Lonny Price | Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened / 2016

crushing and beautiful

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kitt LaVoie, Lonny Price, and Ted Schillinger (screenplay), Lonny Price (director) Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened / 2016

 

How even more painful, after writing about the later performances I had seen of Stephen Sondheim’s biggest theater flop, was it to watch the absolutely charming documentary by Merrily We Roll Along original cast member, Lonny Price, based on TV tapes of the time collected by ABC News, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.

    It begins as what might be a story of the best possible musical—directly after Sondheim’s greatest achievement to that date, Sweeney Todd and co-directed by his then favorite collaborator and multi-successful director, Harold Prince. How could anything go wrong? Particularly given the total commitments and beliefs of the young—very young—cast who were, after many, many tryouts and stressed re-appearances, finally chosen for inclusion. They included, given their ages, almost all unknowns, but now several of who have become quite famous, Lonny Price himself, the young curly-haired Charley Kringas (the sadly tortured writer who was punished most by Franklin Shepard’s neglect), the talented Jim Walton as Franklin Shepard, Ann Morrison (as the even more-neglected Mary), Jason Alexander (as Joe, the sleazy producer), and Terry Finn as Gussie—all young actors aged from 16 to 25.

     Sondheim and Prince had determined that they wanted to go back again in time, to relive their dreams and possibilities as young people, obviously, without saying it, betrayed by their own Broadway successes. The utterly dreaming young cast members—every one of them reminding me, so painfully, of my own total commitment to theater from an outsider’s perspective (they, as I had done with dozens of other composers years before, having brought all of Sondheim’s records and memorized them, in whatever American back town in which they existed)—and their excitement in even having been chosen to be part of this musical experiment is, even today, startlingly palpable. All true believers, and buoyed by their amazing commitment, so too where the musical’s creators. How could anyone imagine, particularly given the remarkable songs the great composer had created, that they wouldn’t naturally be applauded and successful?

      Who might have imagined, as well, that in a musical in which only young people who were employed to perform as quite elderly and wiser folk, that their elders, mavens who had long ago suffered the indignities of their mistakes, would also determine to dress all the actors alike, with only their names emblazoned across their sweatshirts while involving them in a plot-line moving backward to forward in time? Given the youth and seeming conformity of the cast, how could it not totally confuse its audience? Yes, one might argue that Pinter had also used the backwards-forwards plot. Others had certainly embraced younger actors in more elderly roles. A conformity of roles might have been used previously in the theatrical world (remember Brecht?) to make a broad statement. But surely not at all in a single “popular” musical entertainment! Even after the grand guignol opera of Sweeney, audiences were simply unprepared for this series of aberrations. Who are these people, what are they singing about, and where in what direction are we moving, the audiences of the day must have asked? The 1981 opening lasted just 16 nights, and the cast was, quite understandably, utterly “devastated,” just as the now clichéd word indicates, their careers quite clearly in duress.

        This documentary is not simply a story of a failed musical, but a story of the hundreds and hundreds of Broadway wannabes, who, after performing in even successful works, have had to move on, into other careers, other lives, in order to simply survive. No one promises any actor, young or old, an endless career of Broadway successes—and this, of course, was no success, these wonderful young figures having had no careers on which to base a future on Broadway.

       Lonny Price went on to have a successful career as a director of Broadway works, including many other productions and revivals of Stephen Sondheim works. Iowa-born Ann Morrison went on to star in numerous regional productions of musicals, and eventually moved off to other career choices. Jim Walton also appeared in regional productions until he returned to Broadway in Guys and Dolls and a revival of Bye-bye Birdie. Jason Alexander, as most know, went on to have a very successful acting career as an actor in Neil Simon plays, and later a television regular in Seinfeld, as well as in films such as Pretty Woman and Love! Valour! Compassion! Others in the original cast simply turned to different careers. That’s what acting is all about, how to survive offstage, outside of temporarily so very bright lights.

      I once met a singer from the original cast of Cabaret, who, with another, performed the horrifying yet quite beautifully sung “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” who had since lived his life as an advertising copywriter; he didn’t seem unhappy—well maybe a little. I think that was why, despite the encouragement I received and the desire I embraced, I never did try out for a Broadway musical. Even if I got a part, what, in the end, would it mean? About a year and half before this young cast’s opening night, I had left New York to return to the University of Wisconsin where, at the age of 23, I met my now husband Howard Fox.

