Blue Moon

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set

actor Ethan Hawke

Lorenz Hart/Ethan Hawke

Richard Rodgers/Andrew Scott

BLUE MOON            B                                                                                                             USA  Ireland  (100 mi)  2025  d: Richard Linklater

It’s like, well, perhaps a Rodgers and Hart song, kind of beautiful and super sad and forlorn and all those things too.  A catchy tune where you’re devastated by the end.                              —Richard Linklater describing his film

While the film doesn’t have the romantic scope of his Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), where the first two are among the best romantic love stories of the modern era, thriving on the spontaneity of the moment, he’s also made films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), which feel like anthems to childhood, as well as the mind-bogglingly funny Hit Man (2023), yet this is something different altogether, with Linklater releasing two films at the same time, an ode to the French New Wave from Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960) in Nouvelle Vague, and this 1940’s tribute to songwriter/lyricist Lorenz Hart.  Working again with Ethan Hawke for the first time since the Before Trilogy in what is essentially an elegiac character study in a film about art, artists, and meaning, this is a chamber drama revealing the dark sides of success, a biographical drama that focuses on a crucial night in Hart’s life, where what stands out is the heavily staged theatricality, with nearly the entire film taking place in real time at one location, a national landmark in Sardi’s restaurant, a historical spot in the heart of New York’s theater district, considered the toast of Broadway for more than 100 years.  Yet that’s simply the backdrop for what amounts to a non-stop, heavily-scripted discourse out of the mouth of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, nearly unrecognizable with a slick comb-over), a tortured artist who is deeply hurt by what he views as a betrayal from his longtime partner and friend, Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), among the best composers of American musical theater, who decided instead to work with a different writing partner, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and lo and behold they turn out the biggest hit of Rogers’ career in Oklahoma!, a kitschy portrait of Americana that completely revolutionized musical theater in the early 1940’s by integrating songs, dances, and plot.  For Hart this is tragic, as he hates the musical they’ve created, pandering wholesomeness to overly white audiences, creating a completely inaccurate and inauthentic portrait of America, missing the humanity of the human soul, but the upbeat songs are catchy and audiences seem to love it.  Hart leaves the theater early and wanders into a nearly empty Sardi’s restaurant before the theater crowd comes crashing in, where this is a very dialogue-heavy work, as the camera remains almost exclusively in the bar, and the plot is driven by sprawling conversations and monologues that thematically jump back and forth with the bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and lounge player “Knuckles” (Jonah Lees) clinking on the piano, whose musical selections often compliment whatever the hell Hart is babbling about, beautifully evoking the era of the 1940’s.  That pretty much defines the picture, as the closeted gay Hart is a chatty Cathy, as they say, as he philosophizes and mocks, blasphemes and complains, lectures and analyzes, while catching the attention of whoever is sitting within earshot, told in a frenetic, screwball-comedy pace, where the entire film captures his every syllable, where he just goes on endlessly about everything under the sun to whoever is willing to listen, raising profound questions about the nature of art, the price of success, and the transience of fame.  But viewers may space out after a while, finding a bitterly exposed Hart a bit too much, while it can also become tedious and repetitious, with witty yet heavy-handed dialogue that doesn’t have the naturalness and light-as-a-feather airiness of a Linklater-written script, which makes all the difference in the world, and can instead feel forced down our throats, with few, if any, pauses to offer a moment of relief.  While there have been other successful musical biopics, like Mike Leigh’s TOPSY-TURVY (1999), Taylor Hackford’s RAY (2004), James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love (2024), this feels more like a one-man play, with the suffocating presence of Hart onscreen for nearly every shot.  Linklater doesn’t sanitize Hart’s addiction or despair, yet never loses sight of the brilliance behind his pain, as snippets of his songs drift through scenes like ghosts, reminders that even as Hart’s life crumbled, his words have endured.

