Three Liberators
IN THE 1991 film Hook, Spielberg opened up the Peter Pan text by J.M. Barrie. Critic Gregory Solman recognized it as "a seminal bildungsroman dealing with being and time." Most critics didn't want to allow Spielberg a philological exploration of a familiar story; small minds were stuck on putting him down as infantile, using Peter Pan as proof of a boy who didn't want to grow up. But last year's Peter Pan film by P.J. Hogan proved the richness of Spielberg's analysis. Hogan furthered the emotional and sexual anxiety in Spielberg's version-the very being-and-time complex Solman outlined and that existed in Barrie's original text all along. It embarrasses our current culture that critics so readily consign movies to the nursery when the real power of art is displayed when movies touch on the basic concerns. It is critics, it seems, who don't want to grow up. And a condescending movie industry continues to feed them pablum/propaganda.
In Finding Neverland, a dream-biography of Barrie, director Marc Forster leans toward simplistic, family-movie treacle. Johnny Depp's performance as Barrie has no dark side (it's just social climbing; he's auditioning for Merchant-Ivory). Hints that Barrie's befriending a fatherless family of boys (the inspiration for Peter Pan) might be pedophiliac are quickly dropped. Forster lacks the courage of Dreamchild, the 1985 film about Lewis Carroll writing Alice in Wonderland, where Ian Holm's memorable and moving performance dared to connect fantasy release to adult repression-and forgiveness. In Finding Neverland, Barrie's estrangement from his wife is symbolized by them retiring to separate bedrooms but with Barrie opening his door to a sunny bucolic field. He is emotionally, sexually distant, alone in his imagination, a mere dreamer.
This backtracks from Spielberg, Hogan and Dreamchild. How Barrie wrote Peter Pan for the Victorian stage, financed by producer Charles Frohman (portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Spielberg's Capt. Hook) becomes a story more reflective of today's corrupt, corporate pop. After an elaborate "flying" gimmick pleases the audience, Frohman exclaims "Genius!" but there's nothing ingenious about the ropes-and-pulley stunt. Frohman confuses gimmickry, success and art. Whatever Barrie was trying to say (surely it was more than "Believe!"), Frohman is memorialized as the first marketer ("Believe!" means "Buy!". He could be the small mind behind productions such as Shrek-movies that ignore time and existence for childish jokes and sentimentality.
"SEXUAL MORALITY NEEDS to be reformed and science will show the way!" announces Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neesom), the Indiana professor whose 1948 sex surveys developed out of his anthropological study of WASPs and changed America's post-war sexual discourse. There was even an entertaining Hollywood fantasy about Kinsey's impact called The Chapman Report (1962), treating Kinsey's bestseller in the spirit of a bawdy potboiler. Bill Condon's bio-pic chooses to be moralistic instead. Kinsey is presented as a kinky crusader but more pedantic than sensual, even consenting to let his stern yet dowdy wife (Laura Linney) share his own dalliance with a bisexual assistant (Peter Sarsgaard).
Condon's less interested in the history of an era or a man than in celebrating Kinsey's steps toward all our liberation. Key dialogue is Kinsey's prophecy, "Homosexuality happens to be out of fashion in society right now. That doesn't mean it won't change in the future." Condon nimbly appeals to contemporary fashion. Prigs, pigs, reprobates, visionaries and the morally blind are blended together with Ella Fitzgerald singing "Too Darn Hot;" a montage where sex-confessors mime Joyce's "Yes" monologue from Ulysses; and John Lithgow (as Kinsey's father) even dusts off his repressive preacher in Footloose. There's wit in Condon's second feature film (and rare sensitivity in the edit from a shot of Kinsey's wedding ring as he gropes a lover to a shot of his wife sobbing after learning about the infidelity). It's much better 50s nostalgia than Pollack and yet it has that typical bio-pic curse of making a complex life seem too pat.
