Written as part of the blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies related to the week's topic and telling us about them!
I have a complicated relationship with my family. I love them, but I don't necessarily like being around them, particularly my extended family. I mean, they're nice, but they are so so different from me that we rarely have much to talk about. A few sentences updating each other on our lives and we're done. Commence another few hours of stuffing my face because I don't have anything more to say.
Although honestly, not many of the families in these films are much better...
This Is Where I Leave You (Shawn Levy, 2014) As unfortunately so often happens, the tricky, interesting tone of Jonathan Tropper's novel doesn't quite survive the transition from page to screen, despite one of the best casts in recent years. Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Corey Stoll, and Adam Driver return to their childhood home for their father's funeral. Naturally, their mother, Jane Fonda, wants them to do certain things and behave in a certain way and they don't quite want to listen. Hijinks ensue. I so wish this was better, although it's not bad.
August: Osage County (John Wells, 2014) Again, Tracty Letts's searing family dramedy doesn't quite survive the transfer from stage to screen, but here it's mostly the fault of the director John Wells, who doesn't really have a good feeling for staging, camera movement, or rhythm, all of which are of supreme importance to the material. Thankfully, the cast mostly makes up for this with tremendous performances: Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis are perfection as three sisters who return to home after their father goes missing. Their mother (Meryl Streep in one of her more "actorly" performances) is a venemous dragon lady with cancer of the mouth (both literally and figuratively), and Margo Martindale is her sister who tries to smooth things over. Needless to say, things don't go well ("EAT YOUR FISH, BITCH!").
Dan in Real Life (Peter Hedges, 2007) The best of this bunch, and - go figure - the only one not adapted from another source. Steve Carell is a lonely widower and syndicated newspaper columnist with three daughters who meets the perfect woman (Juliette Binoche, of course) at a bookstore on the way to the annual family get-together. Unfortunately for him, she shows up at the gathering, too, on the arm of his brother (Dane Cook, because.... really?!?!?). Will Dan gain the courage to stand up for himself and go after the woman of his dreams? Yeah, it's pretty predictable, but this is never less than enjoyable, and performances kick it up to great.
BONUS DIPTYCH
Death at a Funeral (Frank Oz, 2007/Neil LaBute, 2010) Go ahead, pick one: British with swoon-worthy Matthew McFadyen or American with raucous Chris Rock. They're both hysterically funny. and they both have everyone's favorite imp, Peter Dinklage, and terrifically funny stoned performances from Alan tudyk and James Marsden respectively.
Tony Kushner's Angels in America is the greatest dramatic work of the twentieth century. Possibly of any century. The play is sterling, radical, moving - a tour de force of theater. So I mean it as the highest possible praise when I say that Mike Nichols's miniseries version of it for HBO is the film it deserved, in just about every possible way.
The performances are, to a one, superb: Justin Kirk as AIDS-stricken prophet Prior Walter and Ben Shenkman as his cowardly partner Louis Ironson; Patrick Wilson as closeted Mormon Joe Pitt and Mary Louise Parker as his Valium-addicted wife Harper (was there ever an actress so perfect for this part???); Jeffrey Wright and Emma Thompson in multiple roles but most notably as the nurse/former drag queen Belize and The Angel, respectively; and of course the headliners, Al Pacino (realizing for once in his late career that underplaying was the right way to go) as closeted Republican superlawyer/Devil Roy Cohn and Our Lady of Divine Actressing, Meryl Streep as both Joe Pitt's mother and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg taunting Roy on his deathbed (and also as the Rabbi who gives the opening monologue... FLAWLESSLY).
Everything about the production is perfect - the production design by Stuart Wurtzel, Thomas Newman's iconic score, the costumes by the legendary Ann Roth, Stephen Goldblatt's cinematography... and of course, the direction by the one and only Mike Nichols, who considered this his magnum opus. Every single directorial flourish - inserts of paintings and old photographs, select tracking shots which daringly push in to another scene happening at the same time in a different place or out to reveal an "angel's-eye view", the numerous Cocteau references - lands with a beauty and grace rarely seen on screen, be it big or small.
I could be ballsy and pick a best shot from each of the six episodes. I could be equally ballsy and go on and on about the brilliance of the text and then randomly plunk down a Best Shot at the end. Or I could just pick my favorite shot from my favorite scene from anything ever and call it a day.
Or I could do none of those things.
I didn't have time to rewatch all of Angels in preparation for this. I only made it through Millennium Approaches (or, for those of you unfamiliar with the plays, the first half: Parts 1-3), and I had intended to pick just one shot overall, but I got carried away and wanted to feature one from each part. Plus, I have one from Perestroika that I just love. So I now share with you my Best Shots from each part of the first half of Angels in America, and some of Kushner's gorgeous prose to go with them.
PART ONE
"Deep inside you, there's a part of you, the most inner part... entirely free from disease."
(This is my favorite scene of anything ever.)
PART TWO
(This one gets no text, because it's the first time we really SEE Roy. We heard him before, when he told his physician "Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual who fucks around with men." And GOD is Pacino brilliant in this part.)
PART THREE
"Prepare for the parting of the air... The great work begins. GLORY TO-"
Perfect reading of that monologue, and I love that it's a (mostly) unbroken shot of her from outside the airplane. Harper may have an "astonishing ability to see such things", but we have the ability to hear such astonishingly beautiful words thanks to Tony Kushner and Mike Nichols and, in this case, Mary Louise Parker.
I could go on and on about Angels and how brilliant it is all week. So I better stop now before I do.
Except to say that the play is just as timely now as it was when it premiered in 1993, in ways that are completely surprising. If you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so. If you have seen it, you owe it to yourself to do it again.
