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The Thrilling Nostalgia of Al Hirschfeld's "A National Insanity"
By Naomi Fry
The reopening of galleries and museums in New York, after those locked-down early-pandemic months, in which art shows could only be viewed online, has made me newly appreciative of the ability to move my body through an actual exhibition space. (On entering the Met, the other week, I felt almost literally uplifted.) And yet, sometimes, a virtual art exhibit can hit just the spot, too. So it is with the Al Hirschfeld show "A National Insanity: 75 Years of Looking for NINA," which recently "closed" but, thankfully, is still available for viewing indefinitely, on the Web site for Hirschfeld's foundation.
The foundation maintains a large collection of works by its namesake, the famed American caricaturist, who, in the course of his nearly nine-decade career, captured the likenesses of a wide-ranging array of performers in the world of theatre, music, television, and film: from Leonard Bernstein to Liza Minnelli, Dizzy Gillespie to the "Sex and the City" foursome, the Beatles to the "Sesame Street" puppets, Katharine Hepburn to Cher. Since Hirschfeld's death, in 2003, the foundation has organized or assisted in organizing exhibitions of his work in various venues across North America and Europe, but, with the onset of the coronavirus, the shows have gone digital. (The first of these, "Socially Distant Theater," which went online in May of last year, consisted, in a nod to the times, of Hirschfeld drawings of solo stage performers.)
Hirschfeld called himself a "characterist," and he was able to capture a figure's very essence with the lightest licks of the pen—notations as elegant and economical as a dance. His elongated calligraphic line is immediately distinguishable by the special attention he gives to hair and clothing, with characters often rendered most precisely through a fine tangle of locks or a draping of a jacket. Around two decades into his career, Hirschfeld developed another signature, which he continued to employ in his work until his death, and which is the focus of "A National Insanity." When his daughter was born, in 1945, the artist began to conceal her name—Nina—in his illustrations, hidden, in the artist's words, "in folds of sleeves, tousled hairdos, eyebrows, wrinkles, backgrounds, shoelaces—anywhere to make it difficult, but not too difficult, to find." This turned the observation of his drawings—which were carried in many American newspapers and magazines, and most prominently, for three-quarters of a century, in the Times—into a kind of game, a "Where's Waldo?" for sharp-eyed culture mavens. (In 1960, fifteen years into his Nina experiment, Hirschfeld began to add a number next to his signature, to indicate how many iterations of the name were included in an illustration.)
"A National Insanity" is uniquely suited to its online form, thanks to the ability to zoom in, which makes it easier to find the "Ninas," and leads you, besides, to pay closer attention to the illustrations themselves. Clicking through the exhibition, I was reminded of my childhood pastime, introduced to me by my father, of searching for "Ninas" in Hirschfeld drawings. I grew up, for the most part, in Israel, and poring over Hirschfeld's work, as a child, familiarized me with luminaries of a certain coastal North American cultural milieu that I might not have known otherwise. (In this it stands shoulder to shoulder with other artifacts I viewed and read in my young adulthood, like Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" and Nora Ephron's "Heartburn.") A couple of years ago, a thoughtful friend bought a second-hand collection of Hirschfeld illustrations to give to my daughter, who happens to be named Nina. As I sat with her, side by side, leafing through the book, it seemed to me as if we were participating in a sacred rite. Scrolling through "A National Insanity" reminded me of this feeling; zooming in to find the "Ninas" in Aaron Copland's tie or the von Trapp children's sleeves in "The Sound of Music" was the kind of family tradition I'd be very happy to pass on. I couldn't wait to show Nina.
Source: Al Hirschfeld Foundation
"The Rental," a Horror Film About Love, Family, and Airbnb
By Carrie Battan
In Hollywood, the term "dump months" is used to describe fallow periods in the release schedule, when audiences are less likely to go to theatres and revenue is low. It's during these windows—January and February, say, or mid-August through September—that the arty, low-budget, or off-kilter movies show up, free from the shadow of blockbusters. In the coronavirus era, with most major studios moving big theatrical releases to 2021 or later, every month is a dump month. The films being released are, by and large, titles that never would have made a splash at the box office to begin with.