If Hart ever imagined his life as a stage play, hurling words like thunderbolts, or exploding bombs, then the rest of the cast are just silent extras.  Often feeling like we’re in the middle of a Woody Allen movie, packed with textual cross-references, self-deprecating jokes, and sardonic commentaries, and just a touch of self-reflection, with wall-to-wall piano music of American standards and screwball comedy dialogue spewed fast and furiously, Hart is an alcoholic plagued by self-doubt, yet is recently sober, attempting to retrieve the essential purpose of his life that he feels has been dumped on the curb, already considered a has-been, as Rogers has found himself another successful partner, who’s much easier to deal with, by the way, making him the odd man out.  Nonetheless, whether he’s raving about the best line in the movie Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942), Bogart’s “Nobody ever loved me that much,” another wartime film about two men and a girl, sharing many of the same thematic connections of a bar, friendship, dashed hopes, and a melancholy finale where the protagonist is left behind, or whether anyone else knows just how terrible Oklahoma! is, with its ridiculous use of an exclamation point to draw attention to itself, Hart is a force of nature waxing eloquently about the unequivocal allure of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley as a blond, a baffling choice, since she’s a decade older), a Yale art student who just turned 20, hoping for a career as a production designer.  After months of correspondence and a mysteriously beautiful (for him) yet unconsummated weekend, he believes this may be the night to finally win her love, where he’s planning a grand soirée afterwards, hiring a string quartet, and even inviting the delivery boy in what he promises will be a memorable evening.  Eddie is confused (as are we), believing Hart prefers the company of men, but Hart defies all expectations, claiming he is “omnisexual,” with the film all but ignoring any hidden homoerotic tension, which CASABLANCA was filled with, by the way, if you believe Hart.  For a gay figure, the film strangely and mysteriously devotes a considerable amount of time to a heterosexual relationship, which may reflect the depths of his own existential loneliness.  Describing Elizabeth as his protégée and muse, suggesting she’s too sexy and smart for boys her own age, he goes on a rhapsodic rant about how much she means to him, suggesting it might be love, despite their age difference.  It sounds like a pipe dream, one of those long-winded alcoholic excursions of prosaic virtuosity in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, as Hart is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, where his alcohol-fueled tirades are a mask for his deeply repressed insecurities, basically an open book for anyone to read, yet reality rarely lives up to those long suppressed hopes, which are so easily dashed in an instant.  Off in a corner he spots E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a fellow writer who also has a clever and witty way with words, where their dialogue together is an endless stream of carefully calculated phrases where every word is aptly grandiose, filled with underlying meaning, as the two effortlessly hit it off.  Nonetheless, Hart singlehandedly holds court for the first half of the film, sneaking a shot of bourbon every now and then to bolster his courage, tossing off philosophical maxims like “How can you give voice to the whole world if you don’t have the whole world inside of you?,” gearing up to meet the eye of the storm when all the theater well-wishers show up in an entourage surrounding Richard Rogers, all offering unanimous praise, claiming it’s the greatest musical of all time, with Hart forced to offer his own disingenuous congratulations in this chorus of effusive praise.  Probably the weakest aspect of the film is the digital cinematography by Shane F. Kelly, a Linklater regular since A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), but it lacks spatial depth, never really capturing the claustrophobic, closed-in feeling of the room, often having the artificial staginess of a filmed play.  

Having worked together for more than 20 years from the 20’s to the 40’s, writing 28 stage musicals together, along with over 500 songs, Rogers can see through Hart’s obvious disdain for Oklahoma!, yet he’s willing to set that aside in the interest of being magnanimous, having put up with all of Hart’s emotionally insecure mood swings and alcoholic doldrums for all those years, where he was simply a pain in the ass to work with, always flying off the handle, something of a drama queen grabbing all the attention, while he was left with doing the hard work.  Nonetheless, he offers him a chance to write a few new songs for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, their successful musical from 1927, but Hart is more interested in his delirious idea about creating a grand musical spectacle around adventurer Marco Polo, which sounds like an exotic journey into the strange and undiscovered lands of King Kong (1933), filled with the same kind of extravagance.  “It’s the thrill of a lifetime,” which he believes is infinitely more interesting than the homogenized and overly predictable Oklahoma!  “Who wants inoffensive art?” he exclaims at one point, but the war years may have taken a toll, with a weary nation preferring something more safe and conventional.  While the ever-eccentric Hart is stealing his limelight, Rogers calmly returns to his party of well-wishers, reminding him to think about the new songs.  While Ethan Hawke’s deliberately showy performance of Hart is the centerpiece of the film, breathing life into the role, something should be said for the saintly grace shown by Rogers (Scott won the Best Supporting Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival), and the endless patience on display, shown through a myriad of changing facial expressions, where it’s clear their paths are on different trajectories, as he looks so effortlessly polite in such an obviously uncomfortable situation, moving his way upstairs to an afterparty that leaves Hart behind.  As an aside, Hart also meets a young Hammerstein prodigy dressed in a tuxedo named Stephen (Cillian Sullivan), a foreshadowing reference to Stephen Sondheim, who would go on to redefine Broadway musicals with his virtuosic wordplay while also introducing darker themes, becoming theater's most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, and just happens to be the subject of Linklater’s next project, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, which will be filmed over the course of the next 20 years, with actors aging naturally, not to be confused by the upcoming holiday release by the same name.  By the time Elizabeth shows up, Hart is all aflutter, his nerves on edge, yet his manners are impeccable, as he curiously gives her all of the attention, wanting to hear everything since they last met, as he’s all ears, literally hanging on every word.  While she’s flattered by his near-obsessional infatuation, coming from a man who is more than twice her age, she makes it clear her interest is “not in that way.”  Perhaps the title of the film says it all, as this is not some sunny remembrance, but is instead a collision course between the high-wire act of being a celebrated artist who may already be on a downward spiral, but just doesn’t realize that yet, and the inescapable success of his ex-partner, who along with Oscar Hammerstein would go on to become the greatest writing team in American musical history, leaving Hart behind as yesterday’s news.  It’s a savagely despairing story written by Robert Kaplow, whose novel was the source material for Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008), adapting the material from Hart’s letters that he wrote to an unidentified woman named Elizabeth, which Kaplow bought at an estate sale, accentuating the ups and downs that occur in the ever-evolving life of a melancholic artist, becoming a mournful tale of a man whose career was cut too short, with Ethan Hawke capturing the contradictions of his character, where everything is secondary to his performance, whose heightened mood swings have a profoundly dark emotional impact. Described at the beginning of the movie as “the saddest man I ever knew,” one of three quotations from companions who draw a picture of a sociable but devastatingly lonely person, within seven months Hart would drunkenly collapse in a rain-soaked back alley and die (which is actually the opening sequence, with a radio broadcast obituary playing over it), with Linklater deserving credit for generously reviving his spirit in this Irish wake-like, tragicomic sendoff, where, perhaps coincidentally, the film was actually shot in Ireland, specifically in and around Dublin, recalling, of course, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).            

