Paul Simon wrote that there are 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, and that sounds about right. But it’s much harder to change the world around you when things are going wrong. Even harder perhaps to change oneself.
Because when the world breaks down and things aren’t working out as we hoped, then we need someone to blame. It has to be someone’s fault. Your husband, your wife, the Arabs, the Jews, the Aristocrats. But if it’s yourself? Then how do you deal with that?
YEAR BY THE SEA, a movie written and directed by Alexander Janko, adapted from Joan Anderson’s memoir – 
In the opening scene of this movie, Joan (Karen Allen) is at her older son’s wedding reception when she finds out from her realtor that her husband Robin (Michael Cristofer) has put their home on the market without even bothering to tell her. Her son the groom gives a toast without even mentioning her. Her other son doesn’t even ask her to dance. She has somehow become a non-person even to her nearest and dearest. The only friend she seems to have is her publisher (S. Epatha Merkerson), who keeps asking Joan when she’s going to write her next book – which is curious, since we never even see Joan open a book, much less make any attempt to write one. In any case, Joan finds a coupon ad for a rental cottage in Cape Cod, and she impulsively calls and rents it rather than go off to Wichita, Kansas with her husband for his new job (whatever that may be – we never find out).
The good news about this movie is that Karen Allen’s smile is still an elixir for whatever ails you, lighing up the screen with her inner glow. The camera still loves her, and her likeability quotient is as high as ever too. You want to like her character, just as you want to like this movie, a true independent with lovely shots of seals playing on the beach and small town eccentrics doing eccentric things. But this is where the bad news comes in, because writer-director Alexander Janko has no clue how to write a screenplay. Even more, he’s clueless about his cluelessness, saying at the Q&A after the screening that “the creative aspect of this movie was never a problem” – ha! It’s a huge problem when your main character says “my sons are going to hate me” for leaving their father, and then there is no follow-up phone call or scene addressing this. When she tells her husband, “We had a successful marriage, we did a great job raising our kids,” but the one time she tries to reach her sons (at her husband’s prompting), they don’t even pick up the phone and apparently never call back. And then what’s really the state of this marriage? Did these people ever love each other? Michael Cristofer does an admirable job trying to invest his character with some sense of reality when in fact there isn’t any – he’s just a type, not a human being. And every time there’s a scene between him and his wife, it is interrupted by the wife of psychologist extraordinaire Erik Erikson (how specific is that?), who wants to go dancing on the beach, scarves flying like some Cape Cod protege of Isadora Duncan. Instead of genuine emotional discovery, we get self-help slogans and New Age psychobabble. And still, Joan never even makes a notation in her journal until suddenly in the Third Act she turns out a memoir at the same time that Mrs. Erickson is writing hers (pre-sold, of course). Because it’s just that easy!
It’s understandable that Mr Janko has discoveries of his own to make about screenwriting and directing, since he has made his living up until now as a movie composer. What is less understandable is how terrible the score for this movie is. There are so many songs, and every single one so on the nose. I mean, it’s just cheesy to use a song about feeling depressed when you’re feeling depressed. Isn’t that in Movie Scoring 101? Against all odds, I still think this movie is worth catching – first for the seals, and then for the luminous, inventive performances of Karen Allen and Michael Cristofer. Just imagine how great they could have been if they’d actually been given something to act!
Alan Blumenfeld and Kevin Hudnell, 2 Venetian Jews
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE by William Shakespeare, directed by Ellen Geer – There are only 3 more performances of this remarkable production at Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga – on 9/17 at 7:30, 9/23 at 3:30 and 10/1 at 3:30. I urge to catch this show before it closes. The cast is excellent, none more so than Los Angeles theater stalwart Alan Blumenfeld. His Shylock is a proud Jewish man in a city that hates Jews, and that does not allow a Jew to hold any job that a Christian can do. He is a legal alien, and he has become a money-lender because this is the only way he can provide for his family. He has in fact become the most successful Jewish money-lender precisely because of his pride – he is determined to succeed in spite of all the obstacles that the Christians have put in his way. The object of his deepest affection is his daughter Jessica, but early in the play we see she has fallen in love with a cavalier young Christian man, and she elopes with him, taking a huge portion of her father’s wealth with her. So when rabid anti-Semite Antonio comes to him for a loan of 3,000 Ducats for his friend Bassanio, Shylock draws up a contract demanding a pound of flesh if Antonio defaults on his loan. Director Ellen Geer and her artistic associates have edited the play a bit to emphasize the cruelty at the core of it. When Portia – played wonderfully by Willow Geer – recites her “The quality of mercy is not strained” speech, it seems deeply hypocritical, as she delights in Shylock’s destruction, just as she has earlier delighted in the defeat of the Prince of Morocco, wishing that “no more of his hue come to court me.” Far from seeing the play as a triumph of “mercy,” the Botanicum production shows us a narcissistic, self-satisfied society with no problem demonizing the Jew as “the other.” Far from diminishing the play, it has never seemed so gloriously cogent to me before.
Photo Credit: Craig Schwartz
A TALE OF TWO CITIES, adapted by Mike Poulton from the novel by Charles Dickens, directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott at a Noise Within – “It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times” is the famous opening of Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Regarding Mike Poulton’s adaptation, I would call it “the best of adaptations and the worst of adaptations” – well, maybe not the worst, but definitely lacking. What it does best is to create the terrifying reality of the French Revolution, that began as a blow for populist justice and morphed into a frenzy of bloodlust and revenge. The staging at A Noise Within is very inventive in creating tableaux that bring this national nightmare to blazing life. This is embodied in the character of Madame Defarge, brought vividly to life by Abby Craden. Madame Defarge’s need for justice is entirely understandable, but her thirst for revenge has become insatiable, and Ms Craden forces us to experience the erotic urge that this has come to represent for her.
Photo Credit: Craig Schwartz
Where Mr Poulton’s adaptation is lacking, however, is in developing characters of any depth that we can understand and care about. There is simply so much plot – so much story, so many twists and turns – that it’s hard to get beneath the glossy surface of the scenes from the French Revolution and feel anything for those who are trapped there. This is not an easy problem for any adapter – Dickens’s novel is bursting with storylines, and it has dual heroes – Charles Darnay (Tavis Doucette), who is at first accused in British court of being a French spy, only to end up a prisoner in the Bastille; and Sydney Carton (Frederick Stuart), a lawyer’s associate who is responsible for Darnay’s London acquittal. But who is Darnay? It’s hard to get a grasp on his character in the midst of his continuing peril. And who is Sydney Carton? Well, that comes through more clearly, thanks in large part to Mr Stuart’s memorably persuasive portrayal. Carton is intriguing but quite an enigma. I could have used more scenes deepening his motives, especially with Lucie, the central female figure, to make his actions at the conclusion feel more inevitable.
I did love the theatricality of this production, as well as its ambitiousness. At the very end, a young actress gives a speech in the shadow of the gallows which was genuinely heart-wrenching. It demonstrated what happens when the human family gives way to self-destruction. I just wish this production had more of that.
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