Friday Night Mandatory Lent Film Party, 2022: FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and THE SCARLET AND THE BLACK

I forgot to write up this year’s Mandatory Lent Film Party plans! Thanks to a few readers for reminding me.

On Fridays in Lent,  our family watches some edifying, well-made films, with at least a loosely spiritual theme, preferably one that we probably wouldn’t otherwise get around to seeing.

In past years, I’ve done short reviews for the movies we watched. My past lists are here (2021) and here (2020), and you can find the individual movie reviews under the tag Lent Film Party. I will also link them separately at the end of this post. 

Here’s our list of possibilities for this year:

SAINT PHILIP NERI: I PREFER HEAVEN 

THE SECRET OF KELLS

OF GODS AND MEN

TREE OF LIFE

THE WAY 

SILENCE 

THE CHOSEN

THE YOUNG MESSIAH

MOLOKAI

THE JEWELER’S SHOP

THE SCARLET AND THE BLACK

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC

A HIDDEN LIFE

KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

We’ve already watched three movies this Lent: Fiddler on the Roof, The Scarlet and the Black, and The Secret of Kells. I’ll do quickie reviews for the first two here, but I want to write up The Secret of Kells separately. 

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)

100% stands up. I’ve seen this movie countless times, and it just gets better. We ended up watching it over two nights, because it’s three hours long (it has an intermission, so you can split it up easily). 

This show is a masterclass in how to sustain a metaphor without wielding it like a club.  Tevye openly tells the audience right from the beginning that “every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking our necks” — and then he proceeds to work out what that means himself, throughout the rest of the movie. At the end, he invites the fiddler (sans roof), with a nod of his head, to come along with them to whatever’s next, and as he trudges forward with his load, he follows the music. So you see that his story is not over. Oh, it’s so good. Every element is perfect, the songs, the casting, the choreography, the dialogue, the cinematography, the pacing. 

It’s the story of a Jewish family in a tiny shtetl in Russia at the turn of the century, trying to maintain their identity despite cultural pressure from a swiftly changing world, and also from overt attacks in the form of pogroms. This movie shows more or less the story of my family, on both my parents’ sides. But it will feel personal to other viewers, as well, to see the Russians suddenly and senselessly descending on their neighbors. Different era, similar pointless horror and betrayal. 

Early in the movie, when Tevye has agreed to marry his oldest daughter to the butcher, they go to a tavern together and drink “to life,” and their jubilant toast is joined by a crowd of Russian soldiers. Normally the two groups keep to themselves, but not tonight. The choreography here illustrates so much tension and menace and emotion. Is it an invitation, or a threat? (Which, by the way, is the question Tevye has to ask himself throughout the whole story.)

Tevye is cautious but doesn’t want to be cowardly or cold, so he accepts the challenging invitation to dance in the Russian style, and as he’s caught up in it he shouts, “I like it!” But he almost immediately learns that good will is not enough. The next scene that shows dancing, at his daughter’s wedding, starts out with such jubilation, and ends in ruin, shattering devastation. And there is nothing to do but, as Tevye roars out into the darkness, “Clean up.”

I don’t really know how it hit the kids, although I definitely heard some weeping from the couch. I was glad they saw how Tevye speaks so naturally and constantly to God, and I was glad they saw how parents struggle and suffer while trying to figure out the balance between accepting changes they don’t like or understand because they love their kids and can’t really control them anyway, and holding the line for what’s really important. It’s not as easy as it looks! When Tevye is trying to work out whether or not he can see his way to making sense of his third daughter’s relationship, he says with a crack in his voice, “If I try to bend that far, I’ll break,” and I think even a teenage daughter who thinks her overbearing parents are unreasonable ogres will see that this man is really trying, and really suffering. (I definitely did, as a teenage daughter of a sometimes ogreish father.)

The kids were resistant to watching this movie because they remember it as a huge downer, but it truly isn’t. It doesn’t shy away from tragedy, but it’s also extremely funny, and tender, and sweet, and it ends, improbably, with hope. My Lenten wish for you is that you watch this movie.

We rented it for $3.99 on Amazon prime. It’s available to rent or buy on many platforms. Worth owning and rewatching. 

The second movie we watched for Lent was: 

THE SCARLET AND THE BLACK (1983)

Currently available to stream free on a few platforms and for rent on several more.

Synopsis: The true story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who uses clever ruses, trickery, and brazen courage to organize an effort that hid and saved the lives of thousands of Jews and escaped POWs in Nazi-occupied Rome. 

