My Panel Discussion With Andre
Who is Wallace Shawn,
exactly? He's been around for years, yet it's still hard to know. In arty
circles, he's famous as the highbrow exhibitionist who wrote and starred in
My Dinner With Andre , but there's more to Shawn than grandiose nerd
angst. Millions of small children around the country could pick him out in a
lineup. They'd know him as the dotty character actor from mass-appeal films
like The Princess Bride and Clueless --a guy who, unlike the
earnest playwright Shawn, appears to have stopped taking anything in life
seriously, least of all himself. On the contrary, he hams up his resemblance to
a clown and wheezes for laughs (and, presumably, a paycheck).
Shawn
doesn't appear in this film based on his latest play, but his schizoid spirit
haunts it all the same. The Designated Mourner is one of those sobering
allegories set in the not-so-distant future in a country not unlike our own.
The actors deliver lots of brooding speeches, and the plot is a downer. On the
other hand, the star is Mike Nichols, in his first-ever film appearance and
with a sneering comic timing that has somehow improved in the 30-odd years
since he stopped performing with Elaine May.
Nichols plays Jack, a shrewd, middle-aged pragmatist. Years
ago, in college, Jack impulsively married smart but prissy Judy (Miranda
Richardson), unaware that by doing so, he was entering a stifling ivory tower.
At the time, Judy's father, Howard (David de Keyser), was one of the country's
leading intellectuals. He was a great man but also a jerk; he surrounded
himself with suck-ups and expected his daughter to wait on him hand and foot.
For a while Jack admired Howard's strong convictions and his ability,
apparently rare in this bleak hypothetical future, to understand the poetry of
John Donne. But one day Jack admitted to himself that he didn't give a damn
about art or poetry, that Howard got on his nerves, and that anyway he'd fallen
out of love with Judy. Relieved, he left her and her clique behind.
Director
David Hare has preserved the no-frills setup of the stage production he oversaw
in London. (It makes sense that the London production was more successful than
the American one, and that the director and two of these three actors in the
film are English. Since when in America have we really obsessed over the fate
of intellectuals?) The play unfolds in monologues, with Jack making a witty
case for his desertion of Judy, then Judy speaking, then Howard, then back to
Jack, and so on; the three of them sit at a long table and talk into the
camera, occasionally pouring themselves glasses of water as panelists at a
conference do. The drama comes from the way Shawn craftily shifts your sympathy
back and forth among characters. Just when Jack has you convinced that Judy is
a pretentious albatross (Richardson's very British clucking-tongue routine
helps here), Judy's stock rises as she stoically describes how the intolerant
new government had begun to crack down on her and her father. Then, slowly, it
becomes clear that the government is going to do worse than harass the
intellectuals. And you realize--or you're supposed to realize--that however
arrogant and annoying you find Judy and Howard, some bottom-line human decency
will be violated if they are harmed.
The writing is ostentatiously literary, and I
expect that although a hard-core band of fans will praise The Designated
Mourner for condemning the vulgarian times we live in, a larger group will
think it's just more intolerable hooey from that highbrow exhibitionist. It's
actually better than hooey, but it's also a hopelessly conflicted piece of
work. The whole conception of "the intellectual life" feels dated: The film is
set in the future, but its grasp of male-female relations harks back to the
1950s, or earlier. Judy starts off as a virgin, then becomes a servant to be
traded back and forth by the men. Later, when Jack casts off the brainy
lifestyle, he becomes a porn addict. In the Shawnian scheme of things, being or
not being an intellectual would appear to be an issue only for men, as if the
only thing that kept them from humping everything like craven dogs was a
fondness for sonnets. Then there's the problem of what's killing the
intellectuals off. They are themselves partly to blame, because they're such
insular snobs. But the big villain is a power-mad government whose only agenda
seems to be hunting down and killing smart people. Shawn has been vocal about
his belief that theater should be more political, but this government of
philistine meanies seems more like a cheap device designed to give his play
some tension. All he's really telling us is: Beware of people with bad
taste.
Besides
being anachronisms, the intellectuals are underwritten and deliberately
unattractive. It's Jack who hogs all the energy, as if Shawn the highbrow
sketched out a play and Shawn the clown took over the writing. And Nichols, who
specializes in 100-proof irony, is the clown's ideal front man. With his
flushed and blotchy skin, his narrow feminine nose, his gap-toothed grin, and
his eyebrows that rise to meet each other like sides of a triangle, Nichols
looks like a scary blend of Hugh Hefner and Alfred E. Neumann. He's charismatic
and monstrous. In what must be one of the greatest nasal performances of all
time, he rasps and chuckles and seduces us into thinking that he's a detached
but basically trustworthy guy--our friendly narrator. Then out of the blue he
calls Judy a "stupid bitch," and we realize he's missing a soul.
And yet, before he turns completely sour, Jack makes a
pretty unbeatable case for leaving the cloister. Once he gets away from Howard
and Judy and their over-serious, isolated friends, he discovers a kind of
peace. He realizes how noisy and restless his mind has always been, "an endless
tinkling of reportage and commentary." He sees how he's always trying to
squeeze everything into concepts--this is Beautiful, that isn't--instead of
taking in life as it is. He experiences silence for the first time, and finds
out that it's all right. Sounds a little like Buddhism. But still, the segment
of the movie in which Jack begins testing what it would be like to live in the
present is funny and original. Up to this point, the audience has been watching
with the spaced-out, slightly bored respect one feels when confronted by a
medieval Flemish altar piece. But when Jack starts making fun of all the
irrelevant thoughts that clog his brain--"I like poetry. I like Rembrandt ...
murmur, murmur, murmur, murmur"--we wake up, recognizing the sound of our own
inner babble.
For a moment, Shawn climbs
off his high horse, and the movie breathes. Then the moment passes, and it
becomes clear that all he wants to do is wag his finger at the know-nothings.
The last intellectuals die off, and Jack heads directly for the gutter. Toward
the end, Shawn has him place a volume of John Donne in the bathtub and pee and
shit on it. We're supposed to mourn, for Howard, for Judy, for Jack's soul, and
even for poor, harmless John Donne. But it's tempting to say "good
riddance."
Jack (Mike Nichols) on
highbrow vs. lowbrow (22 seconds) :
"One of Judy's problems":
Jack and Judy (Miranda Richardson) (39 seconds) :
