The Play’s the Thing: Why Tom Stoppard Lost It At the Movies

 The deaths, alas, just keep on coming. (In today's news, it's the great Frank Gehry, an architect blessed with rare skill and imagination.) Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read of the passing of one of our greatest playwrights, the Czech-born English man of letters, Tom Stoppard. A fascinating individual as well as an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, Stoppard had premiered his last play (at the age of 83) in 2020. Fittingly, Leopoldstadt was both a brilliant dramatic achievement and a belated exploration of his own Nazi-era Jewish roots. Like most of his plays, it is very much a work tailored to the stage, and will not be coming to local cinemas anytime soon. Which doesn’t mean Stoppard is adverse to film, as I discuss in a 2021 Beverly in Movieland post that I’m repeating here as a Stoppard tribute.  

“Inside any stage play there is cinema wildly signalling to be let out.” This Tom Stoppard quote, from the impressive (and weighty) new biography by Hermione Lee, hints at the famous playwright’s complex attitude toward the movies. From his youth onward, Stoppard was a fan of movies, starting with Disney’s Pinocchio, which he saw at the ripe old age of four. As an adult he loved everything. from Marx Brothers laff-fests to European art films to such popular Hollywood fare as The Graduate. (He and its director, Mike Nichols, turned out to have much in common – including early lives disrupted by Nazis – and later became close friends.)

  But Lee’s biography makes crystal-clear the gulf between writing for the stage and writing for movies. As the successful playwright of such works as The Real Thing and Arcadia, Stoppard revels in prestige and power. It’s not simply a matter of custom: the legalities of the theatre world stipulate that the text of a play cannot be changed for the purposes of stage production without the author’s consent. Some playwrights are probably shy about exerting their will, but Stoppard is not among them. Although unfailingly polite and collaborative, he insists that any changes to the text of a play be made by him. He also demands consultation on production matters, which means that he’s present not only at rehearsals but also at auditions and meetings of the technical staff. The performance of a Tom Stoppard play is, first and foremost, a Tom Stoppard production.

  At the movies, though, it’s the director, not the writer, who is king. (Or, I guess, queen, though female directors continue to be rare indeed.) A major director can hire and fire screenwriters at will, and can even have two writers toiling on the same project without being aware of one another’s existence. Other members of the production team often chime in with their own ideas, and stars have been known to contribute (and sometimes insist on) their own rewrites. This should not be a world in which Stoppard would want to operate, except for the fact that movie gigs are so very lucrative, and Stoppard’s lifestyle is so very lavish.

  Stoppard has been credited on several major movies, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He has also directed an ambitious though modestly budgeted 1990 screen version of his own earliest hit, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, reasoning that only he would have the audacity to ruthlessly re-focus his own much-admired play. He quickly discovered that he was fundamentally NOT a filmmaker: his instinct was always to focus on dialogue, at the expense of camera movement. Afterwards he acknowledged that a filmmaker, though not a playwright, can change the frame. “In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks.”

 Aside from his several screenplay credits, Stoppard has become invaluable to such major directors as Steven Spielberg, because they trust him for smart, honest assessments of their pending projects. For Spielberg, he tried to tamp down the soppy elements that ended the romantic 1989 film, Always, but he also was insistent that Steven Zaillian’s final draft of Schindler’s List not be ”improved” upon. Sometimes Stoppard beefed up dialogue scenes, without screen credit but for serious sums of money. See, for instance, his sparkling work on the key father/son scene between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film, which ends with Connery’s Henry Jones telling his long-neglected son that “you left just when you were becoming interesting.”

 

  

Born in the U.S.A.: Indiana Jones and Asteroid City

There was a time, back in the Thirties and Forties, when Hollywood backlots stood in for all the exotic places on the globe. You needed to set your story in a Casablanca bazaar? An Irish village? An exotic palace high in the Himalayas? If SoCal couldn’t find a suitable location, perhaps you went as far away as Yuma, Arizona (where Crosby and Hope filmed Road to Morocco). Back then, Hollywood studios’ screenplays circumnavigated the globe, but their production was strictly all-American.

 How things have changed! I just saw Wes Anderson’s new Asteroid City, an all-star meditation on the difference between reality and artistic invention. Some of it is apparently set in New York, where a TV documentary captures the evolution of a fledgling theatre piece written by Broadway great Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Most of it—showing the playing-out of Earp’s artistic vision—is set in a candy-colored version of the American Southwest, complete with a quaint filling station, a roadside café, and a bungalow court, as well as a freight train that passes through now and again. This out-of-the-way place, known as Asteroid City, gets its name from a small globule of space junk that once landed here. Now it’s the location of a modest but prestigious gathering of military brass, some “brainiac” kids who’ve won a science competition, and their eclectically assorted parents. And did I mention there’s an alien sighting?