Here’s a trailer:

Terrible trailer that kind of does justice to the movie, which we all found underwhelming. At 2 hours and 23 minutes, it was made for TV, and it does not translate well into a single night of viewing. There are many extraneous scenes of people talking vehemently to each other across a desk or on the phone. The repetition may have been necessary to keep the TV viewer up to speed across several episodes, but it turns the movie into a bit of a slog. 

For a movie that takes place partially inside the Vatican with a monsignor for a hero, I found it weirdly secularized. The priests who are martyred die explicitly for the people, which sounds good, but I dunno, you’d think they’d mention something vaguely spiritual while facing a death squad! I have only seen the movie once, but no portrayal or prayer or faith in God stands out, and they all seem to be relying on sweaty masculine vigor and cunning, rather than ever on grace. I understand making a religious story accessible to a general audience, but this was a pretty egregious case of Jesusectomy, except for literally the last five minutes and the little written epilogue that appears on the screen.

Tell me if I’m being unfair. It’s not that I expected it to be one kind of movie, and was disappointed that it was a different kind. It was that the final scene was extremely powerful … and completely unearned by the previous two hours. I’d pay good money for a remake that starts with what happens at the end, and then spends the movie explaining what led up to that. Instead, it was a dated, somewhat plodding adventure movie with priests, with a tacked-on religious finale that appears out of nowhere. Tell me if I’m being unfair. 

It was a pretty good historical antidote to the myth that the Church just sat on its hands and made nice with the Nazis (or even that the pope was an antisemite — a view which even the author of Hitler’s Pope has recanted); but it still soft balled what actually happened. It portrayed Pius XII as an overly cautious political player who was mainly concerned with staying safely neutral and not making things worse, but had a thing or two to learn from this bold monsignor, who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. In fact, the Vatican saved tens of thousands of Jews or more through numerous secret means. Could and should they have done more, or done things differently? I don’t know. The facts are still being sorted through and analyzed. One thing I tell my kids often is that, if someone tells you history is simple and straightforward, they’re either stupid or lying. 

I guess I give the movie a B- overall. It wasn’t exciting enough to be a wartime adventure movie (there was only one attempted stabbing in a shadowy Vatican hallway, followed by a punching and a shooting! There should have been one every twenty minutes!), but it didn’t have enough spiritual or even interior content to justify the ending. 

So the next week, I chose something completely different: The Secret of Kells, which I hadn’t seen before. And I’ll review that next! 

Here’s the direct links to previous Lent Film Party Reviews from last year:

Fatima

The Song of Bernadette

Ushpizin

Calvary (This one is a podcast and it’s currently only open to Patreon patrons)

And I guess that’s all we got to last year, although I feel like I’m forgetting something. 

From the year before:

I Confess

The Robe

The Trouble With Angels

Babette’s Feast

Lilies of the Field

Bonus review:

The Passion of the Christ

 

 

 

Spielberg’s West Side Story is better than the original

Last night, we saw Steven Spielberg’s new West Side Story. I grew up listening to the soundtrack of the 1961 movie repeatedly. My sister and I would put the LP on just for fun and dance around the living room. I know every second of the score by heart (and it took me many years to realize “Krup you!” is not an actual insult). I’ve seen the original movie countless times and the stage version at least twice.

So yes, I was a little nervous about how the new movie would hold up. I won’t keep you in suspense: I loved it. If you’ve never seen another production of West Side Story but you’ve seen the new movie, you have seen West Side Story. That’s how well they did. In many ways, they did better.

It’s not a slavish recreation, but it’s also not a daring new take or reinvention. What Spielberg did was make sufficient changes and adjustments and yes, improvements, so that a modern audience could understand and appreciate the show for what it always has been.

A warning: Plot spoilers here. (Guys, the show is 60 years old. You’ve had your chance.)

If you’re looking for some kind of incisive comment on racial tension that’s especially apropos for 2021 America, this isn’t it — unless maybe you’re an optimist who’s had your heart broken, and you’d like to see that portrayed on screen.

That’s what happened to Anita, played by Ariana DeBose, whose performance, sorry, has so much more depth than the beloved original Rita Moreno’s. She’s not just a fiery and sultry Latina; she’s someone who is working through conflict in her head. You see on her face and in her posture the struggle between the old and new, between tenderness and ambition. She starts out defiantly singing “I like to be in America” but ends up seeing who America has really been to her, and when she spits out the lie about Maria’s death, it feels like it’s been a long time coming. She’s suffered a lot and has stuffed down so much to try to make her new life work, and when she’s finally cornered, the least she can do is protect Maria and inflict a little pain. That was always there in the script, but in this performance, and in her betrayal in particular, you feel the deep tragedy of what has played out in these few blocks. 

