Vanya on 42nd Street
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Movie Reviews of Vanya on 42nd Street
Movie Review: Mamet and Malle make a winner!
Summary: 5 Stars
I remembered loving this "small" film when I saw it in the theater, so I knew I'd be happy with the DVD, whether it had any extras or not (it doesn't). Although Julianne Moore has made it big since making Uncle Vanya ("Boogie Nights," "Nine Months," "The End of the Affair"), and her lovely face dominates the DVD cover, "Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street" is truly ensemble acting at its best. Wallace Shawn as the title character does a powerful job of holding the viewer's interest, even though his Vanya is riddled with smugness, envy, self-pity, and lethargy. There are things about his performance that make you wonder if Louis Malle wasn't thinking of "Uncle Vanya" as a sequel to "My Dinner with Andre" (especially since Andre Gregory plays the director who has gathered his troupe of actors to rehearse Uncle Vanya in the falling down New Amsterdam Theater in New York City). In both movies, Shawn plays a man facing a mid-life crises, plagued with self-doubt and floundering around, looking for reasons to go on.What struck me on my recent viewing of the film was how timeless Checkhov's story really is. Like Jane Austen, he has a great ability to find the universal in the pettiness of highly-controlled domestic life. In comparing Mamet's rendering with Paul Schmidt's excellent recent translation, it seems Mamet did a good job of crafting speakable lines. He modernized the play without wrenching it from its original time or setting. Since the performance we see is a final run-through, not a dress rehearsal, we receive no visual clues as to when the play within the movie actually begins. Malle's light hand in this regard only reinforces the dubiousness of the distinction between theater/art and reality (a much discussed subject in "My Dinner with Andre").
The decision to film "Uncle Vanya" in the decaying New Amsterdam Theater was an inspired one. When Dr. Astrov (Larry Pine), the play's most forward-looking character, bemoans the cultural and spiritual devastation caused by deforestation and human indifference to the environment, one can't help but think of the plight of 42nd Street itself. The New Amsterdam's resurrection--thanks to Disney dollars--as the current home of "The Lion King" is not without it's ironies. As all of the characters in "Uncle Vanya" are painfully aware, our futures are always purchased at a very high price. And the losses we are likely to experience as we move towards those futures may be greater than any of us will be able to bear.
"Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street" is one of those great works of art, like Eugene O'Neill's "A Long Day's Journey into Night," that makes you stop and take stock of your life.
Movie Review: Just gorgeous. Thank you Louis, Wallace and Andre.
Summary: 5 Stars
If you aren't willing to sit through Chekov, stay away but otherwise, find this and feast!! It is so moving and wondrous. Beautiful performances abound and it is just terrific. I watched it after reacquainting myself with My Dinner With Andre. Tremendously moving and touching. So thrilled to own it and to be able to dive back in now and again and experience the work of gifted and deep people doing something beautiful and rich. Magnificent. Highly recommended! Wallace is just miraculous as is everyone else. This is what artistic work is about. Everybody in the arts wants to make a Citizen Kane and a Sgt. Peppers, a Le Sacre Du Printemps and a West Side Story, a Sweeney Todd and an Angels In America. Andre Gregory's direction and goal seems to be to find a level of communication and depth in the work that is both heightened and yet ultra realistic at the same time; in the end analysis the film therefore is affecting in a way that many productions aren't. He achieves this by working on a smaller scale yet allowing the actors all the room they need to get big when the play demands it. It reminds anyone involved in the arts that the process is everything. Doing good work with all your heart, mind and soul down to the smallest detail is all we can ask of ourselves. Within that there will be artists able to push through and be a part of something transcendent. This film is a lost gem. It didn't and it won't make a big noise. It doesn't matter, it has everything it needs to have to remind anyone who is able to take it in what the arts are all about, especially the theatrical arts. Forgive the sermon. Watch it.Movie Review: Louis Malle's swan song: Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street.
Summary: 5 Stars
Vanya on 42nd Street is a 1994 film collaboration between French director Louis Malle and actors-writers-directors Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. The three had previously worked together on the must-see 1981 film, My Dinner with Andre. This film was the last of Malle's career. (He died of lymphoma following filming.) The engaging film features a cast of actors including Shawn, Julianne Moore, George Gaynes, Brooke Smith, Larry Pine, Phoebe Brand, and Lynn Cohen, who rehearse in their street clothes for a performance of Chekhov's major play Uncle Vanya (as translated by David Mamet) in the rat-infested, 1903 New Amsterdam theater on NYC's 42nd Street, while Gregory supervises the workshop rehearsals. Their performance of Chekhov's tragicomedy about "the wasted life" is intended for an invitation-only audience. This film will appeal to anyone with an interest in Checkov. His popular play has also been adapted into three equally hard-to-find films on DVD: Dyadya Vanya, Sam Neill's Country Life, and Sir Anthony Hopkins' August.
G. Merritt
Movie Review: How can a fruitless life be regarded pure?
Summary: 5 Stars
This statement belongs to a clever dialogue between the doctor and Vanya's niece in the middle of the night. Few directors along the history of the cinema have been able this brilliant and enviable opportunity to express with major solemnity, supreme conviction and admirable honesty, his last creative Op. like Louis Malle, a very prominent director who adapted the powerful, incisive and even neo existential play of Chejov around a crumbling and abandoned theater in Manhattan, where Malle accents and carves in relief not only his profound love for the actuality of this work; he makes a true tour de force around the lives and times of these personages where every one has something to hide, miss and love. Nobody is happy because there is not any innocent happiness. There `s a lot of issues to be considered, analyzed and scrutinized that you will have to watch several times to taste, delight and enjoy it due its single grandness. Filmed with outstanding realism, wondrous angle shots, suggestive illumination and supported by a formidable cast in which nothing is out of control. Marvelously made and one of my twenty top films of the Nineties.
In case you just have only heard about it, get close and convince by yourself. This is a masterpiece, under any possible angle.
A must-see for the students of acting and formidable evidence the theater may be conveyed to the cinematic stage, with pristine elegance.
Movie Review: Stark, moving, and brilliant!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is how Chekhov was meant to be performed! The setting is bleak, dark, heavy, honest, and so are the performances - but the stand out is clearly Brooke Smith. Her portrayal of Sonya is raw and lyrical, and it lit a small fire in my heart that burned brighter as the film progressed. She literally glows in the flame that she kindled. Something in her makes my emotions dance to whatever song her face and eyes are singing, and I was left groaning and sighing with inexplicable ache and hope.
This is what theatre and cinema are meant to be. I want to be transported outside of myself in order to recognize my deepest places reflected back at me through a character. Brooke Smith shows me the deep places that exist in all of us, even if we're too bound up to reveal them to each other.
Buy, buy, buy Vanya on 42nd Street! And then take a deep breath, surrender to the truth and beauty of Chekov, the universal ache and loneliness of Brooke Smith as Sonya, and come to the understanding that we are most alive when our heart aches for that which we can never have.