Film review

  • Yentl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Barbra Streisand (1983)

    In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’, the title character is determined to study Talmud – in defiance of Jewish custom and practice, which restricts Talmudic education and learning to men.  Her widowed rabbi father allows Yentl to discuss and debate Jewish theology with him, within the walls of their home in an Ashkenazi shtetl in Poland.  When he dies, Yentl cuts her hair, puts on men’s clothes and leaves the shtetl to pursue her scholarly ambitions.  She adopts the male name Anshel.  Already an excellent student, she’s accepted at a yeshiva.  Her study partner there is a young man called Avigdor, with whom Yentl falls in love.  Leah Napolin worked with Singer to adapt the material for the stage and the play opened on Broadway in 1975.  By then, Barbra Streisand had already optioned the story and, in 1983, realised her dream of bringing it to the screen.  Yentl, part of BFI’s extended musicals season, beginning this month, was the first cinema feature directed by Streisand.  She also starred in it, co-produced and shared the screenplay credit with Jack Rosenthal.

    The film (which I’d not seen before) sets up its themes clearly, not to say obviously.  There are no credits at the start, just a couple of legends.  One announces the place and time as ‘Eastern Europe, 1904’.  The other situates the story more emotively – ‘in a time when study was for men only, there was a girl called YENTL’.  The opening scene is a market in the shtetl.  One of the stalls sells books – sacred books for men, storybooks for women.  Yentl tries to buy a sacred book and the (male) vendor refuses – until she says it’s for her father.  The description of her home life is nicely economical.  Her father (Nehemiah Persoff) tells Yentl to draw the shutters before they start talking Talmud:  ‘I trust God will understand – I’m not so sure about the neighbours’.  Streisand sings her first number, ‘Where Is It Written?’, thoughtfully and unshowily.  The music for the film’s songs was composed by Michel Legrand, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.  According to Roger Fristoe on tcm.com, it was the Bergmans who, when Streisand showed them a Yentl script (this, according to Wikipedia, went through many versions), ‘exclaimed in unison’ that ‘This has to be a musical!’  That proved to be bad advice.

    This isn’t so much because some of the songs aren’t great.  It’s rather because the musical element confirms the egotism of Streisand’s passion project.  This isn’t a traditional film musical.  For one thing, there’s no dancing – which isn’t necessarily a problem.   For another, the star sings all the songs, solo – which is.  Although Yentl is definitely the protagonist, there are other important people in the story – not just Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin) but also his fiancée Hadass (Amy Irving).  When her father (Steven Hill) puts an end to the engagement – he finds out Avigdor’s brother committed suicide and considers his prospective son-in-law tainted blood – Hadass looks to Anshel for comfort, and finds herself increasingly drawn to him romantically.  Hurt and angry, Avigdor too continues to confide in his study partner and friend.  Characters in musicals conventionally use song to express their feelings; Avigdor and Hadass have strong emotions to convey but must do so without singing them.  The fact that Mandy Patinkin had recently won a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a musical (in 1980, for Ché in Evita) underlines the unfairness of the Streisand monopoly in Yentl.

    That said, there’s one highly effective musical sequence.  When Avigdor and Hadass are still betrothed, Anshel is invited to dinner for the first time at the house of Hadass’s parents.  Anshel/Yentl observes the confidential looks exchanged by the engaged couple, and the beautiful Hadass’s subservient role, as she serves dishes to the others at the dinner table.  Streisand’s face shows suppressed jealousy at the sight of Avigdor’s and Hadass’s private communication.  The words of the song ‘No Wonder’, sung inside her head, fuse that feeling with indignation about traditional gender roles – an indignation that helped trigger Yentl’s journey to the yeshiva and led her to meet the man now causing her jealousy:

    No wonder he loves her,

    No wonder at all.

    The moment she sees him,

    Her thought is to please him.

    Before he even knows that he’s hungry

    She’s already there with his plate …

    The emotional complexity of this is satisfying.  Yentl’s persisting secret means that much of what Streisand sings is internal monologue, unheard by others, which often works well.  It’s no coincidence that the worst number is the last, when Yentl, having finally revealed her true identity to Avigdor and Hadass, sets sail for America and relative freedom.  On board the ship carrying her and hundreds of other emigrants to the New World, she belts out ‘A Piece of Sky’ (which also incorporates fragments of the more haunting ‘Papa, Can You Hear Me?’, the film’s best-known song).  Streisand seems unable to decide whether or not Yentl’s fellow passengers are aware of her performance.  Some of them ignore her; others stand transfixed as she heads down the ship’s gangway towards the camera.  Besides, the shipboard setting inevitably calls to mind the climax to ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ in Funny Girl.  This grandiose, musically conventional finale is altogether a mistake.

