JonathanRosenbaum.com

Metaphysical Pop [THE MUSIC OF CHANCE]

From the Chicago Reader (September 24, 1993). Oddly enough, the version of this piece that’s available on the Reader’s web site and  (until recently) here is missing the final five paragraphs, which I’ve just restored by copying them from the printed version that I still have in one of my scrapbooks. — J.R.

THE MUSIC OF CHANCE

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Philip Haas

Written by Philip and Belinda Haas

With Mandy Patinkin, James Spader, M. Emmet Walsh, Charles Durning, Joel Grey, Samantha Mathis, and Christopher Penn.

In an interview included in his nonfiction collection The Art of Hunger, Paul Auster gives an intriguing account of the major influences on his novels — an account that suggests why these novels aren’t well suited to conventional movie adaptation:

“The greatest influence on my work has been fairy tales, the oral tradition of story-telling. The Brothers Grimm, the Thousand and One Nights — the kinds of stories you read out loud to children. These are bare-bone narratives, narratives largely devoid of details, yet enormous amounts of information are communicated in a very short space, with very few words. What fairy tales prove, I think, is that it’s the reader — or the listener — who actually tells the story to himself. The text is no more than a springboard for the imagination. ‘Once upon a time there was a girl who lived with her mother in a house at the edge of a large wood.’ You don’t know what the girl looks like, you don’t know what color the house is, you don’t know if the mother is tall or short, fat or thin, you know next to nothing. But the mind won’t allow these things to remain blank; it fills in the details itself, it creates images based on its own memories and experiences — which is why these stories resonate so deeply inside us. The listener becomes an active participant in the story.”

If Auster were taken literally, the best medium for adapting his fiction would be the Disney cartoon feature. But in fact the differences between seeing Beauty and the Beast and hearing the story read aloud are profound — as profound as the differences between reading Auster’s beautifully crystalline prose and seeing Philip Haas’s intelligent but fairly literal screen adaptation of The Music of Chance.

An oral storyteller like Orson Welles, who throve on radio drama, had to reinvent film style in the 40s to accommodate his talent to movies. In Citizen Kane he devised many schemes for narrative condensation and visual ellipsis while bringing the darkness of German expressionism back to studio filmmaking. Plainly central to these strategies were the spectator’s imagination and active participation: everything we see in Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons is a kind of visual shorthand for the vast quantity of things we don’t see. The voices of offscreen narrators exert a similar lure, predicated on a comparable sketchiness in what they’re saying, which compels us to furnish the rest.

In terms of plot, Haas’s The Music of Chance is every bit as sketchy as Auster’s novel — even more so, given the deleted material (such as the opening chapter) and a few distracting additions (such as the cutesy, compromised tacked-on ending). But in terms of narrative method, the movie eliminates much of the space for the audience that the novel opens up to the reader, and without employing any film style that might compensate for the reduction. As a result, what makes the novel compulsively readable makes the movie relatively dull; the enforced passivity of conventional moviegoing simply can’t compare with the enforced mental activity of reading a novel. And the meditation on freedom that lies at the heart of the parablelike story in novel and film alike ultimately only cheats on its initial implied promise to tell us something concrete about the contemporary world.

Before The Music of Chance, his first fiction feature, Haas made only documentaries; since the early 80s, they’ve all been about artists, ranging from painter David Hockney (A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China) to performance artists Gilbert and George (The Singing Sculpture) to traditional artists such as Australian aboriginal ground painters and Malagasy funerary sculptors (in the four-part Magicians of the Earth). Two of these films — The Singing Sculpture and Money Man, about an American conceptual artist who paints and spends his own dollar bills (the only ones I’ve seen) — turned up at the Music Box this past summer. The main point of convergence between these works and The Music of Chance appears to be the novel’s central event — two men settling a $15,000 gambling debt with two eccentric millionaires are forced to build a wall in a meadow out of 10,000 60-pound stones imported from a 15th-century Irish castle. In the novel this prolonged ordeal is a sort of spiritual testing ground for the hero. But Haas (who adapted the book in collaboration with his wife, film editor Belinda Haas) seems to regard the project as an absurdist artwork, as do the two millionaires. And perhaps in the filmmakers’ hands it takes on an additional meaning — as a metaphor for the absurdist task of adapting Auster’s novel in the first place.

