Who Am I This Time? - made for TV

 

Director Jonathan Demme

writer Kurt Vonnegut

WHO AM I THIS TIME? – made for TV                 A+                                                                 aka:  American Playhouse Theater TV                                                                                            USA  (53 mi)  1982  d: Jonathan Demme

I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again.  I have to do that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all my works.  I can do that in print.  In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes.  Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me.                                                                                      —Kurt Vonnegut on adapting his stories to film, from the preface of Between Time & Timbuktu, 1972

Among the very best and most intelligent made-for-TV adaptations from American Playhouse, an anthology of original dramatic films that premiered on PBS in 1982 and continued until 1994, where this film has been hidden in the weeds literally for decades.  It features phenomenal early performances from Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken, which are so amazingly memorable that once you’ve seen them together, you’ll simply never forget them, which in addition to being a master class on acting is also an impossibly sweet love story.  Susan Sarandon was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980), while Christopher Walken won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in Michael Cimino’s THE DEER HUNTER (1978).  Both are utterly spectacular.  The source material is a 15-page short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Who am I this time?, originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961, initially entitled My Name is Everyone, and was later included in a 1968 book of short stories called Welcome to the Monkey House, with a screenplay written by Morton Neal Miller, who doubled as a producer, a Chicago area businessman who shifted his career focus midlife while also owning a construction firm that specialized in renovating old Victorian buildings.  This is a reminder of the heights that literary adaptations can aspire to and actually achieve, and while it’s less than an hour in length, this remains among the top-tiered films you could ever hope to see.  Yes, it’s that good.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been restored, as there’s no Blu Ray or high-res version.  After making MELVIN AND HOWARD (1980), receiving plenty of awards and critical acclaim, Jonathan Demme became a Hollywood director of note, where his work offers light and hope, created out of a deeply felt affection for people, insisting on their potential, embracing all possibilities.  This script was only handed to him ten days before shooting began, featuring the kinds of characters not usually featured much less expected to carry a film.  Essentially a story about people who inexplicably change their identity in order to flourish, it is set in small town America, which could literally be anywhere, as small towns are uniquely distinctive, filled with old world charm, but in this case it is a fictionalized North Crawford.  George Johnson (Robert Ridgely) makes a trip to the local telephone company to complain about being billed for a call to Honolulu that he never made, going so far as to suggest that no one in North Crawford has ever made a call to Honolulu.  The friendly woman behind the desk is someone he had never seen before, Helene Shaw (Susan Sarandon), who’s in charge of installing a new automatic billing system, going from town to town for the past two years, spending eight weeks in a new and different location teaching local girls how to run the new machine.  And while she apologizes for the mix-up, George is taken by her beauty and sweetness, but also her lack of natural expressiveness, asking very politely if she’d like to try out for a community theater group, as he’ll be directing an upcoming production of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire.  Embarrassed initially, having never given anything like that a second thought, not staying in any one town long enough to establish roots, always remaining a stranger, yet her anonymity, in this case, is an attribute, as she’s a new and fresh face that local audiences have never seen before.