      This cast of talented young actors got the chance again in 2002, thanks to Price, to do it all over again, even if for just one night. They were now all adults, now having reached the ages which the characters were to have originally been, and they attracted a huge crowd to what now had become a cult musical, performed since by hundreds of major Broadway actors, including Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, the latter of whom, complains that he was too old for the first production!

       What is a Broadway star? These young people all saw that great possibility whisked away from them. Unlike Fanny Brice, there was no Flo Ziegfeld for them; not even the great Stephen Sondheim could provide the magic that audiences stole from their premieres. Frank Rich, then critic of The New York Times, bemoans but does not deny his review of the day, even though it plainly pained him to write the news:

 

As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one's heart broken at regular intervals. Usually the heartbreak comes from Mr. Sondheim's songs—for his music can tear through us with an emotional force as moving as Gershwin's. And sometimes the pain is compounded by another factor—for some of Mr. Sondheim's most powerful work turns up in shows (''Anyone Can Whistle, Pacific Overtures) that fail. Suffice it to say that both kinds of pain are abundant in Merrily We Roll Along, the new Sondheim-Harold Prince-George Furth musical that opened at the Alvin last night. Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful—that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles.

 

     Perhaps giving the not so high quality of so many of the Broadway musicals since, “crushing and beautiful” songs should have been enough.

     Throughout the years, I have also since discussed several revivals. And in the 2023-2024 revival, that musical finally became a Broadway hit.

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2016, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

Satyajit Ray | দেবী (Devi) (The Goddess) / 1960

the human god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Satyajit Ray (screenwriter, based on a story by Prabhat K. Mukherjee, and director) দেবী (Devi) (The Goddess) / 1960

 

Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi is a film, in part, about religious ecstasy and the ecstatic vision, in particular, of the Hindu religion in relationship with the Mother Goddess, Kali and her other avatars, born into another period through reincarnation.

      Originally, the great Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore had planned to write the story, based on real-life events, but realizing that his membership in the Brahmo Society, an elite group of contemporary Indians who publicly opposed idol worship, would immediately create hostility within the Hindu culture, he offered it to his friend, Prabhat K. Mukherjee, who as a Brahmin, the highest of the Hindu castes, would be somewhat freed from criticism.

      Ray, also a member of the Brahmo society, felt that by the time he was planning his cinematic telling of the tale that Hindu society had grown sophisticated enough to accept his updated version, set not in the 1790s as was Mukherjee’s story, but in the important cultural period of the 1890s, during the cauldron of British rule, when many of the wealthy classes turned to British educational values.

     Yet Ray was mistaken, and his film caused a great stir within India, threatening its showings outside of the country. Only the intrusion into the matter by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, resolved the issue, allowing the world to see and admire Ray’s film.

     In fact, instead of mocking Hindu beliefs, Ray’s work is a nuanced portrait of them and an accurate rendition of both the wonderment and dangers of the culture of the Mother Goddess.  He begins his film with a stunning scene which shows us the rituals of the religion, as a recreation of the Goddess is celebrated before it is returned to the sea to be destroyed.

      The wealthy Kalikinkar Choundhuri (Chhabi Biswas)—his first name itself revealing his commitment to the goddess Kali—is a firm believer in those rituals, and follows the demands of his belief every day, despite what we perceive as his own wife’s quiet disdain of his practices. Kalikinkar’s beliefs are also shared by his elder son, Taraprasad, while his younger son, Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee) is proud of his English enlightened education, and is planning soon to leave his beautiful 17-year-old wife, Dayamoyee (Sharmila Tagore) behind for a period of time as he finishes his education in Calcutta.

      The loving Daya dotes on her father-in-law, serving him tea and massaging his feet without him having to ask. She is also beloved by Kalikinkar’s youngest son, Khoka (Arpan Chowdhury), who often spends the night in his Auntie’s bed after she has told him a bedtime story, a fact that also troubles the old man’s wife. Even the family parrot calls out Daya’s name.