The main thing the movie has going for it is the acting — juicy performances by the five male leads (Mandy Patinkin, James Spader, Charles Durning, Joel Grey, and M. Emmet Walsh) give the movie most of whatever life it can claim. Of the two wall builders, Spader has a showier and more aggressive part than Patinkin, while of the wall owners Durning seems a lot more prominent than Grey; but in fact all four project just the right amount of personality and energy for their parts. Walsh — a gifted and familiar character actor — is comparably resourceful as the owners’ servant and the builders’ foreman.

Patinkin plays the hero, Jim Nashe, a Boston fireman who inherits money from his estranged father shortly after his wife leaves him and spends an aimless year on the road, after depositing his two-year-old daughter with his sister in Minnesota. Much of Patinkin’s interesting performance reflects what Auster does as a prose stylist, suggesting some intellectual and spiritual depth beneath a colorless, relatively imperturbable surface. Spader is Jack Pozzi, the brash younger man and professional poker player Nashe picks up on the road; what makes the part flashier than Patinkin’s is the fact that Spader — sporting a mustache and all but unrecognizable in relation to his usual yuppie roles — is clearly having a field day.

Nashe needs a respite from the protracted existential drift triggered by his inheritance (recounted in the novel’s first 20 pages but reduced to a few belated lines of dialogue in the movie) and needs to replenish the money he has left after his year of cross-country driving. So he agrees to stake Pozzi in a poker game with the two millionaires — middle-aged single men who won their riches in a lottery and now share a mansion on an estate in rural Pennsylvania — and split the winnings.

Vain and idle, the nouveau riche millionaires cultivate their separate hobbies. For Stone (Grey), a former optometrist, it’s constructing a scale-model “City of the World” that incorporates his own autobiography as well as solipsistic tokens of his godlike powers. (In more ways than one, this scale-model city is Auster’s parodic representation of his own enterprise.) For Flowers (Durning), a former accountant, it’s collecting historical memorabilia, including the stones from the dismantled 15th-century Irish castle — though apart from the stones, this hobby is ignored in the movie. (In the book, Flowers and Stone cultivate their different hobbies in separate wings of the mansion, but I assume budgetary restrictions prevented Haas from showing or mentioning Flowers’s wing.)

The two men also like to play poker, and their lack of skill is what convinces Pozzi he can win a fortune from them. But since he last saw them play they’ve taken lessons from another poker master, and they wind up winning all of Nashe’s money: $10,000. After further winning Nashe’s car and an additional $10,000 their opponents don’t have, they propose that the men work off their debt by assembling a wall in their meadow out of the stones from the castle. While Pozzi initially recoils at this suggestion, Nashe dutifully accepts, and by the next day they’re reduced to living as indentured servants in a trailer adjacent to the meadow on the fenced-in estate. From that point we no longer see the millionaires — except for the hands (presumably Stone’s) duplicating the growth of the wall in his model city — which only serves the film’s shift from a naturalistic to a more abstract and symbolic terrain.

Auster has cited Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka as his contemporary masters, and these influences account for much of what is both right and wrong with his novels — as well as what makes them less than ideal as movie material. (Pozzi’s name is most likely derived from Pozzo, in Waiting for Godot, and Nashe’s name probably alludes to Thomas Nashe, the late-16th-century author of the prose romance The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton. The more cosmic significance of names like Stone and Flowers is equally characteristic of Auster.)

Auster’s comments about the spareness of fairy tales, combined with Roland Barthes’ argument about why movies contain too much information to carry the force of fragmentary written texts, help explain why Beckett, Kafka, and Auster are difficult movie sources: “Constraints of representation (analogous to the obligatory rubrics of language),” Barthes argues, “makes it necessary to receive everything: of a man walking in the snow, even before he signifies, everything is given to me; in writing, on the contrary, I am not obliged to see how the hero wears his nails — but if it wants to, the Text describes, and with what force, Hölderlin’s filthy talons.”

