"Vanya on 42nd Street" is Chekhov for people who hate Chekhov, theater for people who hate theater, and a movie for people who love movies.
Louis Malle's film of Andre Gregory's perpetually-in- rehearsal production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" in a decrepit New York movie house is something of a transcendent miracle. This movie, which opens today at the Charles, is a tribute to the magic dance of performance and text and the irrelevance of all other matters. The movie simply becomes, seamlessly and totally, the play; and then both become the universe, as every other element melts away.
It begins as far from classic 19th-century Russian drama as could be imagined: on a chilly spring day in the American sewer -- that gaudy, seedy, once grand and now dangerous boulevard of decaying dream palaces called 42nd Street, just to the west of Times Square. It's a street a-blur with tawdry human torrents as the thousands course up and down it, but gradually, we watch as this or that face springs into clear relief.
Some of them are familiar, some are not. Wallace Shawn, of course, will be recognizeable from "My Dinner with Andre," just as some will remember flame-haired Julianne Moore from Robert Altman's "Short Cuts."
Some faces will seem to arrive from the land of deja vu: Brooke Smith, for example, has a face you can't forget even if you've forgotten where you saw it, which was as the senator's kidnapped daughter in "Silence of the Lambs." George Gaynes? Wasn't he the guy on "Punky Brewster"? Still others will be entirely unknown: Larry Pine, for example, looks like an actor with a handsome, theatrical profile, but he rings no bells.
It turns out that they have a common destination -- the lobby of a sadly used movie house. Others arrive: Andre Gregory, with that wise, cosmopolitan face, squiring a strange Indian woman for whom no explanation is given. Look quickly and I think you'll notice the silent, glowering visage of writer Fran Liebowitz among the sparse crowd of civilians. They clap their hands to beat down the cold, sip from cups of deli coffee ("I Luv New York" on the cardboard), gossip and whine about the theater, munch fast food, and seem to have no purpose at all.
Then Wally, looking bushed and grumpy, squirms down on a bench and takes a quick nap. When he shimmies back to pTC consciousness, he notices that the tenor of the conversation has subtly altered. It still sounds spontaneous and unrehearsed, it still arrives in rock-solid American idiom, and no one is really acting. But it's different and seems to touch on issues as yet unraised. A famous brother returning with his new wife. A doctor's love of the environment. The backbreaking labor of keeping an estate going. Wally seems confused, slow on the uptake. Like, what the hell is going on?
When he opens his own mouth, however, he's no longer Wally Shawn. No, he's Uncle Vanya, Chekhov's tormented schlemiel, ignored, taken for granted, forlorn and lovelorn. Without noticing it, without formal demarcation or announcement, somehow we are no longer in a dying movie house but on an estate in rural Russia in the 1890s.
The play has been adapted into bell-clear American by David Mamet. It's unlikely Chekhov ever penned the line "Are you up for a drink later?", as Pine's Astrov asks Shaw's Vanya. Yet at the same time Mamet hasn't given the language a "hip" cant; nobody calls anybody "baby." Rather, the language has somehow been opened up, made transparent, almost neutral, so that the performers can get at it more readily.
And what a document of performance is "Vanya on 42nd Street." Brilliantly photographed by Malle with primitive 16mm equipment, and beautifully lit by Declan Quinn, the movie enters the action to an almost intimate degree.
Without attracting too much attention, the camera moves in and among the actors and wholly abandons the convention of proscenium stage. It's not recording a performance, it's penetrating it. It feels so utterly spontaneous and heartfelt; there's no sense of lines being read or marks being hit. The whole convention of "theater" and "film" and "text" ultimately dissolve. We just see faces radiant in lyrical light abeam with hope or despair or love or anger. We're as totally "there" -- in the zone of empathetic belief in the reality of what we're seeing -- that nothing else quite matters.
Purists will notice the radical approach to the text. "Vanya" is usually viewed as Dr. Astrov's play, since Chekhov -- also a physician -- gave him all the best and most mordant lines. In a conventional film, Jason Robards would get the role, playing him a sexy, damaged romantic, full of crackling romantic despair and cynicism. But Gregory subverts the wiring; Pine's very obscurity prevents him from dominating the play and there's a subtle shift of balance in favor of poor Vanya.
Poor Vanya! Flaccid and bitter and complaining, human to every inch of his pudgy body, Vanya becomes a Quixote without a horse, a lance, a Sancho Panza or even a windmill. All he's got is a house in the country, which Professor Serebryakov (Gaynes), his pompous brother-in-law, is now proposing to sell.
Vanya's woes accumulate: He's secretly in love with the professor's beautiful new wife Yelena (Moore), and he has slaved away at the estate to give the brother-in-law the freedom to establish himself as an academic (we in the audience see that Serebryakov is a total fraud). So it's a life built on a delusion, which now, with an insouciant gesture of selfishness, Serebryakov will destroy by selling the estate to raise money for his retirement with Yelena.
Vanya's cry from the heart is clarion from the dispossessed: He speaks for all the people on earth -- oh, say, roughly 10 billion of them since the year 900,000 B.C. -- for whom life turned out not to offer a fair shake. "What's to become of me?" his soul howls in a shiver of bone-deep despair.
Other plots are deftly balanced by Gregory and brilliantly evoked by Malle and his cameraman. Astrov, too, is in love with the beautiful Yelena, who is herself (Moore is staggering; a review could be dedicated to her performance alone) aware of her beauty, used to being hit upon and has somehow been turned both tough and wise by the ordeal that isn't quite an ordeal. Poor Sonya (Brooke Smith), Vanya's sister, is plain and lost in self-pity; no man will ever love her. Two older servants wonder what will happen to them.
In its final bitter act, "Vanya on 42nd Street" has picked up so much raw emotional power that it's almost frightening. It has the great Aristotelian passions -- pity and terror -- in such abundance that it almost threatens. Yet as black and bitter as the play is, it also speaks to man's most powerful attribute: his imagination. Through Gregory and Malle and a cast of piercingly brilliant actors, Chekhov lives. You can say of this movie as you can say of few others: "It's alive!"
"Vanya on 42nd Street"
Starring Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore and Larry Pine
Directed by Louis Malle; production directed by Andre Gregory
Released by Sony Classics
Rated PG
****