The Spy in the Sandwich

Thursday, July 23, 2020

10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 89

[89th of 100]. Plays can be tough adaptations to film -- as a medium, it's bound to a strict unity of place, hence the intrinsic stagebound-ness of films made from theatrical materials. Most of the time, directors attempt to "open up" the story, to get away from that static changelessness and to become more cinematic than just having people in a room talking to each other. Most retain their feel of being contained -- but sometimes for the better, like in Oleanna or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where the singular setting contributes to the suffocation of the drama. [But Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf even attempts to "open up" a little by having its characters leave the living room for a nearby bar for a while.] "Opening up" can work, like in Barefoot in the Park or Brighton Beach Memoirs or Closer or The History Boys, or most musicals to be honest. My favorite attempt at an "opened up" play is this prismatic gem of a film from 1993, directed by Fred Schepisi from the play by John Guare who also wrote the screenplay. It hops around, gets to places and mindsets in a swirl, it's unbelievable the original material is a play. I've read the play before, and I've always thought it unfilmmable, a quirk about most Guare plays. In fact, the film critic Pauline Kael once wrote: "When I see a Guare play, I almost always feel astonished; I never know where he’s going until he gets there. Then everything ties together. He seems to have an intuitive game plan.” The same exact thing strikes me about this particular play, which premiered on Broadway in 1990, garnering nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. It is about an upper class couple in Manhattan, the Kittredges, who run a private art gallery catering to their wealthy friends. One night, as they are about to go to dinner with a prospective client, a young man -- who tells them he is the son of Sidney Poitier and is a classmate of their Ivy-educated children -- barges into their evening, eventually charming them with home-cooked pasta and a spirited discussion of modern ennui and Catcher in the Rye. He promises them parts in the film version of Cats that his "father" is preparing, and they're dazzled. Things best left unsaid ensue, but they discover he is a conman, and has pulled similar shenanigans with other friends. They collectively go to the police, only to be told the young man has not done anything wrong: he didn't steal anything -- he only wanted to be, in a surreptitious way, part of their lives. But I have not done justice to the intelligence of the material, and how elegantly it explores the beauty of art, the singularity of experience, the want for what is deprived of you, and above all, the longing for connection, hence the title of the film. This is emphasized by the monologue given by Stockard Channing's nuanced take on Ouisa Kittredge, who sees finally the young man not as a criminal interloper, but a lost soul brimming with this longing: "I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection ... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people." A beautiful film, and I'm glad Schepisi found a way to be truthful to the play. It must have been difficult transferring the nuances, but in accomplishing this, found a way to make an almost perfect film. Ryan Gilbey, writing for New Statesman and echoing Kael before him, has this to say about the film: "I want to liken it to a mosaic because of the accumulation of mysteries and profundities. In fact, it's more fluid than that suggests; it's closer to a word-association game, or a string of sense-memories. This is a kind of film-making that aspires to reproduce consciousness, where our divisions between past, present and future are elided." Yes, yes, yes. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

Labels: film, theatre