Much as Joyce was the key modernist influence on Beckett, as well as other English-language novelists, Beckett’s spare narratives of inertia and absence have influenced later novelists, and often of very different kinds: the first two novels of Rudolph Wurlitzer, Nog and Flats (both key literary documents of 60s counterculture sensibility), are as drenched in Beckett as Auster’s much straighter and squarer novels. The crucial difference, I would argue — which is also the crucial difference between a modernist and a postmodernist approach — is that while Wurlitzer used Beckett to process his experience of the 60s, Auster uses him more often, as he uses Kafka, as a way of processing his experience of literature — an approach he makes more palatable to pop taste with stylistic infusions of such hard-boiled writers as Raymond Chandler. (Kafka, who never completed any of his novels, was properly speaking a writer of parables and fragments rather than a novelist; in effect Auster’s The Music of Chance starts with a Beckett-like protagonist — a traveler without direction — and leads us into the more abstract and spiritual realm of a Kafka parable once Nashe and Pozzi arrive at the meadow.) It’s worth noting that Auster’s more recent novel, Leviathan — which tries to deal with the radical sociopolitical awakening of the 60s, but unlike Wurlitzer, only at secondhand, as imagined rather than lived experience — is a sour failure.

Auster’s appropriations place his fiction in a category critic John Powers has called “Metaphysical Pop”– “a smart, eerily cool style practiced by novelists as diverse as Stanislaw Lem and Michel Butor, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Muriel Spark, Don DeLillio and Haruki Murakami. All these writers are literary game players who suck you in with clever plot hooks, often derived from science fiction or noir, but eventually wind up dealing in existential abstractions — what Murakami might call wild-sheep chases.”

As Powers defines it, Metaphysical Pop is definitely a postmodern genre. What distinguishes a genuinely modernist film like King of the Hill – which also deals with a personal and spiritual ordeal brought about by economic deprivation but is grounded in a very specific time and place (defined by the A.E. Hotchner memoir on which the movie is based and Steven Soderbergh’s rigorous fidelity to it) — from the postmodernist The Music of Chance is the fact that this film (and novel) can deal with such an ordeal only as an Idea, or what Powers calls a “wild-sheep chase,” plunked down into the center of a fenced-off meadow that has been carefully isolated from the world as we know it. Powers’s definition also helps explain why Auster’s trafficking in secondhand literary experience is so much less powerful than his more authentic delving into his own experience: “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” the first section of his book The Invention of Solitude, is a potent investigation into the mysteries surrounding his own late father; significantly, Beckett, Kafka, and Chandler are nowhere in evidence.

In their very different ways Kafka, Beckett, and Chandler all stand at the end of the modernist tradition –dealing, however elliptically, with their own firsthand responses to the 20th century. Metaphysical Pop, on the other hand, deals with those experiences in lighter, less committed ways (significantly, the Penguin editions of Auster’s books proliferate in airports; most of them make ideal travel reading). Haas’s movie — by lightening the darkness with which Auster’s novel ends, literally grafting on a “happy ending” in which Auster himself makes a cameo appearance — only clarifies the degree to which Auster, for all his craft and intelligence, has been partially fooling us all along. Metaphorically speaking, Auster’s music of chance has been mediated by the Muzak of the bottom line — a process the movie can only intensify.

Social Climbing (THE AGE OF INNOCENCE)

This remains one of the most controversial reviews I ever published in the Chicago Reader (it ran in their September 17, 1993 issue) — occasioning many outcries, especially for my use of the term “drooling paisan” (although many others also quarreled with my point about apostrophes). No one, however, seemed to have had any quarrels with my treatment of Edith Wharton. — J.R.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Jay Cocks and Scorsese

With Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, Stuart Wilson, Miriam Margolyes, Geraldine Chaplin, Mary Beth Hurt, and Norman Lloyd.