George then wanders over to the local hardware store, seeking out a clerk working in the back, Harry Nash (Christopher Walken in what remains his finest undiscovered role), a painfully shy young man who blends in seamlessly to the background, almost as if he’s not really there, who may as well be invisible in his Harold Lloyd glasses, hat, and bow-tie, yet he is the one constant in the community theater productions, as he always plays the lead role, captivating audiences in every performance, as he has a bombastic flair for the dramatics.  Yet as soon as the final curtain is pulled he disappears, retreating back into that shell of himself, hiding behind those glasses, as socially inept and uneasy with others as he could possibly be.  George treads very cautiously, asking if he would consider the lead role in the next play, which makes Harry extremely nervous, clearly agitated already, finally asking, “Who am I this time?”  Perhaps, unsurprisingly, Ms. Shaw wanders into the tryouts, sheepishly looking around at what looks like a local library, where George, a mild-mannered, aluminum siding salesman, warmly welcomes her, introducing her to Doris Sawyer (Dorothy Patterson), the woman who usually directs the plays, as they ask her to read a few lines of Stella, yet no matter how much they encourage her, she exhibits no emotion whatsoever, drawing on no personal experience, feeling as empty and alienated from the role as is humanly possible, that is, until Harry walks in, already inhabiting the persona of Stanley Kowalski, stripping down to his undershirt, demanding to know when he can audition, aggressively barking out words, as the lines literally explode out of his mouth, where the assault to the senses takes Ms. Shaw by surprise, completely taken aback by his unorthodox approach, taking her breath away, yet the fear he elicits quite naturally turns her into a stuttering and trembling Stella.  When the two of them read one of the play’s fight scenes together, the transformation is like night and day, where it’s suddenly fireworks between them, as she is absolutely transported and thoroughly confounded, touching passions and emotions inside herself she had never felt or even imagined.  Harry is actually a shy, clumsy introvert, but as Stanley he is on fire.  Helene falls hard for him, suddenly feeling weak in the knees, not just because of who he is but because of who she becomes with him.  Yet as soon as they’re done, he retreats back to that nebbish hardware clerk, shunning all contact with people, and literally disappearing before their eyes.  Helene, to say the least, is left stunned.  George and Doris look at each other with eyes of incredulous wonder, as they have themselves a show!  Knowing how much Vonnegut prizes individuality, he has a field day with the blank slates of these two underdeveloped yet highly likeable lead characters, literally paying homage to what theater can do, both embodying their respective roles, neither one with any social life to speak of, never feeling worthy enough on their own.  As described by Helene, “When I get to know somebody nice in real life, I feel like I’m in some kind of bottle, as though I can’t touch that person, no matter how hard I try.”

As the rehearsals progress, it’s clear Helene has grown quite fond of Harry, where he hilariously throws chairs, kicks over tables, while exuding that brute animal magnetism which has charmed its way into her heart, trying to share a picnic basket with him during a break, where it’s clear she’s brought too much, cutting cucumbers in the shape of a heart, so he only has a nibble, yet the queasy nature of just how uncomfortable this makes him is endearing, where it’s remarkable just how dramatically potent they are, where the spaces between the lines say everything, with Demme, who directs with a humanist sensibility, finding just the right balance of comic subtlety in their peculiarly developing relationship which seems founded on just how awkwardly ill at ease they are with themselves, taking comfort that there’s someone else out there to help them bear the load.  But as floundering as they are offstage, their onstage performances are electrifying, becoming a huge success.  Helene is so enthralled with what’s happening between them that she’s informed the telephone company not to move her anymore, as she’s finally staying put.  On opening night, the play is a huge success, as Helene receives a dozen red roses from her coworkers, but finds Harry has disappeared when she turns to give him one, wondering what she’d done to upset him so.  The secret, she discovers, is continuing to read plays together in order to keep Harry socially engaged with her, concluding, “This week I’ve been pursued by Marc Antony, and romanced by Henry Higgins, loved by Henry the Fifth, and I was just proposed to by Ernest Worthing.  Now, don’t you think I’m just about the luckiest girl in town?”  The early 60’s period detail is on point, from women’s hairstyles to storefront window displays, where small town life exudes such an expressive charm, beautifully shot by Paul Von Brack at Oakton School in Evanston and Hinckley, Illinois, never feeling condescending, though it’s given a low-budget TV aesthetic.  A story of two shy people without much personality who come alive onstage is a constant delight, as they go on adventures together in successive roles, where the true value of their performances is just how much fun they’re having, where it’s a bit like John Madden’s SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998), where the superbly written dialogue becomes, in essence, who they are at that given moment, suddenly supercharged with emotions, always inhabiting the characters’ personas for the full run of the play, changing back to their normal selves afterwards.  It’s a miraculous search for identity that just glows with warmth and tenderness as they move from play to play, taking us on a literary adventure of our lifetimes, as the lines between their characters and real life blur, with viewers profoundly changed by the experience, where falling in love was never like this, but it feels so naturally authentic and genuine, with no real false notes to speak of, where this offbeat love story is a blissful hour of entertainment that puts many longer programs to shame, becoming a tour de force about theater, acting, and personality, which miraculously makes you appreciate the wonder of being alive.      