"The Rental," a lean and slick thriller about a casual Airbnb stay gone catastrophically wrong, is one such film, and it thoroughly scratches the summer horror-flick itch. The directorial début of Dave Franco, brother to James Franco, the film follows two couples on a weekend getaway to a palatial, ocean-view rental house in the Pacific Northwest. There's Charlie and Michelle, who, as played by Dan Stevens and Alison Brie, make a winning husband and wife. Then there's Charlie's troubled younger brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White), and his girlfriend, Mina (Sheila Vand), who's strong-willed and accomplished, and who happens to be Charlie's work partner at a newly successful venture-capital firm. Tucked away in a spectacularly remote part of the country, the four are left with nothing to do but confront the demons of their past. (Charlie has a secret history of philandering; Josh has a criminal record.) Franco and his co-writer, the indie-film darling Joe Swanberg, are deft observers of character. But they also manage to provide an entire summer's worth of stimulation: "The Rental" is a slasher film masquerading as a psychological thriller, and is also a commentary on the racially fraught nature of renting an Airbnb, a seductive slice of real-estate pornography, a cautionary tale about the perils of surveillance technology, and, to top it all off, a study of a love quadrangle which allows for some titillating speculation about Dave Franco's fraternal relationships. If I could see it again on the big screen, I would.
Photograph by Allyson Riggs / IFC Films
The Ongoing Relevance of "Norma Rae"
The other night, I found myself once again scrolling the multiple streaming services I subscribe to, and wondering, as I often do, which show or movie would allow me to relax my brain into a pleasing limpness. Should I pick the reality dating show about Indian singles looking to enter an arranged marriage with the help of an unflappable matchmaker? The documentary series about the face-off between federal agents and New York goodfellas in the seventies and eighties? The travel show in which a tetchy British comedian joins celebrities on jaunts to various international locales? All of these seemed solid options, if fairly mindless. Then I noticed that Martin Ritt's 1979 drama, "Norma Rae," which I hadn't watched since high school, was on Hulu. Relaxing my brain, I decided, could wait for the night.
For those who haven't seen the movie, or whose memory of it is hazy, a recap: Norma Rae Webster—played by a ferocious Sally Field, who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, in 1980—is a Southern single mom of two who works on the dim, noisy floor of the town textile mill, where her parents, and, likely, her grandparents, have worked before her. It's a grim, precarious, and repetitive job, which makes for a grim, precarious, and repetitive existence. Early on in the movie, we see her attempt to rouse her mother, who has gone temporarily deaf from the incessant din of the mill's machines. The plant doctor is unimpressed: "Now, you know it happens, Norma Rae. It happens all the time!," he says, suggesting that the older woman "can get herself another job" if this one isn't to her liking. But in their mill town there is no other job, and no real alternative to the low-paying and dangerous work that the plant provides.
Though she is as constrained as anyone by her work and life conditions, Norma Rae is spirited. The movie's original theatrical poster, an image of which is used as a thumbnail on Hulu, shows Field silhouetted on a white background, smiling widely as she raises her arms high in a cheesy triumphant stance, a slice of bare tummy revealed over the waistband of her jeans. The film itself, however, presents the character's spunk as an angrier, more complicated, and occasionally self-defeating thing. She rails against her circumstances by talking back—to the worthless men she sleeps with and who degrade her, to her loving but domineering father, to her uncaring bosses. "Norma Rae, you have the biggest mouth in this mill," one of her managers tells her, before attempting to neutralize her workplace demands—for a Kotex machine in the women's bathroom, for longer smoke breaks, for more time off—by giving her a supervisor job, which she leaves soon afterward, when she realizes that it makes her a "fink" in the eyes of her fellow-workers. "You're looking fine, Norma Rae," the deadbeat father of one of her children tells her, when he runs into her at a local baseball game. "I'm always fine. I'm a horse!" she tells him, defiantly. Like a horse, she is strong, and she keeps going, but she also has blinders on. On her own, she is unable to shift course.
A turn comes about when Reuben Warshowsky (the great Ron Leibman, who died this past December), an organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America, arrives. A New Yorker, Reuben is an oddity in town, and his unionization efforts are met with resistance. As far as most millhands are concerned, he is a communist Jew interloper who will cost them their jobs. Norma Rae, however, is intrigued. "I think you're too smart for what's happening to you," Reuben, with whom she develops a platonic but transformative relationship, tells her. The film's most iconic and well-known scene—and the one I recalled, from watching it as a teen—is a moment when Norma Rae stands on a table at the mill and holds up a sign that reads "UNION," until, one by one, the workers around her stop their machines and silence falls on the factory floor.