Martin Scorsese clearly intends The Age of Innocence – his close adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel about wealthy New York society in the 1870s — to earn him a bouquet of Oscars. But the high literary tone was somewhat blown for me by the opening title, immediately following a lush credits sequence of flower blossoms unfurling behind dainty fabric: “New York City, the 1870’s.” That superfluous apostrophe doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that Scorsese is the ideal interpreter of Edith Wharton.

Fortunately the movie improves after that, but never to the point that one can entirely forget that slip at the beginning. If the project winds up a noble failure, testifying throughout to Scorsese’s resourcefulness in plowing through an impossible mission — much better to my taste than Cape Fear, and considerably more likable (if less successful) than GoodFellas – it may be because the subject is diametrically opposed to what he usually does best as a filmmaker. I had assumed that the Visconti of The Leopard would be Scorsese’s key model; 15 minutes into the movie, I realized that Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons was exerting an even stronger influence. But the fact remains that Welles — and Booth Tarkington (the author of Ambersons), Visconti, and Giuseppe Tomasi (the author of The Leopard) — are all better equipped to understand Wharton’s world, by virtue of their upper-class backgrounds, than Scorsese is. Even a bourgeois type like Antonioni seems better suited to capture the faint tremors and enduring ambiguities of Wharton’s fiction.

Perhaps the tribalism of the New York families is what attracted Scorsese’s interest — a thematic concern that supposedly makes this film the blood brother (if not the blood sister) of Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. That, at any rate, is cowriter Jay Cocks’s suggestion as to why he brought this novel to Scorsese’s attention. But even if one accepts the loose connection between Wharton and Scorsese as ethnographers of their different tribes, that doesn’t mean that either one is qualified to comment on the other’s territory. If Wharton were alive and working today as a filmmaker, would Cocks have suggested she make a movie about macho rituals among working-class Italian Americans?

Scorsese’s street-smart, Little Italy origins are no disgrace; they simply point his perceptions in a certain direction. But trying to focus on Wharton’s world inevitably places him in the role of a drooling paisan with his nose pressed against the window. It’s one thing for Wharton, in the midst of a 362-page novel, to describe a dinner that Newland Archer, the lawyer hero, shares with his employer: “after a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young broiled turkey with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise.” But it’s quite another for Scorsese, in a 133-minute movie, to highlight each of these items in a separate decorously lit and framed shot. The novel is already consumerist, to be sure — Wharton’s method of mainstreaming Henry James is very much a matter of simplifying the style and amplifying the set decoration — but what figures as a fleeting aside in her prose becomes a TV ad for Gourmet magazine in the movie.

Much later in the film, after Archer is married and he and his wife are giving their first big dinner party, there’s an elaborate camera movement to set the scene that seems to come straight out of Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress – an overhead pan up the laden banquet table to Archer at the head of it, then a backward track past the same opulent array of foodstuffs, then a crane up and away from the end of the table. In Sternberg’s movie, the point of such a show-off maneuver is the spectacle of conspicuous consumption at the court of Catherine the Great. But in Scorsese’s movie the key point is supposed to be Archer’s inability to communicate more than superficially with the woman he secretly loves, whose farewell party this is, before she returns to Europe. (”He was a prisoner in the center of an armed camp,” says the offscreen narrator.) Both conspicuous consumption and private grief are articulated in this scene, but given the studied grandiloquence of the opening it’s the former that takes the upper hand, overwhelming the dramaturgy. Thanks to this kind of emphasis there’s a lot to “ooo” and “ahh” at in this movie, but much less to sink your teeth into, and still less to think about afterward.

Let’s start with the overhead shots. Scorsese cuts to these distracting angles in two early scenes, at a ball and at another fancy dinner party, and both times the sudden shift in viewpoint doesn’t correspond to a dramatic or analytic point; it’s the nervous tic of an awed director who isn’t entirely sure what to do with his camera in relation to a scene but likes the visual pattern yielded by a bird’s-eye perspective on all this splendor. There’s nothing criminal about these cuts if mannerist doodling is all that’s intended, but I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that Welles or Visconti wouldn’t dream of such a shot unless it corresponded to some narrative or dramatic advancement.