First Reformed

FIRST REFORMED              C+                                          

USA  (113 mi)  2017 d:  Paul Schrader

Loneliness has followed me my whole life — everywhere — in bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores — everywhere.  There’s no escape.  I’m God’s lonely man.

—Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976), written by Paul Schrader

A crisis in faith film, made for people who feel suffocated by an overly repressive church, who prefer, like writer/director Paul Schrader, a tortuous existence, with suffering a stand-in for religious commitment, as if it could wipe away the sins of the world.  Associated with Scorsese as a screenwriter in films like Taxi Driver (1976), RAGING BULL (1980), and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988), Schrader grew up attending the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, never seeing a film until he was in his late teens, early on training to become a minister, where it is significant that roughly three out of 10 Protestant leaders describe their church as “Calvinist or Reformed,” a proportion statistically unchanged from a decade earlier (according to a 2010 Barna poll, So there is no NeoReformed/New Calvinist movement - Patheos).  The Christian Reformed Church is the American embodiment of the original 16th century reformation movement that became necessary as the Catholic Church spawned corruption and failed to respond to its parishioners, examples being widespread corruption among the Catholic clergy, especially at the top, the practice of torturing people suspected of holding non-orthodox beliefs until they confessed or died, encouraging parishioners to pray to Mary and to the saints (instead of Jesus Christ), also church sales pitches, including fake letters from the Pope, that promised heavenly redemption once money was received.  While popular in the Netherlands and Germany, later an American version arose, becoming the Christian Reformed Church (currently 300,000 members in the United States and Canada).  While narratively modeled after Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951) and Bergman’s WINTER LIGHT (1963), the film lacks the sparseness and transcendent poetry, bearing more of a resemblance to Bruno Dumont’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #5 Hadewijch, as it tries to be a modern parable, complete with contemporary themes, but all in all, it’s overly fatalistic, bearing a gloominess that resembles the tortuous anguish of Scorcese’s Silence (2016).  Ethan Hawke plays Reverend Toller, a pastor with a dwindling congregation at an old Protestant New England parish that’s been around since 1767, part of the Underground Railway, whose historical significance is diminished by being a subsidiary of a much larger modern megachurch.  Leading a solitary existence, giving little thought to his own health or well-being, the film is a morose tale of a despondent priest who grapples with his own existential malaise, himself a former military chaplain, having lost a son in the Iraq War that destroyed his marriage, his road to redemption lies in service to others by practicing his faith, though he’s constantly challenged at every turn, recorded in his yearlong diary, where his bleak inner narration provides the outline of the story, basically a reflection of God’s silence expressed through acute self-loathing, describing an “all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of all things.”

