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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
As a director, Robbins has never been so openly emotional as he is in the staging of the premiere of "Cradle."
When I saw Emily Watson's Olive Stanton stand from her seat in the audience to sing her first line, I was overwhelmed not just by Watson's touching guilelessness in the role, but by the knowledge of just how much Olive is risking, and the glory that the company conferred on itself by following her brave lead.
This is far from the smug, self-satisfied "Bob Roberts" and the rather underhanded "Dead Man Walking," in which Robbins affected even-handedness while slyly playing one side of the capital-punishment debate off against the other. Robbins' political passions find an outlet in Blitzstein's operetta in the love Robbins lavishes on the actors and musicians.
But he's not a political thinker. What Robbins can't see is that a work like "The Cradle Will Rock" ages faster than any other. Would Blitzstein's operetta be known at all today if not for the unusual circumstances of its premiere?
Doesn't it signal something to Robbins that he can tell the story of Olive Stanton in the manner of "42nd Street," the backstage girl who gets her big break, and we know immediately what he's talking about? The "art" of the '30s, of the movies in general, has more to do with the genres Robbins regards as trifles than with all the socially committed work that was done. There is more of the essence of the '30s in the scene in "Gold Diggers of 1933" where the chorus girls swipe their neighbors' milk, or in offhand details here like Emily Watson washing up using a trickling fire hydrant.
In his autobiography "Front and Center," John Houseman writes that Blitzstein frankly acknowledged "The Cradle Will Rock" as a hodgepodge into which he threw anything that would get his message across. (He also writes that Blitzstein's unresolved conflict between writing politically and writing commercially divided and bedeviled his later work.)
Robbins firmly believes that art and politics are inseparable. The naiveti of that position aside (Robbins isn't a man I'd want to discuss "Birth of a Nation" with), it makes for scenes that are at best conflicted and at worst unreadable.
When Sarandon's Margherita Sarfatti tells Blades' Diego Rivera that she supports his art but that doesn't mean she has to support his revolution, the way the scene is played and shot (and the fact that Robbins has those lines delivered by his offscreen partner Sarandon) makes it appear that Robbins agrees with her. But the import of the movie suggests the opposite.
And when Bill Murray's ventriloquist decides to go onstage and do the old communist-inspired routine he used to do (complete with his dummy singing the "Internationale"), Robbins appears to regard it as a triumph of conscience. But the act is terrible; Robbins refuses to even consider that the people walking out of the theater might well be leaving for reasons other than not liking the politics on display.
It's the scenes with Watson and with John Turturro, in a lovely performance as an actor whose dedication to his art and providing for his family leads him to some very lean circumstances, in which Robbins acknowledges the difficulties that can lie in honoring your principles.
Robbins has made the classic mistake of thinking that art that's persecuted for its political ideals must be good art. (And he's made the kind of movie that, if you don't go for it, always gets you accused of being an impediment to progressive thought.)
That Nelson Rockefeller destroyed a Diego Rivera mural is awful; but the re-creation we see doesn't make the mural look very good to begin with. By the time the workmen bring out the sledgehammers, they might as well be knocking us over the head. Robbins cuts back to show us the only remaining element of the mural, a syphilis cell hovering over the ruling classes, nine separate times.
And he can't resist symbolism that should be outgrown by your junior year in college, like intercutting the performance of Blitzstein's operetta with the rich dressed up as French aristocrats at a costume ball.
Robbins is the kind of liberal who thinks that "the masses" need to be educated by having everything insultingly laid out for them (as opposed to the conservatives who think we're too stupid to understand anything in the first place). That kind of thinking is harder to get by with in a movie season featuring two American political films as complex as "Three Kings" and "The Insider."
And you can attribute nearly all of Robbins' sins here to his simplistic thinking, except for one: the outright viciousness of his treatment of Orson Welles and John Houseman. I don't know what these men ever did to arouse the bile directed toward them here, but the portrayals of them are a disgrace.
Every account I've been able to dig up of the staging of "The Cradle Will Rock" describes it as a collaborative process. Welles' elaborate staging plans, scrapped when the company was locked out of the theater, did make the rehearsal process difficult. But it was his and Houseman's enthusiasm, championing what they knew would be a risk for the beleaguered FTP, that helped get the show cleared for production in the first place.
Why, then, is John Houseman played as a prissy stuffed shirt? Why does Robbins, for the sake of a very unfunny bitchy remark, out him? And consider Orson Welles' career: the triumphant FTP production of an all-black "Macbeth," the staging of Julius Caesar set in Fascist Italy, "Citizen Kane," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Othello," "Touch of Evil," "Chimes at Midnight" and his performances in movies like "The Long Hot Summer" and "Moby Dick." What in all that supports Robbins' depiction, and Angus MacFayden's horrendous performance, of Welles as a drunken blowhard leeching off the talents of others?
It's not possible to deal with Welles without allowing for the elements of egomania and showmanship. Liev Schrieber's portrayal of Welles in "RKO 281," the recent -- and not very good -- HBO movie on the making of "Citizen Kane," seemed to get it right, allowing for the genius and the egomania. This was a guy who tried to steal credit for Herman Mankiewicz's screenplay but who also directed that film.
Robbins, with his black-and-white way of looking at things, makes no such allowances, and you have to ask, who does he think he is? Tim Robbins is not an untalented man, but next to Orson Welles he's a pisher.
Robbins' treatment seems even more appalling considering that among the people who tried to bring this movie to the screen was Welles himself. In the early '80s, Welles wrote a screenplay and even cast Rupert Everett as himself. But, as frequently happened with Welles, he couldn't get funding.
Robbins shows no sense of how lucky he is to be the one to tell this story, and no sense that without the men he's slandering, there wouldn't have been a story to tell. Couldn't he have at least shown a little gratitude?