    Directing herself, Streisand gives one of her best-judged performances – for some of the time.  Her playing of Yentl in the shtetl scenes is mercifully different from her supercharged interpretation of the still-a-nobody heroine at the start of the abominable A Star Is Born.  Even so, there’s a double disguise involved, and a double suspension of disbelief required, here.  Yentl needs to pass herself off as a young man; Barbra Streisand needs to pass herself as not Barbra Streisand.  Since she’s not an actress able – or, at any rate, willing – to immerse herself in a character, neither of these things happens.  According to Wikipedia, Yentl’s age was increased from sixteen in the source story to twenty-six in the film, the better to accommodate forty-year-old Streisand – though since she’s disguised as a man most of the time, I’m not sure why.  Avigdor and the other hirsute yeshiva students initially tease Anshel that he doesn’t need to shave but no one ever mentions that his voice hasn’t broken either.  Anshel is incongruous in the group not because he looks like a girl – he does, but we accept that someone wearing men’s clothes a century ago is assumed to be male – but because he looks like an adolescent.  This wouldn’t be quite such a problem if the story didn’t require Anshel, in due course, to marry Hadass.

    Some elements of the gender concealment/sexual confusion plot are strong, thanks in large part to Mandy Patinkin.  For those of us familiar with him mostly through his recent role in the (much too) long-running HBO television series Homeland, Patinkin’s presence and playing in this film, made when he was just thirty, are a revelation. In his early scenes, his virile vitality is highly charismatic:  it’s easy to see why Yentl finds Avigdor attractive.  Streisand animates the yeshiva scholars’ good-natured intellectual competition very well – and self-confident, almost cocky Avigdor is always at the centre of their debates.  A scene in which the young men go skinny dipping, and Avigdor tries and fails to get the overwhelmed Anshel to join them, is both funny and distressing, and admirably played by Streisand and Patinkin.  This is also the first time, though not the last, that Avigdor holds Anshel’s gaze for several seconds.  His eyes suggest he’s as disconcerted by what compels his gaze as Anshel is disconcerted to be held by it.  When Yentl eventually reveals her true identity to Avigdor, he’s horrified and incredulous, and calls her a ‘demon’.   On reflection, he admits to her that he’s reassured too:  the attraction he felt towards Anshel wasn’t, as Avigdor silently feared it was, homosexual.

    Elsewhere, the cross-dressing comes over as a shallowly comical matter, a gender reversal of the Some Like It Hot set-up – notably in the extended wedding night scene between Anshel and Hasadd, with the groom urgently thinking up reasons to postpone consummation of the marriage.  There’s also a queasy earlier sequence when Yentl, knowing she’s falling for Avigdor, undresses in private.  The camerawork, designed to tantalise, would be uncomfortable even with someone else directing the scene; since Streisand is shooting her own body, the effect is smugly narcissistic.  She visualises Amy Irving much more pleasingly and David Watkin’s lighting does full justice to her lovely face.  Irving’s portrayal of Hadass is limited but she’s an unusual blend of docile and inscrutable, and eventually touching.  It’s her quality of naivete, rather than Streisand’s comedic aplomb, that gives the wedding night episode what substance it has.

    The most controversial aspect of the movie awards season in early 1984 was that Streisand, after winning the Golden Globe for Best Director for Yentl, didn’t receive even a nomination from either the Directors Guild of America or the Academy.  The film won an Oscar for Legrand and the Bergmans (for the song score as a whole) and was nominated in several other categories but the snub to Streisand is what’s remembered – for two reasons.  First, it resonated with Yentl’s central theme of patriarchal restrictions on what women can do.  Second, and in retrospect, it was part of a sequence of Oscar results that, taken together, seem to prove Streisand’s unpopularity with the Academy.

    This sequence really started in 1969, when she won the Best Actress Oscar, for Funny Girl, in a tie with Katharine Hepburn:  Streisand should have been a clear winner.  She did win a second Oscar, in 1977, for co-writing the song ‘Evergreen’ in A Star Is Born, but, once she started directing, the run of high-profile losses was sustained.  Her next film after Yentl was The Prince of Tides (1991):  Nick Nolte was expected by many to win the Best Actor Oscar but lost out to Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs.  Six years later, one of the biggest upsets in Academy Award history occurred when the Best Supporting Actress award went to Juliette Binoche in The English Patient – not to Lauren Bacall, receiving her first (and only) Oscar nomination at the age of seventy-two, in Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces.