Kinsey has the urgency of agenda filmmaking, sending a message about overcoming the trauma of sexual neurosis. Condon has the habit of blending wish fulfillment with biography (as in his script for Gods and Monsters). This, too, seems pat. A real person's life ought to challenge or humble the recognition of our own struggles. Instead, Kinsey's more than a martyr. Pontificating, "Everybody's sin is nobody's sin. Everybody's crime is no crime at all!" he's a politician. By casting Tim Curry as Kinsey's smarmy campus nemesis, the filmmaker exposes his facile approach-proof that Condon isn't taking his subject seriously enough. He's making Ken Russell's mistakes without Russell's expressionist panache.
IN CALLAS FOREVER, Franco Zeffirelli gets to the essence of diva-worship when Maria Callas' former manager Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons), a gay man who moved on from working with the tempestuous opera star to manage rock bands, returns to the flame. (The film opens with the Clash's "Complete Control," a changing-times irony that Zeffirelli uses with surprising fidelity; he extols Callas' struggle to maintain artistic quality.)
Critics Richard Dyer and Wayne Koestenbaum have written how female singers' expression of controlled, yet unguarded, feeling draws worshipful (mostly male) fans. Zeffirelli dramatizes the specific attraction that emotionally powerful female artists (especially singing divas) have for gay men. Callas Forever's cinematic wonder comes from the male supplicant and the female idol's emotional connection. Kelly goes to Callas' Paris apartment where she holes up in luxurious exile. "I don't go out. Out is overrated," she says, mourning her talent (still horrified at her last performance in poor voice) and the loss of her longtime lover Aristotle Onassis to Jackie Kennedy. Kelly convinces her that a comeback will restore her former eminence, but he also wants to be reinspired.
This homage moves like in-and-out breaths. That's the distinction of Fanny Ardant's embodiment of Callas. Memories are summoned and then exhaled in her effort to keep living, to stay creative. She rolls together willfulness, petulance, suffering and strength so that one emotion leads to and explains the next, establishing a humane syllogism-not a camp impersonation. Zeffirelli's recall-and-regeneration concept also intensifies and expands; he goes from modern moments to flashbacks to scenes that create new operatic spectacle when Callas decides to perform again. Kelly sells Callas on the idea of making a movie by lip-synching to an old recording of her voice at its peak. She rationalizes doing Carmen because it was the only role she never played on stage. This seems odd-if not apocryphal-because the lip-synching violates Callas' artistry. Here's where Zeffirelli's sophistication surpasses the year's other bio-pics. He is after an emotional truth where sympathy for Callas intersects with his own filmmaking drive. Callas had filmed Medea with Pasolini in 1969. Now Zeffirelli gets to film Bizet's Carmen (Francesco Rosi beat him to it in 1984)-but doing choice moments that distill his love for the opera and for Callas' rendition.
That voice, with its almost unearthly beauty (except that its power comes from concretizing mortal experience), should be undeniable even to those who like the Clash. Zeffirelli chose well-from the superbly orchestrated recordings to the actors who portray Marco (Gabriel Garko) and Escamillo (Roberto Sanchez). Photographed as art objects, Garko and Sanchez are also idealized love objects-combining both Callas' and Kelly's desires. Sanchez dresses very left and when Garko closes his eyes in a backstage flirtation with Callas (she is mesmerized by the temptation of reliving her youth), he seems to personify her own dreaming: a perfect male/female metamorphosis. The Carmen sequences are a moving realization of what might have been.
Zeffirelli's play with possibility in art is astounding. The double-tracked arias (Ardant tearfully doing Callas, both voices in the mix like Streisand's live concert version of "A Piece of Sky") are strong stuff. Ardant's ripe, wolfish beauty always suggested Cyd Charisse but her depiction of Callas' bold and tender emotional life goes deeper. When Ardant collapses mid-song, she breaks as Callas broke the hearts of listeners. She confronts their awe at the generosity in her voice, reexperiences the passion of her early sealed-in-wax interpretations.
"Technology can create the most magnificent illusions," Callas finally says in response to Kelly's attempt to trick history. "But it's a fake. What I had was honest." Zeffirelli knows-as Kelly learns-that this is what must be respected about his subject's art even as it concedes to history. Callas Forever reconnects art to a life, and Ardant makes you feel it. o