 The locale, the cast, and the background music (lots of old western tunes that would surely make the Coen Brothers happy) all shriek Americana. So I was more than a bit surprised, in reading the closing credits, to discover that Asteroid City was shot largely in Spain, with additional production units in France and Italy. I’m sure the financing of the film had something to do with the choice of shooting locations. Anderson, who has made such films as The Darjeeling Limited, and The French Dispatch, has a great affinity for exotic locales. By choosing to shoot in far-flung corners of the globe, he’s doubtless come up with some lucrative funding sources that depend on him filming far from Hollywood, even when he’s dealing with all-American subject matter.

 I like Anderson’s loopy vision of the world, and it’s fun to see such major talents as Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston and even Tom Hanks pop up in offbeat roles. (Jeff Goldblum is billed as the alien.) The approach worked beautifully in probably my favorite Anderson ensemble flick, The Grand Budapest Hotel. (His sensitive coming-of-age romance Moonrise Kingdom is lovely but stylistically uncharacteristic.) But it certainly helps, when the canvas is so broad, if we care about the characters, and if the film is actually about something coherent. In Asteroid City, Anderson’s movement back and forth between the behind-the-scenes creation of a drama and the actual playing out of the finished version can be seen as meaningful . . . or simply aggravating. Me, I’ll go with the latter adjective.

 But of course the big news this week is about the launching of Indiana Jones and the Dial of  Destiny. Talk about Americana—and a great film with which to kick off a holiday weekend. No, I didn’t choose to brave what I hope will be big crowds at the multiplex (today’s film industry needs all the blockbusters it can get). But I rented Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Harrison Ford gets to play (delightfully) against old pro Sean Connery. Indie’s crusty dad may be Scottish, but the man himself is a strong, smart, courageous All-American. July 4 doesn’t get much better than that.

 

“No Time to Die”: James Bond Shaken and Stirred

James Bond has taught me a valuable life lesson. Back when my generation was discovering Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels (President Kennedy was a fan!), a guy I was dating lent me a paperback copy of Casino Royale. I dutifully started reading it, but wasn’t all that enthralled. Restlessly, I scanned the back cover, which proclaimed, in breathless prose, that the novel was full of exciting moments . . .  like Bond romancing a beautiful lady spy. I was puzzled. Though almost through the novel, I’d only seen Bond get horizontal with a nice, wholesome young woman, so where was this female spy? Uh oh! I’d just ruined the novel’s major plot twist. Lesson learned: from that time onward, I’ve never glanced at the promotional copy on a novel’s back cover before diving into the book.

 When it comes to Bond movies, I’m hardly the ultimate fan. I enjoyed several early ones; it’s hard not to fall under the spell of the suave, witty Sean Connery. But the various villains with their weird fetishes and bizarre hideaways were too outrageous to be taken seriously. I’m not much on sexy sports cars, nor am I the right gender to fully appreciate the gaggle of Bond Babes, always so intent on shedding their clothing at the slightest provocation. In the post-Connery years, I didn’t watch a single Bond movie, until Daniel Craig came along.

  Even more than Sean Connery, Craig is an ambitious actor, active on stage and screen. Looking at his credits, I’ve discovered how often I’ve seen him in a wide range of parts: as an Irish mobster in The Road to Perdition, as English poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath, as a Swedish journalist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and as a South African who’s part of a Mossad assassination plot in Steven Spielberg’s Munich. He seems to have a fondness for accents, and I suspect he relished every honeysuckle syllable when playing New Orleans detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out.

 Craig reportedly had a great deal of input into his five appearances as Hollywood’s most recent James Bond. Not for him the insouciance of Connery. His Bond is less cocky than mournful, keenly aware of all that has been lost (friends, lovers) on his watch. The script of No Time to Die turns out to be a canny remembrance of things past, at the same time that it pushes his personal story forward.

 Though the film certainly contains beautiful and accomplished women, they do not emerge dripping wet out of the ocean, as a bikini-clad Ursula Andress so memorably does in 1962’s Dr. No. In a cheeky reversal, it’s Bond himself we first see rising from the water, and his still buff physique cannot detract from a smidgen of middle-aged flab. (Craig is now 53.)  In A Time to Die, the closest we get to a Bond Girl is the scintillating Ana de Armas, who last appeared with Craig as the good-hearted nurse at the center of Knives Out. Here, she’s a kick-ass assassin in a barely-there black evening gown, the movie’s joyful nod to the Bond movies of old. But the sexual side of Bond is most engaged in a poignant, even somber, interaction with Léa Seydoux, returning from an earlier Craig/Bond film, Spectre..  

 As the latest Bond villain, Rami Malek too is mournful rather than exuberant. I like director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s addition of Japanese Nōh touches, which suit the austere mood. And the scenery is so gorgeous (particularly an Italian hill town) that I’m almost ready to board an airplane.