Why must the show go on?

Just back from a Delightful Weekend in the Country.  It’s been far too long since the CV (Culture Vulture) and I did our Midwinter Movie Madness.  This one was pretty low-key—I think our record is 19 films in a three-day weekend, a third of them in actual theatres—but lovely.

Of course, we could have lolled forever in the great tufted Chesterfield suite of BBC classics—and we did revisit Wives & Daughters.  We had sterner movies in reserve, dark serious Norwegian and Polish stuff, but somehow we didn’t get around to it this time.   I think we were too giddy with the election and wanted pure celebration, and a tinful of Tollhouse cookies.  We did have some snark with our borscht for dinner--In the Loop, The Trip.

The heart of the program was four revels* and an elegy.

Revels

Sadly, the first of these was A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets. Oh dear oh dear.  A tissue of twaddle, all about Mr. W.H. and the Dark Lady.  You’d think that Will Shakespeare wrote nothing but incessant sonnets, as if they were some kind of anguished tweet.  Their William Herbert is a vacuous Goth punk; their Lucie (as Moorish drab), Orientalized softcore.  Nothing whatever happens here above the waist.  Even Ben Jonson comes off as a humor:  Sir Posthumus Cockstand.

And the design is just awful:  black ruffs and neon wigs—troll pink and traffic orange—and the Dark Lady got up like Aladdin’s princess in a panto.

In the end (which is 1609) Shakespeare pays an unwilling Thomas Thorpe to print his sonnets, as a spite; then he goes off (in a coach, no less) to Stratford and his shrewish stultifying wife, to die of pox.

Stale, flat, and unprofitable.

The other three pieces were old friends and fabulous.

A Midwinter’s Tale (In the Bleak Midwinter, 1995) is the only thing of Kenneth Branagh’s that I love.  He wrote and directed it, but he’s not in it, mugging.   A gang of lunatics do Hamlet in a redundant church at Christmas.  Michael Maloney and Julia Sawalha are Mickey and Judy.  Slight, endearing, and hilarious.

Slings & Arrows (the Hamlet season, 2003).  Just bloody brilliant.

Stage Beauty (2004):  Restoration comedy.  The last man to play Desdemona, Mr. Edward Kynaston, tangles with Mrs. Margaret Hughes, the first woman in that part.  Pepys observes.  I roll my eyes at the premature invention of naturalistic acting—Othello as Streetcar—but it’s otherwise bliss.  I so love the image of Rupert Everett’s Charles II (with terrible grey tufts of wig hair) lying in a sea of spaniels and Nell Gwynn.

Elegy

In honor of Remembrance Day, we watched A Month in the Country (1987), a film of J. L. Carr’s fine and quiet book.  The principals are Colin Firth—so young that his mustache is his face—a puppyish Kenneth Branagh, and a luminous, lost Natasha Richardson.  It is after the Great War.  Two damaged men, strangers, come to the village of Oxengodby to work:  Birkin uncovering a mediaeval fresco in the church, a Last Judgment; and Moon digging for bones and secrets.  Rain falls.  A Chapel organ is considered and bought.  Birkin and the vicar’s wife talk about apples.  Nothing and everything happens.

Nine

*Films about playing Shakespeare.  It was going to be straight Shakespeare, but my Hollow Crown hadn’t arrived.  (Still hasn’t, damn it.)