Archive for July, 2006

Like Shakespeare in Love—Only It’s Actually Good

Last week The Mink recommended a movie from a couple years ago that I’d never seen: Stage Beauty, starring Billy Crudup and Claire Danes. We watched it, I liked it, and Porpoise mostly liked it, even though it’s a period film. Other than that, it’s a movie that’s hard to classify: not entirely comedy, not entirely drama. It’s too enjoyable for an “artsy” film, too high quality to be mere star-driven fluff. It raises gender issues and deals with them in interesting (and intentionally incomplete) ways, but above all, it’s a paean to acting.

The period in question is the Restoration (Rupert Everett gets to don a huge wig for the role of Charles II). Real historical personages such as Nell Gwyn and Samuel Pepys (pronounced “Peeps”) make significant appearances, but don’t expect the movie to be an accurate historical representation of the 1660s. The filmmakers know what makes a narrative, and they’ve gone for it, whether it matches “fact” or not.

Stage Beauty’s main character, Ned Kynaston, was indeed a real actor, one famous for playing women’s roles. The movie begins by showing him at the height of his popularity, and then follows the reversal of his fortunes as Charles II decrees that men shall no longer play women’s roles upon the public stage. Ironically, Kynaston’s love-stricken dresser Maria (Danes), who copies his every gesture and inflection, ends up usurping his role as Desdemona.

The fascinating thing here, and the thing that makes this movie rise above a simplistic celebration of “girl power,” is that Maria can’t actually act. Not in the highly stylized 17th-century method, nor in what we today would recognize as “realistic” acting. When Kynaston, desperate to continue acting, first tries a man’s role, he can’t do it either. Many of the movie’s reviews imply that Maria and Kynaston end up teaching each other how to be a real woman and a real man. Wrong. They do teach each other to be better people, but most of all, they teach each other to be better actors, to create something beautiful out of what they’re given.

From what I’ve seen, a lot of reviews just don’t get Stage Beauty. Even the NY Times’ A.O. Scott, whose writing I love, is completely off: “And just as the theater is cured of its perverse affectations and artificialities, so Ned, once he shares the stage (and his bed) with a real woman, is straightened out. He is turned from a fascinating, changeable creature into a regular guy, and in satisfying itself with this outcome, the movie spoils some of its beauty.”

Nope. The movie is not really about Ned Kynaston shifting from a homosexual to a heterosexual identity. The very last lines of the movie could tell you that. Maria asks Kynaston, “Who are you now?” and he replies, “I don’t know.” Smiles, and repeats, “I don’t know.” He doesn’t know who he is, but he’s discovered that he still has a place in the world, and that’s enough. During these lines, Maria and Kynaston, hands linked, are pushing back and forth gently, creating a tension in their arms that keeps them upright. It’s half-wrestling, half-dancing, and it speaks volumes about the delicate balance of identity between the two. It’s a balance they’ve created not just as “man” and “woman,” but as two individuals who strive to create beauty out of limited resources.

The best Stage Beauty review I’ve read comes from Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek (and her piece is more like an essay than a review, so of course I would like it, since that’s my style as well).

Crudup and Danes do a marvelous job in their respective roles. Crudup has a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance and mannerisms based on his apparel. Of course, he never really looks like a woman, but you can see why 17th-century audiences would be willing to accept him as one. And Dormouse and I have agreed that he pretty much personifies our ideal of masculine beauty (and I imagine that’s part of why he was cast).

Stage Beauty is pretty bawdy, as Restoration-era anything tends to be, but sometimes the bawdiness isn’t just there for humor, but rather to underscore that identity confusion isn’t all playful “performativity”; it can be painful, too.

Oh, and I do need to mention that Samuel Pepys gets some of the best lines in the movie. Pepys seeks to reassure Kynaston that some of his best roles have been as women-playing-men (Rosalind, Viola, etc.), and Kynaston launches into a speech: “You know why the man stuff seemed so real? Because I’m pretending. You see a man through the mirror of a woman through the mirror of a man. You take one of those reflecting glasses away it doesn’t work. The man only works because you see him in contrast to the woman he is. If you saw him without the her he lives inside, he wouldn’t seem a man at all.” Pepys gets a rather blank look on his face and hastily replies, “Yes. Well. You’ve obviously thought longer on this question than I.”

Apparently Stage Beauty was a play before it was a movie, which is probably part of why I like it, and part of why it works so well as an ode to theater. Thanks to Mink for recommending it!

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