But speaking of Rita Moreno, let’s turn to one of the most startling changes in the new movie: The short song “There’s a place for us” gets sung not by Tony and Maria, but by Tony’s mentor, the Valentina, who, in this production is a Latina woman who long ago married a white man — and she’s played by Moreno. They’ve added some dialogue to flesh out the idea that such couples will always struggle.

What’s the effect of putting the doomed/hopeful song in the mouth of someone who has already lost? It adds another layer of real pathos, because her husband is long dead, and things have only gotten worse since her time (and there’s also the pathos, for those familiar with the old film, of seeing Moreno still beautiful but so very old. This is a tricky maneuver, but I think they pulled it off.)

Changing this song from a romantic duet to a tragic solo also does the service of making the show slightly less sticky.  Musicals are always a little bit sticky, by which I mean there is going to be a certain amount of . . . well, couples standing side by side, staring up into the stars singing a duet about how much they love each other. This exact thing recently happened when Tony and Maria sang “Tonight,” and you wouldn’t want them not to sing it. That’s the show: It’s about gangs and stabbing and racism and attempted rape, and also ballet and rhythmic snapping and a lot of extremely graceful choreography on crumbling brick walls. People burst into song with trained voices and cleverly rhymed lyrics to express how they feel. If this is something that’s going to bother you, then please don’t watch a musical! Nevertheless, they engineered tweaks and tightenings here and there that modified how artificial the show felt, and made the whole thing make more sense emotionally. One such tightening was to have Valentina, in a reflective mood, musing on the past and the future, rather than having Tony and Maria interrupt their drama and sing about it.  

Another change that I believe was intended to de-stickify the show: They moved “I Feel Pretty” back, so it happens after Bernardo kills Riff and Tony kills Bernardo, but Maria doesn’t know it yet. I’m pretty proud of myself for noticing they did this and figuring out why: The song was always a little too cute and clever, especially for someone who doesn’t speak English well, and it’s an adorable song, but it’s hard to reconcile it with Maria as a tragic figure. By shoving it right in the middle of the action, it takes your discomfort with Maria’s inane giggling and prancing and uses it. You feel slightly ill, watching the number, because you know there are two bodies on the ground. (I was gratified to see that this L.A. Times article backs my theory up.)

I love this change not only because it works, but because it’s completely in character with the show. There has always been a desperate shred of hope in every tragic song, and a heavy shadow of dread in every hopeful song. That’s the show; always has been. So this change is an improvement. Amazing. 

The one change they made that I didn’t like was relocating “One Hand, One Heart” to the Cloisters. In the original, the couples improvise a bridal scene, and it’s very clear that, in their minds, they are in a church and are exchanging vows before God. It’s always been one of my favorite parts of the movie. The new movie locates them in a literal convent, and it’s just heavy-handed, which disappointed me. A small quibble.

One more improvement: “Cool” (the song that starts “Boy, boy, crazy boy”) makes so much mores sense in the new movie. In the new movie, Tony is going to Riff to try to retrieve the gun he’s bought, and stop the rumble. It takes place on some kind of ramshackle pier with gaping holes in it, giving Tony and Riff plenty of chances to leap precariously over and around the edges, daring and threatening and sweating and menacing each other. It emphasizes the tension and peril so much better than . . . whatever was in the original, which I can’t remember, which is telling. 

I liked the casting overall. Everyone sang well. It seems foolish to have to say that; and yet we’ve all seen our share of musicals cast with people who seem to have been hired for reasons other than their voice. Maria (Rachel Zegler) is young and fresh and lovely and impatient to start her life.

Tony (Ansel Elgort) is a vast improvement over 1961 Richard Beymer, who essentially showed up and had big shoulders and hit his notes, and that was it.

Elgort’s Tony is a good actor with a fine voice and a slightly odd, interesting face, and you feel like he’s got something going on in his skull.

He and Maria come across more like a real couple and less like a couple of movie stars. This new Tony has a lot more to work with, because they rather daringly added significant backstory: He very nearly killed someone, only avoiding it by luck, and just got out of jail. He spent his jail time thinking, and wants to change his life. Voilà, a motive, other than a vague “he’s different from the rest.” 

They also provided a bit more motive for why the gangs are so territorial in general, other than that one is white and one is Puerto Rican. There is some kind of urban renewal project going on in the neighborhood, which involves wrecking balls tearing down all the buildings these young men have grown up with. So it’s not just a slum, but a pretty explicit war zone, and so we understand better their fierce, furious desperation to hold on to the little scrap of something that that belongs to them. 

