Yaron Zilberman (2012)
A Late Quartet currently holds a 74% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes so I can’t be the only person who thinks it’s moldy. But it’s taken an alarmingly long time to locate a negative review. Just as I embark on this note, I’ve found one: Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman calls it ‘a terrible film—it’s like an idiots’ [sic] Amour’. Philip Kemp’s review in Sight and Sound just about qualifies as unfavourable but Michael Nordine in The Village Voice and David Denby in The New Yorker, although lukewarm, are well disposed to the film, and there’s a good deal of outright enthusiasm. The British broadsheet reviews praise Yaron Zilberman’s first dramatic feature (he made a prize-winning documentary feature called Watermarks in 2004) for being ‘complex’ and ‘grown up’. This praise and/or the reluctance to give A Late Quartet the mauling it deserves is because of the centrality in the film of what’s recognised as a complex and grown-up piece of classical music: Beethoven’s Opus 131, one of his ‘late quartets’. The film’s title, which is warning enough, couldn’t be clearer. It’s set in New York: there’s snow in Central Park; the weather in the souls of the members of the twenty-five-year old quartet – whose future is threatened when Peter (Christopher Walken), their recently widowed senior member, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s – is increasingly inclement. The encroaching melancholy means there’s barely any light in the film’s interiors except on the stage of the concert hall. Cellist Peter’s illness destabilises the lives of his three colleagues: the sudden removal of decades of routine exposes deep-rooted but long-suppressed tensions between Daniel (Mark Ivanir) and Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), first and second violin respectively; it opens up fissures in the marriage of Robert and the viola player Juliette (Catherine Keener). Years ago, the intense, competitive Daniel was in a relationship with the gravely lovely Juliette. Although she married Robert, Daniel finds that he still holds a torch for Juliette and a grudge against Robert: his solution is to have an affair with the couple’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots).
In the film’s opening scene, Peter is lecturing a group of students. We hear his voice reading the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’. There’s a surprising and promising sense of humour in Christopher Walken’s reading of the lines; as a predictor of what’s to follow, this couldn’t be more misleading. Philip French in his Observer review says that Walken reads ‘the first 10 lines’ of ‘Burnt Norton’: in fact he reads the first five lines and appends to them a line from near the end of the poem. T S Eliot is there to underline the film’s touch of cultural class – Peter describes Four Quartets as Eliot’s ‘take’ on Beethoven’s quartets – but Yaron Zilberman doesn’t, of course, want the poet to detain us too long. I understand why people think A Late Quartet has a cachet that it would lack if the foursome were a well-established pub quiz team. I don’t understand how the starring role in the movie for posh music can blind intelligent people to its feebly familiar treatment of world-shattering illness, bereavement and marital discord. Late on in the film Peter sits listening to a recording by his late wife Miriam, a famous mezzo-soprano. He is so moved by the music that Miriam appears before his eyes. The moment is several notches down on the potter’s wheel bit in Ghost and having the wife materialise actually detracts from Christopher Walken’s expression of grieving love – but Miriam appears in the form of Anne Sofie von Otter, a real famous mezzo-soprano. This is somehow meant to transcend the cliche (and of course it flatters those in the audience who recognise her). Peter also imparts the following words of wisdom to his three colleagues: ‘What are we supposed to do? Stop? Or struggle to continuously adjust to each other … even if we are out of tune?’ If this were a movie set in, say, the financial world and the scenarist produced corresponding lines with a corporate metaphor they would be roundly and rightly derided. At least, David Edelstein, in his admiring review of A Late Quartet, seems more or less to admit why he sees merit in it – because it gave him information he didn’t previously have about the musical directions that Beethoven wrote.
Zilberman is working from what is, technically, an original screenplay (which he co-wrote with Seth Grossman) but A Late Quartet seems like an adaptation of a one-set stage play, given how often the characters say things – sometimes at considerable length – in improbable physical circumstances. The script is remarkably shallow and the plotting entirely mechanical: Alexandra hates her mother simply in order that she can come to realise that she’s always misjudged her; the affair with Daniel is terminated for no better reason than that the quartet will have to sort themselves out in time for their imminent final performance. The rare moments of intended comedy – as when Daniel makes a swift exit from Alexandra’s bedroom down a fire escape – are pathetic but it’s a relief that A Late Quartet is sometimes laughable. Alexandra resents the fact that Juliette put her career before her family but she’s a brilliant violinist herself and her mother reminds her daughter that she’ll do the same as Juliette did for the sake of her music. Alexandra furiously denies this – ‘If I’d been you,’ she yells, ‘I’d have had an abortion!’ – and Alexandra is such a pain that you feel Juliette must regret not having done so. Early on, Alexandra accuses Daniel of being ‘anal’. Later on, he visits Robert, who’s now living apart from Juliette; ‘Come in, Daniel’, says Robert but Philip Seymour Hoffman slurs the line so that I thought at first he said ‘Come in, anal’. Best of all is the moment when the affair between Daniel and Alexandra is announced to Robert during rehearsals and the two rival violinists start brawling. From this point onwards, I was hoping for catharsis achieved by the quartet smashing each other over the head with their instruments – with Christopher Walken and his cello well equipped to deliver the coup de grâce. (The words ‘weapon of choice’ naturally came to mind.)
On paper, the casting looks imaginative. Walken is not the first person you’d think of to play a decent, super-civilised elderly gentleman; Catherine Keener isn’t the obvious choice for a woman incapable of showing the kinds of love her husband and daughter need. Keener seems miserably uncomfortable in the role, though: forbidden to show real warmth, she’s monotonously mournful. Walken is getting a lot of praise (even Ryan Gilbey thinks he’s marvellous); he has some fine moments but the praise is due more to the unexpectedness of seeing him in this role than to the quality of his work. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives by far the best performance: it’s uncanny – in the context of this film almost miraculous – how effortlessly he can inject energy into a scene and make it seem truthful, momentarily at least. Mark Ivanir must have been thrilled to work in this exalted company but the role of Daniel is hopeless – his main problem, as in movies about performing artists from The Red Shoes to Black Swan, seems to be that he’s fanatical and, what’s worse, European. To say that Ivanir is convincingly humourless is hardly a compliment. You’d never guess from her excruciatingly self-aware playing that Imogen Poots is a good actress but she was responsible for the only thing in the picture that surprised me, apart from Walken’s tone reading Eliot. Poots delivers her lines in such an odd, affected accent that she sounds vaguely exotic – I thought this might be a clue to the fact that she was really Daniel’s daughter. On second thoughts, perhaps she is and their incestuous relationship is the explanation of the mystifying 15 certificate given to the film: apart from a couple of fucks, both verbal and physical, it seems innocuous from a censor’s point of view. But I’m forgetting: it’s grown up and complex. I wish Pauline Kael, a Parkinson’s sufferer herself, had lived to see and trash this film.
7 April 2013