      The wife knows what Kalikinkar does not, that she is losing the love of both her husband and her son to her daughter-in-law. But Kalikinkar, with his old ways of perceiving, does not comprehend that his affection for Daya has begun to transform into something else, and, in Ray’s subtle Freudian interpretation, Kalikinkar has a dream, revealing, so he believes, that his daughter-in-law is actually a “reborn” Mother Goddess, Devi herself.  And soon after, he and his family and male friends begin to worship her instead of the Devi mask.

       Clearly startled by this strange change in her position—even her bedroom is moved from an upper floor to the first—the young girl has little to say in the matter, and, as an obedient  daughter-in-law simply submits to the long hours wherein other men pray over her. As her fame grows ever larger, she is brought a young boy by a desperate father who hopes for a cure. Ray suggests that the food that is dribbled into his mouth by other congregants may, in fact, be what saves him; but when he awakens from his stupor, it is Daya who is acclaimed as the child’s savior.

     It is only after this “miracle” and when Uma is called home by his mother that we recognize just how far Kalikinkar’s beliefs have turned into a kind of mania, which Ray demonstrates in perhaps the only unbelievable image of the film, with an endless thread of supplicants making their way to the elder’s home. Uma, outraged, by what he discovers, attempts, respectfully, to convince his father of the error of his ways, and tries to help his manipulated young wife to escape the situation. Together, the couple attempt to run off together to Calcutta, but, at the last moment, Daya refuses to continue; might she not really be a reincarnation of the Devi, and, if so, can she live with herself if she fails to take on her identity? The uneducated Daya cannot resist, and Uma is an ineffectual intellect when sparring with his father.

      Back in Calcutta, his teachers attempt to reinforce their enlightened beliefs, but Uma, raised in an opposing culture, has his own doubts.

      When Kolba grows ill, the family has no choice but to again to rely on the magical healing powers of their in-house goddess; but this time she has no longer any power, and the boy dies. Daya, soon after growing mad, walks off into the meadow, clearly becoming little more than an aspiration, a whiff of the former body she was. In the original story she hung herself, and in Ray’s first film script she drowned herself in the river. But in Ray’s final version, she simply disappears, a figment of religious hysteria, a young woman transformed into a saint, like so many women in the world, whose true being and sexuality is snuffed out by the patriarchs who claim to love them. 

       Although I might easily describe this film as a story of religious fanaticism, it is something even more horrible and common: the story of a woman being destroyed by the men who claim control of her life. If the Hindu community was fearful for what they saw as a perverted vision of their religious beliefs (and since all of Ray’s films were presented in Bengali only, most of the Hindus of India never watched his films; one estimate suggests only 5% of Indians saw Ray’s movies), what they really might have feared is that Devi revealed their dangerous sexist attitudes that silenced the voices of women in their society, a problem that continues in India and numerous cultures still today.

 

Los Angeles, Independence Day, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

 

Kenneth Lonergan | Manchester by the Sea / 2016

melancholia for an american life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenneth Lonergan (screenwriter and director) Manchester by the Sea / 2016

 

Just as many journalists and film critics have touted, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is a painfully moving and yet somehow uplifting story of personal guilt and the loss of the central character’s ability to emotionally feel and express himself—except perhaps through anger and self-hatred.

      Lee Chandler (brilliantly performed, despite the fact that he has very few verbally communicative moments, by Casey Affleck) has moved away from the small Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts community where he has lived most of his life; now working as a handyman-janitor, he willfully does the dirty jobs the people of his buildings require: everyday plumbing, unplugging backed-up toilets, fixing up chandeliers, and clearing the heavy Boston snow away from doors and sidewalks—all the while working for minimum wage. The handsome young man appears to be the model of decorum, although one day he does lash out at overbearing apartment dweller, and later, as two men seemingly stare at him in a local bar, he reacts suddenly quite violently, slugging them both in the face. The men, well-groomed and handsomely dressed, are probably gay, and are looking at him simply in admiration, so his sudden burst of violence might seem to suggest that Lee is simply a homophobe.

     What we don’t know about him yet is that he has often been stared at and pointed out many a time back in Manchester after a tragic fire has destroyed his house, killing his three children. More pointedly, he has been partly responsible for their deaths, starting up the fireplace after a long evening of drinking and smoking cocaine with male friends, leaving the home to pick up a final pack of beer. In his dazed state, he has forgotten to return the fireplace screen. Reporting this to the police, he expects to be taken into custody, but is simply let go; as he turns to leave he grabs a policeman’s gun, attempting to commit suicide.