An interesting point: The character of Anybodys has become not just a goofy tomboy, but an actual trans character who really suffers at the thought of being perceived as a girl. It’s not inordinately magnified; it’s just another character rescued from being a caricature in the new version. 

To my relief, they don’t appear to have altered the choreography much (or if they have, they preserved the character of it very well). The dancers are wonderful, weightless.

The music was performed faithfully, which is another thing I was worried about. (In a few previews, they movified the music, for some reason; but they didn’t do that in the actual film.) The score is some of the greatest American music of any kind ever written. 

The only scene I didn’t like was “Gee, Office Krupke,” and I don’t know why I didn’t like it. Maybe it just had so many dated references, it was harder to work with. As my husband said, it suffers from the same problems as “I Feel Pretty,” but it’s harder to know how to fix it. You definitely can’t take it out of the show, but it just doesn’t land right. 

But oh my friends, this movie is gorgeously shot, every moment. The long views of the city streets with the crumbling bricks, just magnificent. The dance before the rumble is opulently heightened, the white students in blues and greens, the Puerto Ricans in reds and purples. When the two gangs approach each other for the rumble, there’s an overhead shot of their shadows mingling that’s pure abstract expressionism, just breathtaking.

And then later the shadows of the cops are shot from a different angle as they come upon the two bodies, and they’re so stubby and ineffective. There’s a little scene where Anita and Bernardo are making out in the morning sun behind some hanging curtains, and it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. 

Beautiful, beautiful work. But it stays true to the era. It doesn’t feel like an update or a reboot; it feels like you’ve returned to the original, but with new powers. 

If you have a chance, do watch it in the theater so you can see it as big and hear it as big as possible. Bring tissues. BRING TISSUES. 

 

All images are screenshots from embedded video, above. 
Correction: In an earlier version of this essay, I repeatedly referred to Bernardo as “Roberto.” The reason for this is that I am an idiot, sorry. 

A quick review of Hadestown, which you should sell a kidney to see

Yesterday, Clara and I saw the Broadway production of Hadestown for her birthday. It was the best thing I have ever seen on stage.

Hadestown is written, words and music, by Anaïs Mitchell, who originally made a musical, then recorded it as a concept album with Ani DeFranco, then re-worked it as a new musical that premiered in 2012. If you still think of Mitchell as a somewhat pretentious, precious, indie folk cutie, you need to get caught up! This is a mature and stunning work that’s hard to classify. WordPress is having fits over me trying to insert audio right now, but you can hear the Broadway cast recording here

It’s based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hades and Persephone, and it’s set in a Depression-like era perhaps near the end of the world, complete with squalid barroom and post-apocalyptic New Orleans folk jazz, I guess? Normally I could do without old stories cleverly transposed into unconventional settings — this Onion article springs to mind — but that’s not really what Hadestown is. Part of the conceit is that we’re all always telling these same stories over and over again, and that we must. And in spirit, it’s truer to to Greek tragedy than any Greek tragedy I’ve seen performed straight, complete with an omniscient narrator in the person of a dazzling urbanite Hermes (André De Shields):

Image from this Theater Mania video

a chorus of the three pitiless, inexorable fates (Jewelle Blackman, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer, and Kay Trinidad), who are on no one’s side;

screen shot from this Theater Mania clip

and so much catharsis, the ushers had to go around with a spatula, scraping the melted puddles of the audience out of their seats after the final curtain. 

I’ll do a more thorough review at some point, but in the meantime you can read Leah Libresco Sargent’s take here

The lyrics are real poetry, but also clear and clever, studded with allusions you can take or leave. Each song, lyrically and musically, was worthwhile in itself, and didn’t exist merely to move the plot along or to give equal time to every performer. Clara and I agreed that Orpheus’ song — the one that has so much power in the story– really did have that much power. You didn’t have to tell yourself, “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure this feels very magical if you’re part of that word.” The hairs standing up on your arm spoke for themselves. 

The stage set was so well-conceived, they could build worlds with lighting and shadows and the three concentric circles of the stage floor, which rotated independently and could be raised or lowered. Without complicated special effects, they placed us indoors and outdoors, in Hell, and in uncanny in-between places.

(These photos are before the show began, obviously.)

All the musicians were part of the action or otherwise integrated into the set, and many of the actors played instruments as well. It was mind-boggling how much talent was on display. 

Orpheus (Reeve Carney)’s voice was powerful and disturbing and he sometimes lost control of his falsetto, which was affecting, rather than otherwise.

