matthewjbond Reviews

Endgame (2000 TV Movie)

A Few Notes

[9/10 · 9 February 2007]

I just want to add that all four members of the cast are brilliant here, and Thewlis & Gambon play off each other beautifully. Gambon catches the right note of ham (pun intended), and Thewlis finds his small spaces between, as his part requires.

Although I would've liked to have seen the two windows facing back, more as two eyes, I can accept Conor McPherson's choices. Perhaps the space could've been a bit more confined, placing the trashcans closer to Hamm, but that, too, is personal taste.

Certainly the steps down to the kitchen were genius, making Clov hobble up them torturously, and re-inforcing how dependent Hamm is on Clov.

Come and Go (2000 TV Short)

A Beautiful Picture

[10/10 · 9 February 2007]

"Come and Go" is one of Beckett's most beautiful works. John Crowley did an excellent job transferring it to the screen. His pacing was wonderful, slow to the point of snail-paced but never sluggish. He brought the camera in for the whispering, then brought it back out when a return of one of the three was imminent. He lit the area precisely: The bench was invisible, and the women walked into darkness, being enveloped as if leisurely entering the void.

Crowley recognized that "Come and Go" exists as a series of pictures (woman in red, woman in violet, woman in yellow), and he showed their bare, unadorned hands before that beautiful last line, "I can feel the rings", but he didn't give us a close-up of the face saying it. Crowley's work here is a lesson that more of the other directors should have followed.

Not I (2000)

Agreeing With "Not You!"

[6/10 · 9 February 2007]

Watching Julianne Moore sit and then, having her mouth shot from several different angles, harms "Not I", which requires us to see only a mouth, and only from one angle, from beginning to end.

Moore's face was never in darkness, and her mouth never, in blackness, either filled the screen (as Billie Whitelaw's did in an earlier filming) or was seen floating at a distance (the effect of watching the play on stage, where Mouth should be eight feet high).

I wish that Moore and Beckett had had a more courageous and thoughtful director.

(This is really all I have to say, but IMDb doesn't reward brevity, so I must fill this out to ten lines. Ironic to do this in a comment about Beckett, the master of brevity. I hope that I've said enough now.)

Breath (2001)

More Ego Than Art

[5/10 · 9 February 2007]

Damien Hirst's film adaptation of Beckett's short play, "Breath," says more about Hirst than it does about Beckett's work.

Beckett wanted a curtain to open on random trash, as if we'd found a neglected gutter in an alley. Hirst covers the floor with shiny plastic trash, trash with a decidedly medical bent, old hospital supplies, &c. Further, the floor floats into the screen and then floats away, giving the piece much more magic & f/x nonsense than Beckett's simple, dirty, scene.

It's a shame that this piece wasn't given to a stage & film director who wanted to show it in the text's spirit.

Film (1965)

Tidbits

[9 February 2007]

Considering the other comments, there's little to add about the movie, but I know these few facts surrounding it. When Schneider visited Keaton to see whether he'd do the movie, Schneider found Keaton in a poker game w/ three empty chairs, which represented three of Keaton's companions--all dead, but Keaton continued to play.

Keaton was mystified by this script, too, as by "Godot", but wanted the money. He suggested several comedic bits be added, because he thought the whole thing would be less than five minutes. In New York, he wanted to use one of his flat hats rather than the bowler Beckett had written in, and Beckett immediately agreed.

The film was shot in mid-summer in a very hot New York, each day over 90 degrees. Keaton (age 69, and not in great health: he died less than two years later) never complained as he had to keep running along that brick wall in the heavy overcoat.

It was Beckett's only visit to the U.S., and he never got outside of New York, and left the U.S. as quickly as possible.

Play (2001)

Almost perfect

[8/10 · 9 February 2007]

Anthony Minghella follows much of Beckett's stage directions with his filming of "Play", but he also takes some pandering liberties that hurt the internal logic of the piece. In a stage production, we would see three characters in urns: from left to right, W1, the wife; M, the husband & lover; W2, the mistress. (This, by the way, was not Beckett's published arrangement, but one he chose when he directed "Play" some years later.) They are in urns, and we can see only their faces, covered with some of the same material as the urns. They speak only when a light, shone from below, is upon them, and the light flits from face to face, fragmenting each monologue, so that we slowly pick up the thread of the love triangle & that each of them is now in some afterlife, not knowing that the other two are beside. They speak rapidly and in a monotone, and the entire play is repeated.

Minghella changes the light to a camera. He places these urns in a larger field of many urns, each babbling its own story, and he gives the feeling of old film, with the sounds of film rattling in the projector in the start & snapped off at the end. These are intelligent means of adapting the play to a film. He, however, cannot keep the camera still, so that we see the characters from the side, not merely from the front. This lessens the intensity & the logic of the questioning coming from a single point. Part of what makes "Play" effective theater is the strong sense of confinement. This is more difficult in a film, and even more difficult on video, but it loses even more of that sense when the camera cuts from one angle to another.

The play is well-cast & well-acted. The actors keep to the rapid-fire rhythm & the flat voices. Minghella's rhythm gives nothing to an audience. We must pick it up on the fly, very quickly. If he could only have kept the camera still, close up, face front, then it would've been perfect.