     All of these events are gradually revealed in a series of scenes that toggle between the past and present, somewhat confusing to the viewer because of their changes in the characters’ ages and appearances; but that’s obviously part of Lonergan’s intentions, showing in great detail, how the past cannot truly be separated—at least for Lee—from the present.

      Eventually, after he is called back to Manchester upon the death of his brother, the story basically moves forward, revealing that his brother has made him the guardian of his teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), an almost impossible request given Lee’s mental condition and the impossibility of his remaining in a town where he is often shunned. What we discover, of course, is that those who shun him or even vocally castigate him for the past events, are, like him, basically good people with open flaws.

     Patrick’s mother (Gretchen Mol), now about to be married to an evangelical Christian (played convincingly in a short role by Matthew Broderick), has been a drug-addict and alcoholic, who has eventually simply disappeared from her family. Only Patrick appears to know of her current whereabouts.

      Lee’s former wife, Randi, who has remarried and is about to have a baby, publicly abused Lee and divorced him after the fire, certainly contributing to the general hostility of many community members. Even the wife of one of Lee’s and his brother’s closest friends, George, tells her working associate that she doesn’t want to see Lee working near the shipyards.

       Although he is a highly affable 16-year-old, even Patrick has problems, breaking out occasionally in violent moments while playing hockey (to be fair, Lee’s sudden appearance at Patrick’s hockey practice surely signifies to him that his father has died); he is having sex with two of fellow schoolgirls, and insists his uncle lie about their visits to each other’s homes; and, when—after the mortuary has reported that the frozen ground cannot permit his father’s burial until Spring, forcing them to keep the body in cold storage—Patrick has a sort of psychological break-down by simply opening the refrigerator freezer, after frozen chickens and other meals spill out unto the kitchen floor. Like many a teenager, Patrick is also somewhat selfish and insensitive, demanding they keep a boat that needs a new, unaffordable, engine, and insisting that he will not return to Boston with his uncle. But then all of his friends and life are in Manchester, and Lee has nothing much in the way to offer him in terms of normal readjustment into life.

       Lee, nonetheless, slowly begins to care for his young charge, and one mother of Patrick’s girlfriends even takes a liking to Lee, insisting he come over for dinner. His painful incommunicativeness, however, creates comic results.

     Randi, encountering her former husband on the street, attempts to ask his forgiveness for her previous behavior and suggests a new possibility of friendship. Yet Lee can only run from these offers of reconciliation, mutely pointing the place where he seems to declare he no longer has any heart. Another violent episode in a Manchester bar, results in his emotional meltdown.

       The only solution, it is apparent, is for him to return to Boston, where at least can find a job and escape the everyday blaming by some who seem unable to forget.

       Sadly, he gives up his guardianship, as the Chandler’s family friends, George and his wife, agree to adopt Patrick, and take him into their home.

       Yet, even now this broken man holds out a promise of hope, telling Patrick that this time he has rented two rooms, so that the boy might occasionally visit or live with him if he finds a Boston-area college to attend. Patrick’s answer, “I’m not going to college,” cuts through the heart like a knife.

        For all of its dramatic power and moving expressions of human frailty, in the end Longeran’s film is just too busy with realist details at times to fully project any potential answers to the despair these characters often face. One might not describe this film as a tragedy but rather as a melancholic fable that reveres its own sensibility a bit too much.

     Perhaps it’s just the times—after a year of a messy presidential campaigning and the shocking and potentially terrifying election results—but several of the films this year have portrayed the same sense of melancholy, wherein things do not quite end the way they should, and characters are forced to make-do with the few consolations they can find. Strangely, both Woody Allen’s golden-framed Café Society and Damien Chazelle’s superficially playful and joyful La La Land both end similarly, as does Barry Jenkins Moonlight, along with Yorgos Lanthinos’’ The Lobster and even Marcin Wrona’s Demon (the latter two foreign films released this year in the US); Jackie’s subject is nearly all about a funeral. All speak of wrong choices made and the difficulties or even impossibilities of healing. If nothing else, it’s clear that the cheerful myths of American directors such as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges no longer resonate with our society, and that for many of us the idea of the American Dream has long-ago died.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).

