Louis Malle made "My Dinner With Andre" about two old buddies, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, who meet and have a long conversation over dinner. The film is about that conversation and nothing much else. It was dominated by Andre Gregory's ridiculous New Age mumbo-jumbo.
In "Vanya on 42nd Street" Malle has brought Shawn and Gregory together again on screen and the results are predictably risible. Luckily, there's more to look at than just Shawn and Gregory - there is at least Julianne Moore. The rest of the cast are mostly familiar 3rd-rate faces, giving rather good performances, all the while presided over by Gregory with his prayer beads.
Malle seems to be trying to explode the prevailing notion that actors should look good if they are to arouse our complicity. Aside from Moore, none of these actors has a particularly watchable face. And Wallace Shawn has a speech impediment.
The mistake, I believe, that Malle and Shawn and Gregory have made is trying to make this beautiful play sound like it was written yesterday, about people we live next door to. Nowhere is there the slightest belief that we, the audience, are capable of the act of imagination that watching Chekhov unadulterated (i.e., a play written and set in early 20th-century Russia) requires. The only thing the film illuminates is "what a falling off was there" (what Hamlet says of the contrast between a portrait of his father and one of his uncle). How terribly little Shawn and Gregory have made these wonderful people seem! At times the actors sounded like they were talking to Dr Phil.
"Vanya on 42nd Street" is obviously yet another Shawn/Gregory silly dinner, only this time they were eating poor Chekhov.
In "Vanya on 42nd Street" Malle has brought Shawn and Gregory together again on screen and the results are predictably risible. Luckily, there's more to look at than just Shawn and Gregory - there is at least Julianne Moore. The rest of the cast are mostly familiar 3rd-rate faces, giving rather good performances, all the while presided over by Gregory with his prayer beads.
Malle seems to be trying to explode the prevailing notion that actors should look good if they are to arouse our complicity. Aside from Moore, none of these actors has a particularly watchable face. And Wallace Shawn has a speech impediment.
The mistake, I believe, that Malle and Shawn and Gregory have made is trying to make this beautiful play sound like it was written yesterday, about people we live next door to. Nowhere is there the slightest belief that we, the audience, are capable of the act of imagination that watching Chekhov unadulterated (i.e., a play written and set in early 20th-century Russia) requires. The only thing the film illuminates is "what a falling off was there" (what Hamlet says of the contrast between a portrait of his father and one of his uncle). How terribly little Shawn and Gregory have made these wonderful people seem! At times the actors sounded like they were talking to Dr Phil.
"Vanya on 42nd Street" is obviously yet another Shawn/Gregory silly dinner, only this time they were eating poor Chekhov.