Uncovering “The Shape of Things”

Playwright and film director Neil LaBute is surely not typical of the graduates at Brigham Young University. I know, and like, a number of BYU grads. (We worked together at Osaka’s Expo 70, many moons ago.) The former Mormon missionaries with whom I hung out tended to be trustworthy, smart, and often a lot of fun. But their political and social views were on the conservative side, in keeping with the moral tenets of the church that shaped their lives.

 LaBute, who studied theatre at BYU circa 1980, is something of a different story. His plays, which he has also translated to film, lack the basic optimism that I connect with the Church of Latter Day Saints. La Bute’s style is to zero in on the worst of human behavior and follow where it leads. His first big success, which I saw and admired years ago, was In the Company of Men, a play that became an indie film and picked up several prestigious critics’ awards, It’s a cold-eyed look at misogyny in the workplace, with two corporate types joining forces to bedevil a hapless female co-worker, with grim results. (To my surprise, I’ve just learned that this corrosive work debuted at BYU in 1992, and subsequently won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters. So perhaps not all Mormons are as optimistic about mankind as my former co-workers.) 

 The film I saw last night, 2003’s The Shape of Things, also started out as a LaBute play. It debuted in London with a cast made up of Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol, and Fred Weller. All four also appear in the film version, which is set on and around a picturesque American  college campus, played by the California State University branch in ocean-adjacent Camarillo, CA. Though on-screen other students and faculty members come and go, only the four main actors have speaking roles: there’s no question that this is essentially a filmed play, one in which the focus is narrow and talk is all-important.

 At first it’s easy for the viewer to get restless while watching a series of mostly two-person dialogue scenes. But the mating-dance aspect of the script is intriguing, and the characters are so wildly assorted that we’re curious to see what comes next. The story’s Queen Bee, played by the always fascinating Weisz, is am art student working on a mysterious graduate thesis project. Convinced that art trumps everything (including morality), she is adamant in her choices, one of them being to bed a nebbishy young man who works—after a fashion—as a guard at the campus art museum. As played by an initially unrecognizable Paul Rudd, he’s all too willing to be molded by this beautiful and outrageous young woman, who helps him find the self-confidence he has lacked. The main cast is completed by Fred Weller, as Rudd’s domineering best friend, and his apparently meek fiancée, the perky blonde Gretchen Moll. There’s a powerful twist ending that I wouldn’t dream of divulging, but suffice it to say that there’s not a lot of happily ever after.

 LaBute, who shares with David Mamet a facility for language as well as a basic pessimism about human nature, makes vivid the cruelty of the characters toward one another. This particular piece of work also has fun satirizing the art world. LaBute takes on both the prudes of the past (a giant plaster fig-leaf covering the genitalia of an art museum statue is key to the story’s beginning) and the hip art-for-art’s-sake convictions of the present. If you like witty misanthropy, this one’s for you. 

 

Raising Cain: 1981’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”

Watching 1946’s The Postman Always Rings Twice set me off on a path you might call obsessive. First I checked out the 1981 remake starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, notorious in its day for its frank sexuality. Then, to better understand the source of it all, I read James M. Cain’s pulp novella from 1934. 

 To be honest, the 1981 remake didn’t do much for me. Yes, that initial sex scene is startling in its brutal power, but it gave me far more than I needed in setting the scene for what was to follow. There’s only so much of a sexually voracious Jack Nicholson that someone like me can take. His nearly devouring Jessica Lange in his brutal embrace just made me squirmy (and certainly made me wonder about her character’s basic intelligence, since she seems to welcome it).  Maybe, I figured, sado-masochism works better on the page than on the screen. The great Sven Nykvist’s cinematography was a marvel, though, in keeping the couple’s private parts completely hidden even while clothes were ripped away.

 Along with Nykvist, who was Ingmar Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, the remake attracted a host of top-grade professionals. The director was Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), and none other than playwright David Mamet adapted Cain’s work for the screen. Part of the hype at the time of the film’s release was that it was far closer to Cain’s original work that the sanitized Production Code version of 1946.  That’s why I wanted to understand what Cain was up to.

 No question: Cain in this work closely aligns sex with death. The novella contains at least three major scenes of erotic connection between the narrator, Frank, and his boss’s wife, Cora. In the first, coming onto Cora in the kitchen of her husband’s roadside lunchroom, he says. “I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers.”  She’s the one who pleads for him to bite her . . .  and he does: “I sank my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down my neck when I carried her upstairs.” 

 The second big scene of passion occurs immediately after they manage to maneuver her soused immigrant husband (scornfully referred to as The Greek) over the side of a California cliff. To suggest that the car crash is pure accident, Frank roughs up Cora by punching her in the eye. Next thing you know, they are locked in each other’s arms. And Frank admits that “Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I had to have her, if I hung for it.” Then he adds, “I had her.”

 For all that the film remake tries to capture Cain’s tone, it just doesn’t pull us along in the way that Frank’s on-the-page narration does. Yes, there are the same plot twists and turns, including some sneaky legal wranglings that briefly have the lovers at each other’s throat. And the remake also includes the novella’s bizarre interlude in which Frank, separated from Cora, takes up with a dame who raises pumas and other exotic jungle cats. (The original film had him tempted by a much more commonplace lady.) On screen this cat-woman is played, apparently in the buff, by Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s real-life main squeeze at the time.

 One more thing the remake doesn’t have is the novella’s powerful ending, in which we learn for the first time just where Frank is as he tells us his tale. It’s the capper we need to understand everything.