 

Ethan and Joel Coen | The Ladykillers / 2004

on the side of the devils

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ethan and Joel Coen (screenplay, based on the screenplay by William Rose, and directors) The Ladykillers / 2004

 

The Coens’ 2004 film The Ladykillers might be perceived to be a testimony to faith. After all, the central figure—and more importantly, the only survivor of the central characters—Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), is a devoted Christian, who regularly attends church services, sends a monthly $5.00 check to Bob Jones University, and by the end of the movie gives away more than a million dollars to that beloved charity. Her religiosity, moreover, is the cause of the Coens’ presentation of the film’s numerous gospel and spiritual music, which helps to make this film so entertaining. 

      All right, she also is a busybody, visiting the police to complain about a neighbor boy who has become involved in “hip-hop,” despite the fact that she evidentially regularly relies upon him to retrieve her tree-dwelling cat, Pickles. But even then, she might be described as a gentle, caring community leader with a strong sense of moral rightness, even if her neighbors view her as slightly insane.

      The film even makes a kind tepid attempt to present us with actual sermon; and surely the black comedic death of all the “criminals”—the erudite, dandyish Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr (Tom Hanks); Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), a hot-tempered, badmouthed janitor; Garth Pancake (J. K. Simmons), an expert at demolitions who himself is often ready to explode as he suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome; “The General” (Tzi Ma) a chain-smoking Vietnamese tunneler who runs a local Hi-Ho Donut store; and Lump Hudson (Ryan Hurst), an empty-minded hulk of a football player—hints at a kind of moralistic fable in the Coens’ telling, that was not truly present in the original British version of this film.

       But even though faith seemingly is celebrated and awarded in The Ladykillers, we have to recognize it as a cynical testament to belief. If the old lady survives numerous attacks and is even unknowingly awarded the stolen money by the police themselves—all suggesting that she is being miraculously protected by some higher power or, at least, the spirit of her dead husband—we recognize that writer-directors have not suddenly seen the holy light, but are simply engaged with the irony and naughtiness of it all; and besides it gives them the perfect excuse to anthologize, as they also did in O Brother Where Art Thou?, the standard and contemporary classics of American Southern music, which, it is apparent, they do very much love.

       The real heroes of this film, although they all justifiably die, are the satiric outsiders: the dumb (Lump), the lame (Pancake not only is suffering from IBS but loses his finger), the violent (both “The General” and Gawain had short fuses, the former regularly swallowing up his own lit cigarettes to hide them from Mrs. Munson) and the intellectually hubristic (Dorr). These criminal misfits, failed men who yet seek for something larger than themselves—in this case, a robbery of a crooked enterprise, a gambling boat, itself protected as Dorr later points out, by an even larger crook, an insurance company—are just the kind of subjects upon who the Coen brothers focus on nearly all of their films.

     Yes, they are laughable fools, perhaps not really worth our serious attention, but the Coens clearly adore them and their sinning ways far more than the righteous “winners.” In a sense all of them are fools and dunces. Dorr is a figure out of the past, regularly quoting Edgar Allan Poe and other Romantic figures in a manner so out of sync with reality that we have to recognize him as “queer,” although I won’t embalm him by describing him as gay; besides he’s already embalmed himself. And money, not sex is his aphrodisiac.

      Lump is so brain-dead that he often speaks up as the most honest and straight-forward of them all, and ultimately he is even willing to give up the money go to church, as Munson demands (his admission that he cannot actually play the sackbut, is a gem). Even Gawain and Pancake are also lovers, Gawain of women with beautiful asses (his pursuit of which temporarily loses him his job) while Pancake has his beloved Mountain Girl. “The General” is bravely fierce, easily foiling, early in the film, a would-be robbery. These human failures are at the heart of nearly every Coen film. While those who are actually brave, have true faith, and share high moral values may win out in the end, in film after film, it is the losers whom the Coens’ celebrate. And, strangely enough, in that preoccupation they do, in fact, resemble the devout believer, Flannery O’Connor. 

      If good guys must win, these filmmakers seem to argue, it’s the bad guys who have the most fun—or, at least, are more fun to watch. Besides, without them, the saintly would have no one to convert.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2016.

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2016).