On this viewing, what struck me even more strongly, however, was the movie's suggestion that no struggle can take place alone. Norma Rae is heroic, but she comes into her own, as a woman, because she is fighting for class solidarity—a struggle that, in turn, could not happen without a breaking down of long-standing ethnic and racial barriers. Even though he is Jewish, Reuben doesn't have horns, as Norma Rae was taught to expect ("I've never met a Jew before," she tells him. "As far as I can see, you look just like the rest of us"), and, though she is a woman, habitually derided by men, he treats her as his equal. What's more, the racist tactics taken by the factory bosses, who try to persuade white employees that their Black co-workers are scheming to take over the union, can only be countered by a white-Black coalition working together against management. Speaking from the pulpit at a Black church, Reuben tells the workers of his grandfather's textile union and its members: "When they spoke, they spoke in one voice, and they were heard. And they were Black, and they were white, and they were Irish, and they were Polish, they were Catholic, and they were Jews." To watch the scene, toward the end of the movie, in which the factory workers chant as one, to celebrate their unionization victory, is to be reminded of something that is not only moving but also, still, more relevant than ever.
Photograph from The Hollywood Archive / Alamy
"Grosse Fatigue" Tells the Story of Life on Earth
By Kyle Chayka
A fashion of the Baroque era, the Wunderkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities," was a wealthy patron's collection of random artifacts from across time and space: animals, art, plant specimens, mechanical devices, religious relics. Bits of ancient Roman statuary were nestled next to conch shells, as portrayed in a painting by Frans Francken the Younger from 1636. The purpose of the collection was to be admired, the objects examined one by one as hints of the world's unknowable breadth.
The French artist Camille Henrot's thirteen-minute video-art masterpiece, "Grosse Fatigue" ("Major Exhaustion," or, as a 1994 comedy translated the phrase, "Dead Tired"), is a Wunderkammer of and for the Internet era. Made in 2013, the piece is now streaming on YouTube until July 16th as part of an online exhibition called "Video Lives," from the Museum of Modern Art. (Because video art is so rarely displayed in full online, it is something of a rare item in its own right.) "Grosse Fatigue" emerges from and dissects the endless archives we've created online. It's somewhere between a video essay (that arcane format) and a supercut, collaging found archival clips, Henrot's own footage, meme GIFs, and documentary shots from inside the Smithsonian, where Henrot developed the piece during a residency.
"Grosse Fatigue" depicts, more or less, the evolution of life on Earth, mashing up creation myths and scientific theories, art, poetry, and the human body, with a conspicuous lack of boundaries that recalls the seventeenth century, when all of those categories were thought to have more in common. The video takes place on a computer screen: on a familiar Mac desktop, with a hard drive labelled "HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE," a cursor opens a file titled "GROSSE_FATIGUE_." Offscreen, the artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh recites an epic poem written by Henrot and the poet Jacob Bromberg, and a propulsive beat composed by Joakim Bouaziz plays in the background. File-browser frames pop up and close, nesting in one another, piling up. It's a digital data binge in which resonance matters more than fact or logic.
"In the beginning, the universe was a black egg where Heaven and Earth were mixed together," Orraca-Tetteh intones. Wikipedia pages scroll. Henrot paints a Zen circle in ink wash on a bright yellow background, symbolizing the state of an empty mind. A photograph of Jackson Pollock in the act of painting opens over a video clip of someone wearing galaxy-print pants on the subway, the splashes of paint resembling the stars. Orraca-Tetteh chants "coelacanth," invoking the still-extant species of fish that might have gradually evolved into land vertebrates. Smithsonian conservators gently examine preserved bird bodies. There's an element of "Grosse Fatigue" that seems akin to ASMR: when the artist's hands peel a black-dyed egg or roll an orange like a ball of clay, the sounds and gestures get inside your brain, tickling nerve endings and accessing subconscious archetypes. It's like a headier version of a TikTok compilation.
Henrot's work has moved between drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, often collaging different media and subject matters together. Her themes are sprawling: hope, archives, classical myth, the way the detritus of the mind spills out into the world of objects. The format of "Grosse Fatigue" is particularly successful at illuminating the crush of information we face in the twenty-first century, daunting and confusing but also magical, infinitely recombinable. The seventeenth-century Wunderkammer gained its value because of a scarcity of knowledge, which is now obsolete—we can Google anything and see what it looks like. Henrot, working in a period of overwhelming accessibility, restores a sense of wonder and discovery, the epiphany of holding a mysterious specimen in your hands.