One of the aspects of neo-Calvinism is a youthful trend of fiery rhetoric that seems rooted by the insular nature of college universities, like think tanks, which have a way of consolidating like-minded thinking, but remain isolated, protecting their inner core while combatting or even condemning outsiders.  This film seems dedicated to the idea of opening up the church to deeply rooted modern era problems that affect us all but seemingly have no answers, which includes ecological nightmare predictions as well as the influence of money in serving the church’s social mission, as the church is often connected to powerful technological interests that may be creating many of the toxic hazards that could diminish or deteriorate any future quality of life.  The church tends to reflect a status quo position, seemingly above the fray, yet may privately be partnering with some of the biggest offenders of toxic waste.  Reverend Toller gets involved in the life of a young married couple at the behest of an ardent believer, Mary (Amanda Seyfried, actually pregnant during the shoot), who is worried about the deteriorating mental state of her non-believing husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an avowed radical environmentalist who has been arrested, preventing him from continuing to help the cause, losing his faith in the apathy surrounding global consciousness, as there’s little interest in saving the planet, creating nightmare scenarios that he’s all too familiar with, struggling with the notion of losing all hope.  While Reverend Toller makes a genuine attempt to counsel a lost soul, laying the foundation of the internal struggle, “Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind at the same time: hope and despair,” suggesting despair exists so that God’s hope is that much more meaningful, where overcoming doubt is the real struggle, yet he is himself facing a losing battle with his own inner torment, drinking heavily while eating sparingly, weakened by his own self-inflicted choices, yet carries on to face a new day with revived spiritual interest, as he identifies with Michael’s predicament, himself something of a black sheep among the flock of the devoted, where the parent church, run by Pastor Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer), couldn’t be more financially successful, viewed throughout the community as a pillar of society.  Exploring the darker regions of society may come naturally for Toller, as he has his own unique familiarity, yet he’s equally as troubled himself, even as he offers guidance and counsel. 

The scenes between Toller and Michael form the inner core of the pastor’s dilemma, with Michael asking, “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?”  While this question reverberates and echoes throughout the rest of the film, their conversation is intriguing but pales in comparison with Steve McQueen’s HUNGER (2008), for instance, a thoroughly complex film that at its center becomes a twenty-minute uninterrupted dramatic scene contemplating the 1981 Irish hunger strike between prison inmate IRA activist Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest arguing the life and death moral implications.  That is a thoroughly riveting first rate drama, while here, perhaps the most surprising scene is a moment of stark cruelty that occurs out of nowhere (there were audible gasps in the audience) between a former husband and wife, with Toller demeaning and humiliating his ex-wife Esther (Victoria Hill) for expressing an interest in his well-being, egotistic actions that undermine all else, calling into question any other motivations he may have.  In other words, what good is it to find forgiveness with God if you can’t forgive your wife?  She’s a member of his flock that needs shepherding as well.  To utterly give up on her equates him with spewing toxic venom, a parallel with the oil and chemical manufacturers who think only of themselves and their own self-term interests and financial gain, all but ignoring the long-term needs of the planet.  The whole thing feels like a moralist trap, a test of absolutism, vying off to explore just a single branch on the tree of sin, yet becoming consumed by the ramifications, clouded by errant judgment, never really seeing the forest through the trees, arguably accepting martyrism as a way out (more short-term speculation), which in the full scope of things only diminishes the overall impact, leaving more to be done by future generations to clean up the mess you left behind.  While Toller’s plan of action remains initially ambiguous, where rational thought turns metaphysical and surreal, with doubts swirling around his head, moving from one possibility to another, with lingering afterthoughts, yet the final implications are clear, whiffing in his moment of truth, coming up empty, ultimately drowning in his own self-pity, lost in the vacuousness of an ethical collapse.  While it’s commendable taking a moral interest in difficult and all-encompassing social positions, similar to Father Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic priest who worked actively in the 60’s against the Vietnam War, putting him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list (eventually  serving two years in prison), the first priest to make the list, yet this film never rises to that level of plausibility, as few American priests ever put themselves on the line like that (unlike the many Baptist pastors in the Civil Rights movement), where the moral convictions would have to be more than mere speculation.  The idea of equating radical environmental activism with extreme religious conviction seems misguided, having more in common with martyrdom and Islamic jihadism along with other radical misadventures that when put into action would only destabilize a polarized public, where democracy requires convincing an otherwise disinterested public about the merits of your argument.  While this film portrays a wayward priest’s struggle with faith and moral servitude, the chosen path convinces no one, basically betraying his own calling, becoming instead an off-the-rails horror story, with the finale set to a raw and bare-bones rendition (sung by Esther) of the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” chillingly recalled being sung by Robert Mitchum as the phony predator priest in The Night of the Hunter (1955).