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Stage Beauty
Mar. 2nd, 2006 12:23 amThis may be my new "favourite movie ever", although I have numerous quibbles with it, that I suspect would have been at least minimized on the big screen.
There are a couple of places where people's impulses make sense emotionally but not logistically, and having just spent a lot of time blocking a play, I guess it made me a little nuts. I wanted it to be even more visually sumptuous, but then that probably comes from my desire to have Catherine Martin design everything on the entire planet. And I felt the script had numerous show/tell problems, that may have been an intentional stylistic choice, but were not clear enough for me.
That said,
The performances are utterly utterly amazing. To watch Billy Cruddup switch back and forth between a man and a woman -- not in the sense of garb and costume (that was the least interesting to me), but in a couple of scenes where he's barely dressed and clearly physically male, but his physical cadence just _shifts_ -- I've felt that, I've experienced that with other people and it is the most stunning gorgeous perfect thing in the world and not not about pantomime at all, but to see it on screen, it was so startling and so gratifying.
Claire Danes, who I am mostly ambivalent about, literally gives me chills on her "a woman would fight!" speech, even if the content of it is obvious. It's perfect.
I love how self-destructive and really unlikeable most of the characters are and yet we care for what happens to them. And it's all so witty and perfect, and people get redeemed mainly just by looking closer.
As Kali notes, if you look at the film casually, it can seem oddly heteronormative -- in the end the girl is a girl and the boy is a boy and they are together -- but if you're looking with any sort of critical, queer or othered eye, it's so fucking prismastic and queer and fabulous and even poly in a way.
And, alas, I was too amused by the Duke of Buckingham.
There are a couple of places where people's impulses make sense emotionally but not logistically, and having just spent a lot of time blocking a play, I guess it made me a little nuts. I wanted it to be even more visually sumptuous, but then that probably comes from my desire to have Catherine Martin design everything on the entire planet. And I felt the script had numerous show/tell problems, that may have been an intentional stylistic choice, but were not clear enough for me.
That said,
The performances are utterly utterly amazing. To watch Billy Cruddup switch back and forth between a man and a woman -- not in the sense of garb and costume (that was the least interesting to me), but in a couple of scenes where he's barely dressed and clearly physically male, but his physical cadence just _shifts_ -- I've felt that, I've experienced that with other people and it is the most stunning gorgeous perfect thing in the world and not not about pantomime at all, but to see it on screen, it was so startling and so gratifying.
Claire Danes, who I am mostly ambivalent about, literally gives me chills on her "a woman would fight!" speech, even if the content of it is obvious. It's perfect.
I love how self-destructive and really unlikeable most of the characters are and yet we care for what happens to them. And it's all so witty and perfect, and people get redeemed mainly just by looking closer.
As Kali notes, if you look at the film casually, it can seem oddly heteronormative -- in the end the girl is a girl and the boy is a boy and they are together -- but if you're looking with any sort of critical, queer or othered eye, it's so fucking prismastic and queer and fabulous and even poly in a way.
And, alas, I was too amused by the Duke of Buckingham.
