Mark Rydell (2001)

I recorded this TV movie to see James Franco’s portrait of James Dean and I’m glad I did:  he’s great.   He gives a highly accomplished imitation of Dean’s acting in East of Eden but there are also essential affinities between Franco’s qualities on screen and those we associate with Dean:  a luminous smile whose every recipient feel its embrace; an ability – when the smile vanishes – to disappear deep inside himself, miles away from anyone.   Franco manages to suggest too that Dean, as he gained acting experience, also gained the confidence to use his talent for dramatic realism as a mask or weapon in his dealings with others – this comes over especially in Dean’s scenes with the studio boss Jack Warner.   We soon get the message, as we watch the shooting of East of Eden, that, as the rejected son Cal Trask, James Dean was drawing on his own unhappy relationship with Winton Dean, the father who virtually disowned him.  What’s so good about Franco’s performance – which gives this otherwise undistinguished, highly formulaic biopic a complexity it doesn’t deserve – is that in the scenes with Winton you occasionally wonder if James is using elements of Cal to express his real-life miseries.

The screenplay by Israel Horovitz is serviceable but extremely primitive.   Everything is explained in block capitals, including the revelation of why Winton won’t have anything to do with James – although this is artificially delayed until a few minutes before Dean’s fatal car crash.   There are bizarre snatches of first person narrative.  (It seems odd that someone who died in the middle of the decade would recall that ‘New York in the fifties for an out of work actor was just the best time’.)   The script is excessively reticent about Dean’s alleged bisexuality.  Apart from what comes over as an improbable reference to sexual ambivalence in an interview that he gave to a movie fan magazine, the only suggestion of gay experience comes when Dean is seduced by a cartoon urbane-faggot theatre director and invited to a party in his apartment at midnight.  (Dean obliges and the door of the apartment closes sinisterly behind him.)  Horovitz is much bolder in maligning the dead than he is the living:  an especially crass example is the characterisation of Raymond Massey in the East of Eden sequences.  Perhaps Massey was pompously and humourlessly old school but the fact that Edward Herrmann, who plays him here, can’t give Adam Trask anything like the weight that Massey undoubtedly did bring to the role, seems to add insult to injury.

Although it’s amusing seeing so many famous Hollywood names being impersonated, the acting is highly variable.  Michael Moriarty rather overdoes it as Winton although he underplays in comparison with Barry Primus as Nicholas Ray.  Valentina Cervi is embarrassingly wooden as Pier Angeli.  As Elia Kazan, Enrico Colantoni gets over a perceptiveness that seems right, although he’s rather bland.  On the plus side, Joanne Linville is amusing as Hedda Hopper, Samuel Gould witty as Martin Landau, and Kyle Chambers affecting as the boy James.  Mark Rydell, as well as keeping the action moving, appears as Jack Warner and gives him a good shark’s grin.  Although the part is feebly underwritten, his daughter Amy does well as one of Dean’s first girlfriends in New York.  John Frizzell more than earned his fee for the overwrought music.

27 June 2010