Who Am I This Time? | FULL MOVIE | Christopher Walken ... YouTube (56:02)

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK         C                    

USA  Great Britain  China  (113 mi)  2016  d:  Ang Lee          Official Facebook

A colossal failure of a movie, one that falls off the rails and then only continues to get worse, yet in spite of the jumbled mess of this rather ambitious series of mixed messages, most all of which go awry, there is a hint of something intriguing underneath all of this, even if filmmaker Ang Lee himself, director of such masterful works as Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), fails to find it.  While the Taiwanese filmmaker has always been an outsider looking in at American culture, the voice underneath the film actually belongs to novelist Ben Fountain, whose 2012 novel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013, is a Kurt Vonnegut style comic satire on American military adventurism in 2004, set on a single day just when the U.S. is losing confidence in the Iraq war.  On Thanksgiving Day, at the home of the Dallas Cowboy football team in Texas Stadium, a young platoon of eight war Iraq war heroes from Bravo Squad are returned temporarily from their combat zone after an intense firefight is captured on a video that goes viral, sent on a well-publicized victory tour in an 8-day swing back home, given the celebrity treatment, culminating with an invite to the football festivities to honor and celebrate their service in a halftime spectacle.  Contrasting the realities of the war with America's perceptions back home, the film refreshingly paints a completely different mindset in the minds of the battle-hardened soldiers than that of civilians, who are baffled throughout and continue to have this wide-eyed mythological view of heroism traced back to John Wayne in cowboy movies.   While the story itself is remarkable for its near surreal depiction of war as an intense, hyper-reality whose traumatized imprint is left on soldiers and their families, where its depiction of bravery in action is balanced by the modest and humble views of the combatants, who are still just 19-year old economically deprived kids who are often driven to join the armed forces based on a paucity of opportunities in their own lives, where they are seen as young guys who are desperate enough to try just about anything.  Told through flashbacks in a psychologically existential manner, almost exclusively through the perspective of Specialist Billy Lynn (Joe Alwyn), whose individual thoughts often seem to freeze on the frame, yet the uneven filmmaking techniques are the film’s real undoing, never really capturing the spirit of the bond between the Bravo unit, who have their own unique humor, or the feeling of just how distanced and disaffected they are from civilian life, creating instead an odd mix of plodding, awkward moments that are only accentuated onscreen, creating an uneven tone of humor and pathos, authenticity and surrealism, dream and reality, becoming one of the more uncomfortable viewing experiences of the year.

Perhaps the biggest problem is the director’s decision to use a super high 4K resolution (twice the pixels as an ordinary film), actually shooting the film in high-tech 3D, relying upon two cameras running at five times the normal speed, 120 frames per second instead of the normal 24, creating unprecedented clarity of image, even when seen in typical 2K digital projections, yet instead of heightening the film’s reality it only serves to accentuate the wildly exaggerated artificiality on display.  It’s impossible to watch this film without being aware every second that the visual style feels forced, becoming more of a distraction where viewers are treated to an artificially constructed alternate reality.  With that in mind, the dream sequences, flashbacks, characters lost in thought or caught up in a spiritual moment, feel eerily undermined mechanically, as if the technique itself is draining the life force out of the film, where the sterile, impersonal world of a football stadium could just as easily be Las Vegas or an ocean cruise, where it simply feels like another world outside our own.  Thrust in the middle of this circus-like, Colosseum atmosphere, Billy seems to resemble Billy Pilgrim’s alienated, mind-wandering journey from Kurt Vonnegut’s epic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, using flashbacks instead of time traveling, where the effect is the same, as he struggles to come to grips with the huge disconnect between the realities of war at home and abroad.  Coming from a small town in Texas, we get a glimpse of Billy’s family life, where his physically disfigured sister Kathryn (Kristen Stewart) fiercely opposes the war and actively works to help Billy from being redeployed back to Iraq immediately following the game.  Since he nearly pulverized the jerk that dumped her after a car accident left her with multiple scars, he joined the military as a way of atoning for his past sins.  Eerily undermining the victory party, but easily overlooked by citizens at home, is the death of Shroom (Vin Diesel), the philosophical platoon sergeant whose life Billy tried to save, awarded the Silver Star for his heroic efforts, but nonetheless missing from all the hollow celebratory festivities that were meant to inspire support for the war effort, where Billy’s left to consider the ultimate irony, “It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.”  And therein lies the problem with the film, as it attempts to lambaste the shallowness of the “Victory Tour” while at the same time honor the troops, whose thankless, life-threatening work rarely gets the support it deserves.  In a film that tries to have it both ways, it fails instead of succeeds, becoming an ugly spectacle where the clarity of image only accentuates how embarrassingly off-the-mark this film really is.