    Streisand hasn’t directed another feature since.  Perhaps the organisers of the Oscars show were acknowledging and semi-apologising for slighting her and her films when they invited Streisand to present the Best Director award in 2010.  ‘Well, the time has come …,’ she said, after opening the envelope and before announcing the name of Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker.  Streisand is quoted in Roger Fristoe’s tcm.com note as saying that ‘In Hollywood, a woman can be an actress, a singer, a dancer … but don’t let her be too much more’.  One female winner of the Best Director Oscar isn’t enough to disprove those words but the ‘too much more’ also hints at part of why the multi-tasking Streisand was so disliked as a film-maker by this particular patriarchy.  When she made Yentl, she wasn’t the first Hollywood star to take a starring role in her directing debut – but she went on to star each time she made a movie, playing opposite Nolte in The Prince of Tides and Jeff Bridges in The Mirror Has Two Faces.

    Some elements of Yentl’s storyline are weak.  In particular, Avigdor obviously must hang around after the end of his and Hadass’s engagement but there’s not a sufficiently good reason – in terms of plot, as distinct from romantic imperative – for him doing so.  The scene in which Yentl tells him all requires her and especially Avigdor to cover a lot of emotional ground in an absurdly short time.  In short order, he denounces her; tells her he’s always felt something for her; decides, with her encouragement, to go back to claim Hadass as his bride (as I understood it, Hadass’s marriage to Anshel could be annulled); and bids farewell to Yentl for ever.  It would have been fun to see Avigdor explain the situation to Hadass’s Orthodox parents but you can’t have everything.  You’re bound to think, though, that’s what Streisand wanted to have here. The concluding lyrics of ‘A Piece of Sky’ seem all too apt for the person singing it:

    What’s wrong with wanting more?

    If you can fly – then soar!

    With all there is – why settle for

    Just a piece of sky?

    It’s a real shame Barbra Streisand didn’t get Michel Legrand and the Bergmans to write just one or two numbers for someone else to perform in Yentl – didn’t resist the temptation to turn it into a one-woman show.   

    15 October 2019

  • A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Marielle Heller (2019)

    Fred Rogers (1928-2003) – puppeteer, presenter, musician and moral inspiration – is a legendary name in the annals of American television.  His half-hour show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, aimed primarily at a pre-school audience, ran for more than thirty years and almost nine hundred episodes.  The show did more than entertain.  According to Wikipedia, it:

    ’emphasized the child’s developing psyche, feelings, sense of moral and ethical reasoning, civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth.  Difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into families, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce were also addressed.’

    Rogers, and his reputation for calm, kind, reassuring advice to children and their parents, became a national institution.  British audiences, though, are unlikely to be familiar with him – unless they’ve seen last year’s Morgan Neville documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?  Watching Tom Hanks as Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is rather like watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia (2009).  You’re impressed by the performance but you can’t see it, as an American viewer can, in relation to prolonged personal experience of the widely loved original.  (That must still be the case even if you check out YouTube clips beforehand.)

    The two films have something else in common.  The American TV icon isn’t the main role in terms of screen time.  Ephron told Julia Child’s story in parallel to that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who set out to cook every one of the hundreds of recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote a highly successful blog about the project.  The protagonist in A Beautiful Day is the journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), assigned to profile Fred Rogers for Esquire magazine.  One definite advantage of this set-up over Julie and Julia’s is that the two principals interact – indeed, their interaction is the heart of Marielle Heller’s movie.  The problem is, it stops being distinctive whenever Hanks isn’t on screen – interest flags, as it did in the Childless sections of Julie and Julia.  That was hardly Amy Adams’s fault and Matthew Rhys plays the journalist well but, in Hanks’s absence, suspension of cynicism on the viewer’s part goes out the window.  We know too well that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, although based on true events, is going to be a clichéd Hollywood story of healing – of how a bitter, self-centred man, through the influence of Mister Rogers, becomes a considerate, compassionate one.

    The screenplay, by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, is based on an article, first published in Esquire in 1998, entitled ‘Can You Say … Hero?’[1] and written by Tom Junod, the inspiration for Lloyd Vogel.  According to Junod’s Wikipedia entry, he ‘is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards …, the most prestigious award in magazine writing’.  The first time Lloyd appears in the film, he’s giving an acceptance speech after winning a National Magazine Award.  Also according to Wikipedia, Junod has said that his encounter with Rogers ‘changed his perspective on life’.  But Lloyd, however much in common he may have with a real individual, is a generic character.  He has a wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), and they have a baby daughter but driven Lloyd is, in effect, married to his work – and driven largely because of unresolved parent issues.  He’s never stopped blaming his father Jerry (Chris Cooper) for the way he treated Lloyd’s late mother.