John Carney | Sing Street / 2016

separating the song from its leap into being

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Carney (screenwriter. composer with Gary Clark, and director) Sing Street / 2016

 

In the tradition of films like Billy Elliot, John Carney’s Sing Street focuses upon youthful dissatisfaction and an attempt to escape the day-to-day difficulties of growing up in a poor Irish community through art. Yet the central character in Sing Street, Conor Lalor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) has it much better than did Billy, in part, obviously, because creating a band is far more normative in his society than is studying ballet. And prior to the sudden financial difficulties of the Lalor family, Conor studied in a somewhat prestige institution. With the loss of family income, Conor is pulled out of his old school and placed in a free state, Catholic-run institution, Synge Street, the street evidentially named after the noted Irish playwright.

       Although he is quickly met with hostility, particularly coming from the threats of schoolyard bully and the brutal headmaster, Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley), Conor seems to be a particularly level-headed and almost unflappable boy, ignoring the insistence by Brother Baxter that we wear black shoes to school (his family cannot afford to replace his brown ones, which forces him to paint his shoes black); and later in the film he taunts the bully with the idea that he can only try to stop something, while creating nothing. Baxter later retaliates, physically abuses him when the boy wears make-up to school.

       With seemingly equal ease, and simply to impress the slightly older girl Raphina (Lucy Boynton), who waits on a door stoop near the school each day, Conor determines to start up a band, determining to use the parentless Raphina in the video of their performance.

       Pairing up with the multi-instrumentalist Eamon (Mark McKenna), a local black migrant, Ngig (Percy Chamuruka), and two younger musicians, the new band, playing on the street name where their school stands, suddenly becomes Sing Street, at first playing 1980s “covers.”

       When Conor’s older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor) hears the first tapes, he challenges his beloved younger brother to create his own songs, shoving records from his extensive collection into Conor’s hands. With Brendan’s challenges and Raphina as his inspiration, the boy suddenly, and seemingly effortlessly, creates the group’s first memorable, and quite charming song, “The Riddle of the Model,” which, dressed in somewhat motley costumes and makeup (the makeup applied to Conor by Raphina), the group performs on video.

       As Brendan hands his brother various different kinds of records, the group morphs from the style of Duran Duran to music influenced by The Cure, The Jam, Hall & Oates and Joe Jackson—the multi-talented Carney inserting the originals in between the new creations which he co-wrote with Gary Clark.

       The director, who admits to hating movie musicals and Broadway fare where the actors suddenly burst into song, carefully presents all of these many musical numbers just as that, “musical numbers” punctuating rather than growing out of the dramatic plot. If they do indeed sometimes refer to story events, they merely “refer” to them rather than expand or further reveal them. For such a fine creator of musicals—Carney was also the director of Once and Begin Again, the former becoming a Broadway hit—it is too bad that his charming songs cannot simply move more fluidly from the story, rather than merely punctuating it. It’s as if, for Carney, and probably many of his generation, no one ever spontaneously breaks into song. Or as if it is somehow embarrassing to be so much in love that one simply has to sing. Carney sees the musical numbers not as a generator of story but rather as a result of it.

        In a question and answer session with the four leads and the director after the film, Carney seemed to indicate that the only film musicals he truly loved were ones that appeared to mock the conventions of musical theater—works such as Singing in the Rain and Guys and Dolls, describing Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons as performing their songs “tongue-in-cheek.” I think he has simply misunderstood their lesser singing talents—which are nonetheless extremely charming—as lacking seriousness; in point of fact, Frank Sinatra complained that Brando took is role far too seriously, demanding retake after retake.

        But that is, perhaps, all beside the point. Carney has found a way to make musicals that work as counterpoint to plot that are still quite charming and enjoyable; the middle-aged woman next to me in the theater was outwardly weeping tears of joy and sympathy by the time Rafina and Conor (now renamed Cosmo) boated off—hopefully—to England, with only their god-given talents to offer in return for food and board. And I too dropped a few tears.

       In the men’s room, after, I asked the now 16-year-old Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (only 14 at the time of shooting) what his next film might be. “I don’t have one yet,” he replied, as his naturally reddened Irish cheeks turned a bit more crimson, “but I hope to.” “You certainly will,” I smiled back. Since then he has appeared in several films and in the TV series of The Vikings. What I hadn’t know at the time was that Walsh-Peelo had previously been a very successful boy soprano, playing in The Magic Flute and as Miles in Benjamin’s Britten’s Turn of the Screw.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).