.' There might not have been a single more pleasurable moment onscreen last year than when Erskine explains his enjoyment of "rough trade" by quoting John Webster's The White Devil with sinister relish.

McKellan's performance alone justifies the movie, though it is not quite enough to carry it. Although he shines best in his scenes with Arterton, he doesn't get nearly enough opportunities to play off her or anyone else. Screenwriter Patrick Marber also wrote Notes on a Scandal, which gave Sir Ian's sometime Macbeth co-star Dame Judi Dench a similar opportunity to play a deliciously wicked villain but wisely pitted her against an equal talent, Cate Blanchett. Nina certainly has potential for a grandly tragic heroine, mad first with ambition and then guilt, but the script doesn't delve nearly deep enough for her to match wits with Erskine. Nor does the rest of the cast feel so larger-than-life, even though the characters should all be coming completely unglued as Erskine poisons everything around him.

The movie likewise abstains from impropriety. Even though it is brimming with the eros and thanatos that is the end result of its characters' volatile passions, it largely refrains from depicting any of it. Perhaps this is meant to be thematically appropriate. The White Devil, which features in the movie's plot, is less baroque in its bloodshed and death-dealing than contemporaries like The Revenger's Tragedy, featuring a lecherous Duke tricked into kissing the poison-painted lips of his victim's skull, or 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, an incest romance that climaxes with a heart impaled on a dagger, but it still does rack up a pile of corpses on its stage.

The torments and deaths in The Critic are by contrast elliptical and tastefully implied, a vestigial accessory of the prestige film it had dressed up as. There is no climactic catastrophe for the cast to cut loose. The carnage wraps up just when it should be reaching terminal velocity, and a good ten minutes after a much more satisfying fake ending. It's a shame the film isn't a better version of itself, but months after having seen it in the theater it lingers fondly in the memory. For a movie about the ephemeral art of the stage, which in recent years has been facing its own mortality, that's a victory in itself.

Speak the Speech, I Pray You, as I Pronounc'd It to You, Trippingly On the Tongue

His Girl Friday
(dir. Howard Hawks, 1940)

There is very little new I could bring to a discussion of His Girl Friday, which I saw last weekend as part of a 'How have you not seen this??' watch party among the community Discord channel for Alternate Ending. The movie fits neatly into the topic of this installment, though, for live theater is integral to it being a screwball comedy masterpiece. It is in the first place an adaptation of a 1928 Broadway play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which laid the foundation of comic patter exchanges that are like verbal tennis matches where all the players, and the ball, are on speed. Carey Grant and Rosalind Russell's snappy, roguish performances are as full-bodied as would be expected from a stage comedy, and Howard Hawks' camera obliges them. Scenes unfold largely though not exclusively in long takes, allowing the actors to maintain the high-wire energy of live performance. The smaller 4:3 aspect ratio, already a television standard, privileges the actors over their surroundings, and the restrained wide angle tracking shots really let us appreciate their full physicality. It's not just that everyone is going a hundred miles an hour, but that they are enunciating and hitting their marks perfectly and precisely as they do so. It all comes together to make a work of effortless-looking virtuosity, like a violin concerto with funny people.

Strange Interlude: "I Will Survive"

Speaking of concertos with funny people, while writing so much about live performances I remembered this classic early viral video that's always worth sharing again:

I was curious what the performing duo, Igudesman & Joo, were up to, and learned that they are in fact on a farewell tour this year, unfortunately only through Germanic Europe. As a consolation prize, their criminally under-subbed YouTube channel includes other weirdo classicists they've discovered and full performances of some of their concerts.

For Never Was a Story Chicago, Than This of Juliet and Her Romeo

Ghostlight
(dir. Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan, 2024)

This takes an altogether different approach to adapting the stage. Months after his teenage son Brian committed suicide, Chicago construction worker Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) expresses his grief in sudden bursts of inchoate rage. When community theater actress Rita (Dolly de Leon) witnesses one such eruption on the street, she invites him to join her company's production of Romeo and Juliet as a more healthy emotional outlet. Dan takes up her offer, albeit without the knowledge of his wife Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and daughter Sharon (Tara Mallen), who are having their own difficulties processing the loss of Brian, especially as they prepare for a deposition in the wrongful death suit they've filed against Brian's girlfriend Christine, who was with him when he died.