Photograph Courtesy MOMA
"And Then We Danced," A Queer Love Letter to Georgian Culture
By David Kortava
The Georgian folk dancer is an image of masculine stereotype. His movements are martial, virile; they simulate war, hunting, and the courtship of his beloved. Often accoutered with a double-edged dagger, he personifies the small, proud nation's history and traditions. So when the Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin arrived in Tbilisi to shoot the country's first explicitly queer feature film, a coming-of-age story about a traditional dancer, he was met with not a little hostility. The Sukhishvili Georgian National Ballet, the country's principal dance ensemble, wanted nothing to do with the project. The rights holders to a number of old folk-song recordings refused to coöperate with the film; Akin rerecorded the songs with new artists, many of whom, along with the lead choreographer, declined to be named in the credits. The casting manager received death threats, and the production company retained bodyguards for the crew. Securing locations was so challenging that some scenes had to be shot on the fly, with many roles filled by non-professional actors, lending the film a neorealist aspect. If anyone asked, Akin resorted to lying about the plot: it was, he'd say, about a French tourist who comes to Georgia and falls in love with the culture.
In truth, "And Then We Danced," which was released this week on iTunes, centers around a fledgling member of the national dance ensemble, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), who is auditioning for a spot in the main troupe. His oppressive trainer reproaches him for being too soft, too feminine. "You should be like a nail," he growls. "This isn't the lambada." Offstage, Merab's life is a grind. To survive, he waits tables, bringing leftovers home for his mother, grandmother, and feckless older brother. He stays up studying grainy videos of Vakhtang Chabukiani, a legendary Georgian dancer, until the electricity cuts out. His entire future, it seems, rides on the upcoming audition, and on the appearance of normalcy the profession demands. "This life is not for everyone," his trainer tells him in private. "There is no room for weakness." Outside the dance studio, the first time we see Merab smile is on an early-morning bus ride to rehearsal, when his rival and crush, Irakli (Bachi Valishvili), falls asleep on his shoulder.
In 1934, Joseph Stalin passed Article 154-a, which made "sexual relations between men" punishable by up to five years of hard labor. (Such proclivities in women were treated as a mental-health issue, which, according to one Soviet psychiatrist, could be cured with "pregnancy and child-bearing . . . even after lasting perverted forms of cohabitation with women.") In 2000, nine years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Georgian parliament decriminalized homosexuality, but the state does not recognize same-sex marriage and, as in the United States, restricts blood donations from sexually active gay men. In one recent survey, fifty-nine per cent of Georgians said that they would object to having a gay neighbor (down from eighty-seven per cent a decade ago). Earlier this year, "And Then We Danced" had the curious honor of being mentioned in Human Rights Watch's 2020 World Report. At the film's Georgian première, both in Tbilisi and in the port city of Batumi, the report reads, "ultranationalist hate groups and their supporters organized protests against the screening." (Its world première was at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it received a fifteen-minute standing ovation; three months later, Sweden submitted the film to the Academy Awards as its entry for the Best International Feature Film category.) One of the protest organizers, Levan Vasadze, a neonationalist millionaire with close ties to the Georgian Orthodox Church, called the film "a moral threat to the fabric of our society." Many of the demonstrators were parishioners, grandmothers in headscarves carrying prayer candles and wooden icons of the Madonna and Child. "Georgian national dance is the pinnacle of the beauty of our tradition of manhood, warrior spirit, and purity," Vasadze told the Times. "To pick that very sanctuary and create something as heartbreaking and offensive to our culture as this is ten times more hurtful than if it was just an anti-traditional movie." In other words, had the film's protagonist been a gay tax attorney or software developer, it would not have stoked such controversy. After three days of sold-out screenings and rioting, twenty-seven arrests, and one hospitalization, Akin called off the remainder of the film's run in Georgia.
Considering this backstory, it may seem odd to view "And Then We Danced" as a love letter to the country in which it's set, but that is what it is. The film scintillates with the colors, sounds, and textures of Georgia: magisterial vistas of the Caucasus; precise displays of folk dance and dress; a-capella polyphonic singing; delectable shots of freshly baked shoti bread and big plates of khinkali soup dumplings; and the custom of the supra, the hours-long ritual of communal eating, drinking, and toasting. An enormous earthenware jar (kvevri), used for fermenting wine, serves as a backdrop for a love scene. In another scene, Merab dances by the dawning light for Irakli; apart from his boxers, he wears only an old-fashioned sheepherder's hat (papakhi) and an Orthodox cross. Akin commandeers these traditional elements not to provoke but to raise the questions at the heart of the film: Who counts as authentically Georgian? And who decides?