Attempting to hold his men together is Sergeant David Dime, Garrett Hedlund, a straight, non-nonsense kind of Bravo Company leader in the Ollie North mold, who barks out instructions that instantly bring the men into formation in seemingly chaotic moments, like when the ferocity of the fireworks display takes the men back to their battleground stations, wreaking havoc with their mental psyches, reliving the traumas of war while supposedly standing at attention during a jingoistic half-time show behind Beyoncé fronting Destiny’s Child and a host of scantily-clad dancers, yet at the same time the guy has a “Fuck you” attitude with phoniness and insincerity of any kind.  Unfortunately, in a football stadium, the place is crawling with American citizens that appear to be well-wishers and supporters who have seen nothing of war and haven’t a clue what a soldier’s life is really about, such as a brief appearance from Tim Blake Nelson as a crude Texas oilman who associates his creed of “drill baby drill” as a sign of patriotism, as if getting rich and fighting in a foreign country are part of the same mindset, yet one is an oil-rich fat cat while the others come from economically disadvantaged communities, where the hypocrisy is so blatant that Sgt. Dime’s dismissive response to the man simply blows his mind, as he’s not in lockstep with the same exaggerated patriotic mentality on display.  The film is not so much about Iraq as it is a sharp critique of the phony patriotism and corporate greed in George W. Bush’s Texas.  None personify that more than Norm Oglesby (Steve Martin) as Jerry Jones, the self-made, oil-rich, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who is willing to put these men in motion pictures to cement their heroic legacy, but after promising six figures each, lowballs what he’s willing to pay them, where the defiant soldiers simply walk away from the deal.  “Your story,” he pompously tells Billy, “no longer belongs to you.  It’s America’s story now.”  While the man may be a wheeler-dealer, he’s also a first-class cheapskate.  Yet just like Bush, Cheney, and Rove, wealthy men of status who went to law school to obtain a student deferment in order to avoid serving in Vietnam, what do they know about a grunt who’s barely making $14,800 a year?  “Vietnam, excuse me?  Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years?  Screw that.”  Billy starts wondering, “Maybe the game is just an ad for the ads.”  Out of this clouded hallucination comes a typical soldier’s dream, described in the book as “the sort of delusion a desperate soldier would dream up,” which comes in the form of Faison Zorn (Makenzie Leigh), one of the attractive Dallas Cheerleaders that makes flirtatious eye contact with Billy before making out behind the curtains.  She heaps effusive praise in Billy’s direction along with kisses, as if maybe she’s finally one of the few who’s capable of understanding him, yet she only sees him in a patriotic light, as a soldier doing his duty, not as a regular guy who’s contemplating not returning to combat.  That kind of guy she would drop in a second, as he’s not her idea of the American Dream.  As it turns out, the Bravo squad is not even their actual name, but a name given to them by a Fox News team that was embedded with them during the war, a signature designed to beef them up and sound more patriotic.  Somehow, whatever the intended message, it all gets lost in the jumbled mish mosh of American spectacle, missing the expertise of someone like Robert Altman, for instance, a director whose genius was creating order out of chaos in sprawling films like Brewster McCloud (1970), shot in the Houston Astrodome, but also MASH (1970) and Nashville (1975).