Then there’s the film’s boldest and in some ways most interesting narrative device: the copious use of an offscreen female narrator (Joanne Woodward) to siphon large chunks of Wharton’s prose into the movie. This has the virtue of providing all sorts of background, social, and psychological details that would have been difficult to shoehorn into the action or dialogue; it also carries the special advantage of supplying Wharton’s own voice as a storyteller.

But deliberately or not, this device highlights a limitation in the novel, a limitation that reveals Wharton as far from the feminist writer she’s sometimes cracked up to be. The perspective expressed in Woodward’s narration, for all its knowingness about the inner workings of New York society in the late 19th century, is still fundamentally and strategically limited: these are the perceptions of a man, the hero Newland Archer. And in Jamesian fashion, everything he doesn’t understand, or can only guess at, becomes an ironic subtext to the narration.

To some extent this subtext in the novel indicts Archer, implying that his failure to act on his romantic impulses — to have an affair with Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), the married cousin of his fiancee (and later wife) May Welland (Winona Ryder) — is as much a failure of nerve and backbone as it is a consequence of societal pressures. As Edmund Wilson (who incidentally regarded The Age of Innocence as a novel written on the very cusp of Wharton’s decline) put it in 1947, reviewing an early Wharton biography: “The male type which most conspicuously recurs in her novels is the cultivated intelligent man who cannot bear to offend social convention, the reformer who gets bribed without knowing it in marrying a rich wife, the family man who falls in love with someone more exciting than his wife but doesn’t have the courage of his passion; and the treatment of these characters by the author, though outwardly sympathetic, is always well chilled with an irony that has an undercurrent of scorn.”

But in the movie — where the narration has necessarily become a series of footnotes, and where romantic dreamboat Daniel Day-Lewis is cast as Archer — this element of scorn has been muted almost to the vanishing point. Novel and movie alike imply that a feminine conspiracy between May and Ellen (whose pivotal meetings are kept offstage in both) aborts the affair — a conspiracy (or at least complicity) Wharton doesn’t choose to describe, much less examine, though a truer feminist might have shown greater interest in the female perspective. And the suggestions of that conspiracy necessarily become far more prominent in the movie.

The reasons are gender-specific. In the novel, Wharton’s irony resides in the fact that, though she is deliberately restricting her viewpoint to Archer’s, she herself knows a little more than he does about the world he inhabits, and especially the world of Ellen and May. In the movie this “extra” knowledge, insofar as it exists, is restricted to Woodward’s voice, which can’t be equated with Scorsese’s “voice” as a filmmaker: he may know a little more than Archer does, but what he knows is exclusively what he’s gleaned from Wharton, and everything else is a massive, uncritical identification with Archer’s poignant sense of loss. The partial blame placed on New York’s upper-crust tribalism is certainly present in the novel, but such blame also figures as one of Archer’s alibis to himself about not following through on his love for Ellen. In the movie it’s no longer an alibi but the unvarnished explanation.

Despite these misgivings, it would be wrong to overlook Scorsese’s inventiveness and energy in The Age of Innocence, even if they’re more apparent at the margins of this story than at the center. He’s bold enough to resort to quick cutting in many scenes, though most directors avoid this technique for the sake of simplicity when working in ‘Scope, and he often creates a style of stenographic notation in crowded, busy scenes that shows off his staccato filmmaking manner at its best. He gives more attention than usual to color, creating a fine, burnished image of Ellen standing on a dock in Newport as seen from afar by Archer (a key moment in the book and film alike) and employing striking color fades (such as a “yellow-out” from a shot of yellow roses). There are evocative exterior shots of New York and its environs as they were supposed to look in the 1870s, some of which recall the re-creations of the midwest at a slightly later period in Ambersons, and dreamy, lush camera movements across richly upholstered interiors that treat us to comparably thought-out period inventories. The historical tidbits used in the narration are fascinating and well chosen, as are the paintings that occasionally punctuate the action.