"And Then We Danced" celebrates Georgia's rich cultural heritage while reclaiming it for a broader demographic—for Georgians like Merab, who have been a part of it all along. One particular scene in the film is executed with such understatement that, on my first viewing, I completely missed its import. Merab is rehearsing in front of a mirror. In another room, offscreen but within earshot, a conversation is unfolding on the subject of a young couple who, following an accidental pregnancy, have agreed to marry—in two days' time, to "save the girl's honor." An older woman's voice is heard evincing disapproval of an ethnically mixed marriage. "I heard she's Armenian," she says. "It could be true." "Jesus Christ," a younger voice retorts. "Who cares if it is?"
Photograph Courtesy Music Box Films
"Buyer & Cellar," a Play That Will Make You Want to Watch Theatre Online
By Alexandra Schwartz
If you're sitting at home—and you are—gazing dully out the window, half-reading half of whatever's open on your Web browser and thinking how weary, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of this world seem to be, then click on over to YouTube and watch Michael Urie reprise his 2013 performance of "Buyer & Cellar," Jonathan Tolins's one-man show about an actor who takes a job staffing a fake mall in Barbra Streisand's basement. Yes, it's digital live theatre—Urie performed the show, which was produced by Broadway.com, Rattlestick Theatre, and the Pride Plays, in his living room on Monday night, to raise money for the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS's COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Fund—and, yes, it's good. In fact, it's great: frothy and hilarious, satisfyingly seasoned with treachery, bitchery, idolatry, and punctured celebrity hero-worship. Here I've been scouring the Web for works of theatre that seem suited to the moment and have been coming up with sombre, worthy stuff that I in no way want to watch. I lasted five minutes into a three-hour-plus recording of a Krzysztof Warlikowski play, in Polish, with English subtitles, billed as a commentary on sacrifice and the Holocaust, which opened with a man and a woman voicing stiff-armed mannequins the size of small children, and I tapped out early from the great Billie Whitelaw's rendition of Samuel Beckett's monologue "Rockaby," whose depiction of isolation and decay seemed, for once, just a bit too on the nose. But I was delighted to stay with "Buyer & Cellar" for its full hour and forty minutes, because that's what we all need right now: to be trapped in Barbra's Malibu dream house instead of our own.
As Tolins, who briefly appears at the start of the video stream, explains, the play sprang from an unlikely source: Streisand's 2010 coffee-table book, "My Passion for Design" (it seems important to note that she did the principal photography for it herself), in which Babs displayed the frankly terrifying Potemkin shopping street, complete with an antique store and "Gift Shoppe," that she built in her basement to show off her costumes and possessions to—herself. What if, Tolins wondered, Streisand hired an employee to work down there? Enter Alex, a struggling actor—he can't even hold a job at Disney World—who lucks into the gig and soon shows a talent for catering to the lady of the house. As he haggles over the price of an antique doll (Barbra wants a discount) and stays late, while Barbra entertains guests upstairs, to man the mall's frozen-yogurt machine, in case anyone wants to come down for a scoop, Alex falls under the diva's spell. He becomes her confidant and encourager. She's wily; he outfoxes her. She's needy; he affirms her. Alex is living the American fantasy of proximity to fame and fortune, and, though he thinks he's protected by a jaded attitude, he's as susceptible as anyone to the promise of intimacy with a star.
Over at Vulture, the critic Helen Shaw pointed out that, in technical terms, "Buyer & Cellar" should be the model for digital theatre going forward, and she's absolutely right. I don't know what Urie's living room usually looks like, and I don't care to. He's pulled the shades down over his windows and moved his furniture somewhere else, making the space a blank slate; the lighting is clean and bright. Three directors are credited: Nic Cory, who directed the digital production, Stephen Brackett, who directed the original show, and Paul Wontorek, who directed the live stream, which featured—miracle of miracles—a second camera angle, a thrill in the age of the relentless Zoom closeup. (The totally adequate camerawork was done by Urie's partner, the actor Ryan Spahn.)
And then there's Urie, with his antic charisma, consummate pacing, and endearing, confessional manner, amplified by direct addresses into the iPhone camera. He plays not only Alex and Barbra but also Alex's boyfriend and Streisand's jaded property manager. One pleasure of the show is seeing him move. He leaps around his living room, and gives Streisand a special slouching walk, part sexy panther, part Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Watching him work his way through Tolins's pleasurably digressive and cannily structured script is like listening to a story being told by a slightly hapless, hugely entertaining friend. Go watch, and, if you feel so inclined, donate to a worthy cause—you have until midnight on Wednesday.