The movie is very deliberately and very obviously making the Mueller's family tragedy parallel the setup of Shakespeare's tragedy. I'm of two minds, alike in dignity, about this. On the one hand the plot mechanicals are creaking extra rudely to make the family narrative line up with the rehearsal of the play. It doesn't make a ton of sense for Dan to keep the play a secret from his family, and it leads to an episode where some very convenient misunderstandings lead Daisy and Sharon to think he is having an affair. It is most contrived, and I'm sure at least part of that is intentional; the plot is self-consciously echoing Romeo and Juliet, after all, which hinges on several instances of famously, fatally, bad timing rather than character choice. Yet it seems unnecessary to tee up so much sound and fury when the actors are able to signify so much on their own.  That's the thing, the performances really are good. They would have to be, for as their names indicate, the three leads are a real-life husband, wife, and daughter, all Chicago actors. A real family playing a fictional family is a softball as far as acting assignments go, but that literal familiarity gives their scenes a charge of lived-in verité, infused with the feeling of people who love and are sometimes exasperated by each other. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are a couple love scenes between Dan and Daisy that convey the feeling of two people who are still crazy about each other well into middle age, in a way that more polished movies that aren't directed by Richard Linklater would struggle to pull off. The built-in relationships help carry the actors through some of the shakier plot contrivances, and in some cases even vindicates them. The fake affair mix-up is dispatched with almost as soon as it's introduced, and it facilitates a scene where Dan gets, for the first time in the movie, to beam with pride about his daughter that is the loveliest thing to watch. The family material feels so much looser and more personal than the slightly sitcom-y scenes at the theater that it calls into question why the movie bothers with the latter at all.

Yet as haphazard as it can be, the tie-in with Romeo and Juliet is ultimately justified by the climactic performance. Due to the vagaries of community theater, fifty-somethings Dan and Rita end up cast as the two doomed teenage lovers. This leads to some expected comic incongruity, but it also culminates in an extraordinary tomb scene. It is on the one hand an almost unbearably painful psychodrama, in which a grieving father, through the empathy of acting, puts himself into the mindset of his son at the moment of his suicide and for the first time comprehends the incomprehensible act. But it is also just a really great tomb scene, with Dan-Romeo-Brian looking at and regarding the poison that is the literal solution to his sorrow with electric consideration. It is catharsis in the Aristotlean sense, a purging of the emotions that brings the audience out the other side with a greater sensibility.

A Ghostlight that eased off the plot schematics and leaned on the family dynamics would maybe have been more consistent, but would it be worth giving up the tomb scene that makes the movie? 'Murder your darlings' is good, cold-blooded creative advice, most of the time. But the blood in Romeo and Juliet runs hot, and the darlings there take everyone with them. It's reckless, but that's romance, baby.

Cell Blocking

Sing Sing
(dir. Greg Kwedar, 2024)

It's not that I don't want to feel good, but that I want to feel surprised. A movie conceived as Feel-Good is like a child that starts a meal with dessert. The outcome has already been arrived at, rendering the road to it redundant rote. Just like an actor cannot give a good performance if they are just imitating the outward form of behavior without an internal motivation, the most genuine emotional response to a movie needs to be just that, a response, and not just a cued-up behavior, where you laugh, or cry or scream, because you've reached the part where you are supposed to do so. Most movies are not quite so obvious as to pitch themselve as Feel-Good, rather the subject matter or the premise comes with built-in responses to make it easier for awards committees to take notice.

Sing Sing has one such premise: a theater program in one of the country's most notorious maximum security prisons, where it touches the hearts of the most hardened criminals. This is fertile ground for Oscar bait, akin to the 'inner city teachers' subgenre, your Finding Forresters and Freedom Writers. 'Do-gooding white liberal goes to the hood to teach disadvantaged minority pupils The Power of Art.' I therefore went into it skeptical, despite the many recommendations I had heard. I emerged, surprised.