He had the air of a floppy theater kid ingénue.

Image from Theater Mania videoo

At first I thought his acting skill wasn’t quite on par with the rest of the cast, but I believe this radical immaturity was part of his tragic flaw. Hermes introduces him this way:

Now Orpheus was the son of a Muse
And you know how those Muses are
Sometimes they abandon you
And this poor boy, he wore his heart out on his sleeve
You might say he was naïve to the ways of the world
But he had a way with words
And the rhythm and the rhyme
And he sang just like a bird up on a line
And it ain’t because I’m kind
But his Mama was a friend of mine
And I liked to hear him sing
And his way of seeing things
So I took him underneath my wing
And that is where he stayed
Until one day…

Well, one day the gods get involved. Toward the end of the show, Persephone takes up the bird theme again, singing:

Hades, my husband, Hades, my light
Hades, my darkness
If you had heard how he sang tonight
You’d pity poor Orpheus!
All of his sorrow won’t fit in his chest
It just burns like a fire in the pit of his chest
And his heart is a bird on a spit in his chest
How long, how long, how long?

Hades (Patrick Page), from his gleaming hair to his gilded shoes, was downright terrifying, in voice and presence. You felt that presence every second he was on stage.

I thought at first his basso profundo was something of a party trick, but he knew how to deploy it, and he seemed more than a man. Which made it all the more gripping when, as a god, he is faced with a terrible choice of his own. 

Persephone (Amber Gray) in this work is not an abducted maiden in mourning, but an aged and aggrieved queen and wife who’s prowled back and forth between summer and the underworld countless times, and who knows full well that “a lot can happen behind closed doors.” She’s developed some coping strategies, and they are not ideal. With her gravelly powerhouse voice and desperate green velvet and shimmies, she is alarming, pathetic, malevolent, and ultimately completely winning, as well as miraculously light-footed in her spike-heeled boots. 

Image from Theater Mania video

The only quibble I had was the casting of Eurydice (Eva Noblezada). She did a good job, but I didn’t lose my heart to her, as I did to every other character. It wasn’t a stumbling block, though; and at one point, Hermes directly chides the audience for holding Eurydice to too high a standard. I was content to award the real heart of the story to Persephone and Hades. Eurydice and Orpheus are, after all, still very young in this iteration. It did hurt to see how she held him at arm’s length even as she was falling in love.

While Hadestown is raucous, funny, stylish, and vastly entertaining, it is also profoundly in earnest, and doesn’t try to dazzle or deceive the audience about what’s the show really means. It has elements of politics, of social commentary, of lessons about the environment and worker’s rights and industrialization; but what it’s really about is . . . well, art, love, and death.  

In elementary school, some student would always complain, “Why do we have to read Greek myths?” The anemic answer came: “They teach us about our own lives.” This makes no sense when you’re fourteen years old and reading a fleshless synopsis of a tale about people in togas making inexplicable choices and being randomly smitten by the gods. But in Hadestown, which keeps most of the myth’s major plot points intact, the very overt point is: What you’re seeing right now will happen to you. Rather than asking you to suspend your disbelief for the show, they insist you resist forgetting, and that you acknowledge how personal it is. As Hermes tells Orpheus: “It’s not a trick. It’s a test.” 

As the action moved inexorably toward the final shattering blow, I was in agony, not only suffering with the characters, but wondering whether the show would have the guts to end with naked tragedy.

And they did. They did not flinch, but let the terrible thing happen. But the way it was framed, what they showed us was tragedy, not nihilism. Real tragedy, which tells you something true about life. Real tragedy which gives you something, rather than taking everything away.

What a contrast there is between the circular reasoning in “Why We Build the Wall” and mystical cycle of hope that Hermes reveals at the end. The whole show is marked by a pattern of openly asking and answering questions, and leaving it up to the audience to decide whether the answers satisfy or not. My friends, I was satisfied. 

***

Clara drew a picture of the show the night before, and several of the cast members signed it.



One more note: The Walter Kerr Theater was wonderful. It’s a small theater, and although our balcony seats were unexpectedly high up, they were still good seats. The sound was great, the theater is gorgeous, and the courteous, placid staff managed the tight crowd exceedingly well, directing streams of antsy New Yorkers in a serpentine line for lady’s room with aplomb. Overall a near-flawless experience.  If there’s any way at all you can get to see this show, I beg you to try! 

The show says it’s recommended for people age 12 and up. That seems about right to me. There isn’t any sex or violence or cussing that I can recall, but it sure is sad.