Source: Broadwaycom / YouTube
"Cause for Alarm!," a Film Noir That Feels Accidentally Feminist
By Margaret Talbot
Most of us who love film noir and have seen all the classics are tantalized by the hard little gems that turn up now and then—lost or forgotten noirs that are sometimes as atmospheric as the better-known ones. In his essay "Notes on Film Noir," from 1972, the director Paul Schrader argues that, measured by "median level of artistry," the noir cycle of the nineteen-forties and fifties represented Hollywood at its most creative: "Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, Western, and so on." When a noir obscurity shows up on TCM, or is restored under the auspices of the indispensable Film Noir Foundation and screened at one of its Noir City festivals around the country, chances are it will be well worth seeing. It's likely to be a B movie—so many noirs were—but that won't mean it's any less appealing. Noirs were ideally suited to low budgets and low lighting, tight editing and short running times, stolen shots on city streets.
Led down some meandering Internet path not long ago—I've since forgotten what I was searching for—I came upon a nifty little suburban noir from 1951, "Cause for Alarm!," which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Directed by Tay Garnett ("The Postman Always Rings Twice"), it stars the excellent Loretta Young as a housewife, Ellen Jones, tormented by her sadistic invalid husband (Barry Sullivan). Though it was written and directed by men, "Cause for Alarm!" feels like a work of accidental feminism—a cry for help sent telepathically from the fifties. (Maybe the uncredited writing contribution from Dorothy Kingsley helped.) The film takes as its subject a husband's sinister campaign to undermine his wife's perception of reality, but the setting is more conventional and ostensibly benign than that of, say, "Gaslight"—not a crepuscular Victorian mansion but a neat, tidy house in a sun-bleached California suburb. In that bright, smug milieu, Ellen is trapped and watched—by the nosy neighbor, the officious postman, even the cute but insistent little boy who keeps dropping by with his toy TV and six-shooters. Like the men in other noirs who've been accused of crimes they didn't commit, Ellen's reasonable actions attract suspicion, but, in her case, a maddening condescension, too. A notary who comes to the house to see her husband tells her, "He warned me that I'd get some resistance from you" but that "I wasn't to take you seriously." It's a tense, suspenseful movie, with a wry twist at the end, but it's also, in its way, a sharp-eyed study of the feminine mystique.
Photograph from MGM / Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy
"Making Montgomery Clift" Is a Fascinating Study of the Ethics of Biography
By Michael Schulman
The documentary "Making Montgomery Clift" begins with shots of archives—boxes and boxes of old letters and photos—and a voice-over saying, "This isn't really a story about a man. It's about what his life was allowed to mean." That isn't aggrandizement; the movie really isn't about the four-time Oscar-nominated actor Montgomery Clift, at least not in the way you might expect. The voice belongs to his youngest nephew, Robert Clift, who was not yet born when the actor died, in 1966, and who made the film with Hillary Demmon. The popular image of Monty is one of gay tragedy—that he was a self-hating, love-starved closet case who drowned himself in liquor and solitude. (He died of a heart attack, at the age of forty-five, but a colleague called it "the longest suicide in Hollywood history.") Robert takes a closer look at his uncle's legacy, finding friends—including Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on the TV show "Adventures of Superman"—who attest to his joy and humor. He may have been closeted to the public, but he appears to have had fulfilling love affairs with both men and women. Maybe he wasn't so tortured after all?
It's an intriguing idea, but the documentary takes a sharp turn toward a more niche subject: the ethics of biography. In the seventies, two books appeared about Clift—one a pop-Freudian scandal sheet, by Robert LaGuardia, and the other a more respectful portrait, by Patricia Bosworth, who had the coöperation of Monty's brother (and Robert's father) Brooks Clift. Bosworth became the "de-facto family historian," Robert says. But, as the filmmakers discover, Brooks ultimately felt betrayed by Bosworth and begged her to make changes in later printings. Her research archives reveal that she may have unfairly suggested that Monty was arrested for picking up a young boy, rather than a grown man—playing into a homophobic trope.
Why get into sentence-by-sentence analysis of a forty-two-year-old biography? Partly because the filmmakers have a trove of material to draw on. Brooks, who died in 1986, compulsively recorded his phone conversations—with Bosworth, with Monty, and even with his wife, the journalist Eleanor Clift, during their divorce. Anyone versed in Janet Malcolm's trenchant observations about journalists and their subjects will recognize the uneasy dynamic between Brooks and Bosworth. Of course, family members can be just as agenda-driven as biographers (often more so), and Robert Clift has his own emotional stake in his uncle's legacy. But the film asks pointed questions about how even small extrapolations can have distorting effects—was Monty really "more loved than loving," as Bosworth infers from an anecdote?—and about our reductive understanding of the pre-Stonewall era.