I wish I could say that these and other touches yield a coherent historical meditation along the lines of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, either about the remote past or (by way of implied parallels) about the present, but if such an intention lies at the heart of this project, I have to confess it eluded me. Pfeiffer is luminous and multifaceted as Ellen, and Day-Lewis brings all the bemused elegance one could wish to the part of Archer. If Ryder, for all her resourcefulness, fares less well in a part that seems “underscripted” even in the novel, one should add that Scorsese and Cocks have still done their damnedest to incorporate as much of Wharton’s material about her as possible. (The film’s fleeting references to Archer’s previous adulterous affair pose a similar problem: much of the movie’s reticence on this matter can be traced back to Wharton.) All that’s really missing from the film is the kind of unifying vision and strategy that gave the novel purpose — which means that all that remains are scintillating commentaries about a story Scorsese never quite gets around to telling.

The Joy Luck Club

A wonderful tearjerker about four young Chinese American women in San Francisco (Rosalind Chao, Lauren Tom, Tamilyn Tomita, and Ming-Na Wen) and their Chinese immigrant mothers (Tsai Chin, Kieu Chinh, Lisa Lu, and France Nuyen). Adapted from Amy Tan’s best-selling novel by the author and Ron Bass, and directed by Wayne Wang, it is a story (or more precisely, four interwoven stories) told mainly in flashbacks. Wang, whose previous work has reflected the influence of both Ozu (Dim Sum) and Godard (Life Is Cheap), seems to have fallen under the spell of Mizoguchi here, and this model serves him well. At once fascinating for its detailed lore about Chinese customs and legacies and very moving in its realization, the film builds into a highly emotional epic about what it means to be both Chinese and American. Fine Arts.

The Ghost Ship

The least known, though far from least interesting, of producer Val Lewton’s exemplary, poetic B-films, this was withdrawn from circulation for nearly half a century due to an unjust plagiarism suit that Lewton had the misfortune to lose. Like many of Lewton’s best efforts (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man), this is a taut thriller promising fantasy in its title but offering a dark look at human psychology that becomes even more disturbing through what’s left to the viewer’s imagination. The plot concerns a young third mate (Russell Wade) on a cargo ship who’s befriended by a lonely captain (Richard Dix), whom he gradually discovers is a disturbed tyrant with little of the self-confidence he initially shows–a cracked father figure whose crew is mysteriously loyal in spite of his weaknesses. Like Lewton’s other early pictures, it’s carefully scripted (by Donald Henderson Clarke), efficiently directed (by Mark Robson), and evocatively shot (by Nicholas Musuraca). This 1943 “second feature” boasts a large and well-defined cast of characters and a very involved plot, though it lasts only about 70 minutes–there’s scarcely a wasted motion, a bracing object lesson to nearly all feature makers today. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, September 10, 6:00, and Saturday, September 11, 4:00 and 7:00, 443-3737.

King of the Hill

The most impressive thing about Steven Soderbergh’s third feature (after sex, lies, and videotape and Kakfa)–an adaptation of A.E. Hotchner’s childhood memoirs, rich in period flavor–is that it’s set in Saint Louis in 1933, roughly three decades before Soderbergh was born, yet it offers a pungent and wholly believable portrait of what living through the Depression was like. Soderbergh gets an uncommonly good lead performance out of Jesse Bradford as the resourceful 12-year-old hero, living in a seedy hotel and steadily losing the members of his family: his kid brother (Cameron Boyd) gets shipped off to an uncle, his mother (Lisa Eichhorn) to a sanitarium, and then his German father (Jeroen Krabbe) goes off to try to make money as a door-to-door watch salesman. We also learn a fair amount about the hero’s neighbors (Spalding Gray, Elizabeth McGovern, Adrien Brody) and schoolmates, and Soderbergh does a fine job of keeping us interested and engaged without stooping to sentimentality. This is a lovely piece of work. Fine Arts.