The heart of the movie is the cast of inmates, and how the seeming frivolity of a stageplay allows them to hold onto their humanity in an environment purpose-built to rip it away.

The most immediate relief is how down to earth the movie is. Pat Scola's handheld 16 mm photography does a lot of the work, injecting energy into the proceedings and giving it a documentary feel. Filming took place within decomissioned prison facilities, and the hard and cramped nature of the spaces comes through in the movie's visuals. There is a somewhat ennervating reliance on close and medium shots, though this may be attributed to wanting to convey that same claustrophobia. About the closest the movie comes to the danger zone of sentimentality is its overly leading score, which has a habit of insisting on emotions that are quite apparent already. It's not necessary to guilt the lily when the movie's plot is so attuned to the self-evident hardships of prison life. There are Big Moments, but the most quietly infuriating is a routine search of the inmates' cells, in which their personal effects, their entire lives within their walls, are casually strewn about like trash.

That focus on day-to-day reality is another credit to the movie. Taking place almost entirely within the prison itself, it is concerned only with the lives of its population, namely John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo), a wrongfully accused convict, and his cell mate Mike Mike (Sean San José). John is effectively the prison-side leader of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a program that facilitates inmate theater productions. By this point the program has existed for several years, and Whitfield has become its impressario. He warily recruits the hard-edged Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), whose defensive, confrontational temperament could not be further from his own genteel introspection. There is a white liberal educator, RTA director Brent Buell (Paul Raci), but he is a tertiary presence, a facilitator.

The heart of the movie is the cast of inmates, and how the seeming frivolity of a stageplay allows them to hold onto their humanity in an environment purpose-built to rip it away. Whitfield is the clearest illustration of this idea, a paragon of middle-class learning wholly out of place in Sing Sing, who Colman Domingo imbues with dwindling reserves of taciturn grace. Divine Eye is more typical of the prison's population, making threats and ultimatums as a matter of course, having to unlearn the lessons from a life of being either predator or prey. Unsurprisingly Maclin's performance is not on its own as impressive as Domingo's; it hits all the beats of the script but doesn't have the internal tensions to support them. That he is able to credibly star opposite Domingo, however, is absolutely an accomplishment that should not be undersold. This is, it turns out, the movie's biggest selling point.

The most moving part of Sing Sing comes at the very end. Not the ending: Divine Eye gets his parole requested while Whitfield's is denied, and once Whitfield's freedom is finally granted Divine Eye is there to greet him. This feels rather pat for how grounded the rest of the movie is, and the reversal happens so quickly, between scenes, that it's hard to follow what happened and how. But the upbeat ending, and Divine Eye's departure and reintroduction, is a crucial transition to the movie's credits, where those who went into the movie knowing little about it learn that Divine G is Clarence Maclin, playing a fictionalized version of himself, and that nearly all of the other inmate cast members did likewise, as they too went through the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts. It's a stunning coup de cinema—a surprise—taking a movie about the program and revealing it to be by the program, and in doing so making the case for, yes, The Power of Art, as much as The Power of RTA.

Before the credits reveal I felt warmly about the movie, though not blown away. Should the knowledge, that the thing I felt pretty good about was made in large part by non-professionals affect that judgment, improve it in my estimation? Or is it cheating for a movie to play the 'real life' card and calibrate itself for maximum advocacy? Maybe! It actually doesn't matter. Ranking and awarding works of art and arguing about them is fun, and at its best criticism can help the audience better understand the work, and themselves. But for the artist, from the most in-demand professional to the obscurest amateur, the personal value of the work to them far outweighs any dollar sign or cultural currency. For me, Sing Sing is one of the better movies to come out last year, albeit one with missteps here and there that keep me from fully embracing it. For the RTA alums, veterans of Sing Sing and other inhumane outposts of the American carceral system, it is the embrace.

Enjoyed the read? Subscribe for free and get the next one as soon as it's published! If you know someone who would enjoy it, share the link. And if you want to support Cinema Purgatorio, any tips I receive will help to offset hosting costs. Any support is appreciated.