I first saw "Making Montgomery Clift" last summer, at the Provincetown International Film Festival, and was rapt. So I was surprised to see, months later, that it had been quietly released on demand. One wonders whether a more conventional film—one that upheld the image of gay self-loathing—might have had wider distribution. But the documentary is fascinating on its own peculiar terms, especially for anyone who loves or writes Hollywood history. In the end, it's a good portrait of Montgomery Clift as well. At one point, we hear Monty on a phone call with a journalist, who seems to imply that he leads a "murky life." "That sounds so fucking dismal, I must say," Monty replies. "I can't say I am just melancholy or I am just sad or I am just anything."
Photograph Courtesy The Film Collaborative
"Good Eats," the One Cooking Show to Rule Them All
By Maya Phillips
There is no dearth of cooking shows to explore as one casts about for ideas for Thanksgiving—or just for Sunday dinner. In fact, the cooking show has spawned multiple subgenres. There's the competition show (the hammy theatrics of "Iron Chef"; the kindly, well-behaved "Great British Bake Off"), the home-kitchen show (the butter-basted-everything "Paula's Home Cooking"; the upper-class serenity of Ina Garten's "Barefoot Contessa"; the celebrity-kitchen adventures of Martha Stewart, Trisha Yearwood, Valerie Bertinelli, and Tia Mowry), the cooking talk show ("Rachael Ray," "The Chew," "The Kitchen"), and the travel show ("Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown," "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern," "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives"). And then there's "Good Eats."
"Good Eats" premièred in 1999 and ran for more than two hundred episodes, until 2012. This year, the show was resurrected as "Good Eats: The Return," and is, fittingly, a return to form. Whereas many cooking shows fit into one category, framing the kitchen as a space for culinary clashes, everyday food preparation, artisanal eating, or the discovery of new cultures and traditions, "Good Eats" was the happy bastard of the genre, playfully manic in its approach to food—not just its means of preparation, with breakdowns of recipes and kitchen tools, but also its science and history. It upended the form with humor and a strange, variety-show style.
The charismatic host and showrunner of "Good Eats," Alton Brown, pairs clear-eyed practicality with free-range dad jokes and Internet-age goofery. In each episode, Brown fast-talks his way through the rules of the kitchen, debunking common myths and providing helpful tips while using costumes, puppets, props, and campy characters to illustrate his culinary know-how. Set changes (say, a sudden move from the kitchen to a classroom), blink-and-you'll-miss-them cuts, and obtuse camera angles from inside cabinets and pantries lend the show a sense of lighthearted exploration. The series also specializes in educational nuggets, explaining the chemical process behind fermentation or the anatomy of a knife, with accompanying trivia-style factoids that flash onscreen. Like "Bill Nye the Science Guy," which also featured rapid-fire pacing, comical interludes, and a focus on science, "Good Eats" is neither too precious with its subject nor too flippant; the show frames cooking as a constant process of discovery, each dish and even each motion (for example, cracking an egg) providing an opportunity for knowledge. Many cooking shows adopt the mode of instruction—Julia Child counselling aspiring chefs from the screen. But, in "Good Eats," Brown delivers a performance that is equal parts lecture, theatre, and winking conversation between friends. Sure, there's delicious food, but you can get that anywhere. The show is also food for thought, with a side dish of oddball humor.
Photograph Courtesy Cooking Channel
The Enjoyable Discomfort of Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg"
In Noah Baumbach's newly released "Marriage Story," Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson play a couple who are going through a painful, protracted divorce battle. The movie portrays the dissolution of a marriage as a domestic catastrophe that doesn't stem from either partner's worst impulses, but that can happen even to good, loving people whose ambitions and needs end up at cross purposes. I enjoyed the film, but, as I watched, I sometimes felt that I would have found it more honest and complicated had I not felt that the baser, crueler instincts of the protagonists had been sanded down to an essential decency. As I exited the theatre, I realized that the poisonousness and discomfort I was missing—the depiction of complex human characters driven near-mad by spite and lust and jealousy and loathing and bitterness—were already in an earlier Baumbach movie. I went home and rewatched "Greenberg."