    Using source material with a ‘can you?’ question in its title isn’t the only resemblance between Marielle Heller’s second and third features.  The main theme of this new film is the very question that gave its immediate predecessor, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, its name.  Heller makes clear from the start, in the first of several simulations of Fred Rogers’s TV show, that her story will be a parable about forgiveness.  Tom Hanks comes through a door in the studio set and makes himself at home.  He takes off his jacket and outdoor shoes, and puts on the host’s trademark red cardigan and sneakers (complete with collar and tie, and light-coloured casual trousers).  Smiling to camera, he quietly introduces the topic of forgiving and Lloyd Vogel, whose face is revealed behind one of the windows on his picture board.  Heller’s effective opening not only states her theme but situates it within the TV world of Fred Rogers – a world that’s both an artificial creation and yet, it seems, an expression of its creator’s authentic values.

    Lloyd has been estranged from his father for years.   The old resentment flares up again at the wedding of Lloyd’s sister Lorraine (Tammy Blanchard), culminating in a fist fight involving Lloyd, Jerry and Lorraine’s latest new husband (played by the film’s co-writer Noah Harpster).  Lloyd’s hostility to Jerry intensifies when his father, in spite of what happened at the wedding, persists in trying to mend fences with him.  At the same time, Lloyd is commissioned by his editor Ellen (Christine Lahti) to write a short profile of Fred Rogers, one of a series of ‘American hero’ pieces that Esquire is running.  Mister Rogers isn’t acerbic Lloyd’s cup of tea.  He’s reluctant to take the job on until Ellen informs him that Rogers was the only one of Esquire’s prospective subjects willing to be grilled by him, the other heroes on the list all put off by Lloyd’s fearsome reputation.  When he gets round to doing the interviews, Lloyd is disturbed to find himself being asked, rather than asking, difficult questions.  He may have hoped to dent Fred’s too-good-to-be-true public reputation.  Instead, Lloyd’s on the receiving end of an infinitely benign psychotherapist.

    The casting of Tom Hanks seems boringly obvious but works very well.  Hanks’s own nice-guy persona, on screen and off, enriches the riddle of how Fred Rogers can possibly be for real.  Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in his mid-thirties and subsequently enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s child development graduate studies programme, he and his wife Joanne were married for more than fifty years and had two sons.  According to Tom Junod’s profile, Rogers went swimming nearly every morning of his life.  He seems to have been a prime example of mens sana in corpore sano.  While his worldview was shaped and sustained by Christian faith, he exudes, in Tom Hanks’s interpretation, a Zen-like calm.  Hanks’s small eyes and smile give him the look of a (trim) Buddha:  he makes Rogers almost spookily inscrutable.  Although he doesn’t closely mimic Rogers’s voice (I have looked at YouTube clips, since seeing the film), you always have the sense that he’s doing an impersonation.  At the same time, you admire the integrity of Hanks’s engagement with the character – and his seemingly easy mastery of screen acting.  He realises quite brilliantly here someone performing to camera but who, in doing so, is not pretending.  Watching Tom Hanks act can be greatly reassuring:  like Fred Rogers’s young audience, you feel you’re in very safe hands.

    Matthew Rhys is very good at showing how his character is both frustrated and impressed by Fred’s unfathomable, acute decency but the writing of Lloyd is simplistic and unfair.  (The other roles are even thinner.)  When Lloyd and Fred are on a subway train together, all their fellow passengers, regardless of age, start up a chorus of the TV show’s ‘It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood’ song.  The sequence has impact, all right, but it’s an excessive illustration of Lloyd’s isolation from the human race.  It’s a long time before he’s given the chance even to explain why he hates his father so much.  When Lloyd eventually speaks his mind, the consequences are immediate and tritely melodramatic.  Jerry promptly collapses and is confined to bed for the rest of his time on screen.  He dies surrounded by his whole, loving family, Lloyd included; the group is joined by Fred, who makes a surprise call.  By this point, even the appearance of Tom Hanks can’t conceal that the film has dwindled to a tame set of tropes and requirements.

    In the cultural and political climate of America today, this happy-ending story of making peace with sworn enemies, with the figure of Fred Rogers at its centre, is bound to give rise to yearning and nostalgia (all the stronger if Rogers was part of your actual childhood).  Marielle Heller sometimes does a good job of avoiding sentimental pitfalls.  Fred and his wife (Maryann Plunkett) regularly play the piano together.  He tells Lloyd that he occasionally feels the need, to release the tensions inside him, to bang down hard on the low notes.  Heller does well to have Fred briefly pounding a piano before he exits the studio at the end of the film.  The whole is unsatisfying, though, because the screenplay just isn’t good enough.  Heller’s was the twelfth and last film that I saw at the 2019 London Film Festival.  I enjoyed several of them, including this one, but nothing came close to my  Festival highlights of each of the three previous years – Manchester by the Sea (2016), 120 BPM (2017) and Roma (2018).  In nearly all cases, the main weakness of this year’s offerings was the screenplay.  As I came out of the Embankment Garden Cinema after seeing A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that ‘To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script, and the script’.

    13 October 2019

    [1] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

     

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