In a Profile of Baumbach in this magazine, in 2013, my colleague Ian Parker noted that when "Greenberg" was released, in 2010, some viewers found it so distasteful that a theatre in which it was being shown was compelled to post a sign reading "We must limit refunds to an hour past start time." (The movie will be screened next week at the Metrograph, in New York, where Baumbach is doing a residency.) As one of the film's stars, Greta Gerwig, suggested in the same Profile, "Greenberg" is the sort of movie that "will make you feel perhaps uncomfortable about choices you've made in your life." But while it's true that, with its savage portrait of a man's noxious narcissism, "Greenberg" can be unpleasant to watch (my editor, when I told him that I wanted to write about how much I love the film, said, with some surprise, "Interesting pick!"), its power lies exactly in its ability to perform the subtle balancing act of rendering its protagonist no less sympathetic for being toxic.
That titular protagonist, Roger Greenberg (a tightly coiled Ben Stiller), is a loser, and he knows it, and it's absolutely killing him. He was once a promising musician, until he blew up a record deal that could have set him and his bandmates on the path to stardom. ("It was corporate bullshit!" he still insists.) Now that he's forty and working as a carpenter, the only thing that matches his self-hatred is his stubborn self-aggrandizement. "I work out of a studio in Bushwick that I share with a few other carpenters. . . . That's been pretty good," he tells Beth, an old girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has a co-writing credit on the movie), before adding, offhandedly but pompously, "It's political, though." After being hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, he emerges from a mental ward and travels to Los Angeles for an extended stay, to house-sit the lavish home of his much more successful younger brother. "Recently, I had this thing where I couldn't move my legs," he says to Beth, apropos of nothing, during the same conversation. "But it was psychological."
We hear nothing more about this episode, but the easy combination of such seemingly throwaway tidbits, which swing within the span of one conversation from the obnoxious to the heartrending and back, is part of the movie's understated sketching of a multifaceted character. Greenberg is a nightmare—a self-obsessed mansplainer who is embarrassingly entitled, and whose self-awareness is flickering at best—but his vulnerability is recognizable, even poignant. At one point, he tells his kindly friend Ivan (the casually terrific Rhys Ifans) that "life is wasted on people"; and, indeed, who among us hasn't been disillusioned by adulthood, and by what seems to us, whether correctly or not, others' blithe, easy acceptance of its limitations? Of course, Baumbach allows us to identify with this side of Greenberg only to almost immediately pull the carpet out from under our feet, by having him throw a hissy fit at a restaurant after Ivan has a candlelit birthday cake brought to him by a host of singing waiters. "I'm not one of these preening L.A. people who likes everything to be about them," he complains to his brother's assistant, Florence (Gerwig, who is lovely here, in her first big mainstream role), as she drives him home.
The centerpiece of the movie is Greenberg's sort-of relationship with Florence, who is a young, not-very-ambitious aspiring singer. Florence is as loose as Greenberg is uptight, and her dreams and disappointments are as fuzzy as his are acute. Their encounter serves less as a fully realized bond in which each partner affects and changes the other and more as a chance for Baumbach to showcase the highly particular, highly recognizable attributes of both. "I don't read enough; I'm such a bad reader," Florence, who listens to mainstream soft rock and hasn't seen any so-called important movies, tells Greenberg. ("You like old things," she says to him, after he gifts her a mix CD brimming with relative obscurities of decades past.) But she is also a much kinder and freer person than he is—the sort who is responsible and caring enough to keep an ailing dog's complicated medication schedule straight, while still delighting in the animal's beast-like corporeality. ("His tongue is so scratchy!") The movie treats her character's foibles and charms with an affectionate but clear-eyed remove.
"Greenberg" is, among other things, a satire—a spot-on taxonomy of the many ways in which the white, privileged, and artsy members of the haute bourgeoisie can be unbearable—and the movie's best extended scene, to my mind, is one in which Greenberg ends up hanging out with a gaggle of millennials at a house party. The secondhand embarrassment I feel for him every time I watch it is nearly debilitating, but it lands the familiar notes of "older person hanging out with younger people" so well that I can't look away. "I read an article—are you guys all just fucking on the Internet?" he asks the crowd, before proceeding to do a line of cocaine ("This is good coke"), gulping down a Vicodin, and flirting aggressively and awkwardly with teen girls. ("Fight or fuck?" he asks one of them, making a karate-chop gesture and eliciting titters from the bratty college students around him.) Greenberg ends the night by leaving a long, musing message on Florence's answering machine. "When I was a kid, I was a leader. My mom said other kids looked up to me," he says, spectacularly navel-gazing. But then he goes on. "I just don't understand. What happened to me? Where does experience go?" The questions are self-indulgent, but they still strike a nerve. What does happen to us when we grow older? Where does experience go? Greenberg is an asshole, but every time I rewatch this scene, it hits keenly.
Photograph Courtesy Focus Features
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