Vanya on 42nd Street
First screened from the mid- to late-1990s / Most recently screened and reviewed in February 2022
One of my Favorite Films, as written up from 2005-2015
Director: Louis Malle. Cast: Wallace Shawn, Brooke Smith, Larry Pine, Julianne Moore, George Gaynes, Phoebe Brand, Lynn Cohen, André Gregory, Madhur Jaffrey, Jerry Mayer. Screenplay: André Gregory (based on the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, as translated by David Mamet). VOR:⑤
The very rare Chekhov adaptation, screen or stage, to capture convincingly his elusive register and mood. A stunning paean to minimalism's power.
I rewatched this for a lecture I'm giving Tuesday about Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore but could just as easily have chosen it as a companion piece to Drive My Car or as a sure thing on a frigid weekend morning when I could use the lift of great art. For a long time I specifically avoided rewatching Vanya on 42nd Street so that it could linger the way a perfect night at the theater lingers, as a rich memory but only a memory. But there's so much more to recover or discover on going back to Vanya, even beyond the famously silken transition from street-dressed actors slipping suddenly yet elliptically into character and into a distant time and place, or the unique blend of the vernacular and the rarefied in David Mamet's adaptation ("picayune"!), or the masterful performances of the cast, among whom Moore, Larry Pine, and Brooke Smith have always been my treasures.
Today, I would add to that list how intimately and carefully Declan Quinn shot this movie, not just with expert sensitivity in framing the ensemble but with a precise balance of luminosity and chill that looks very little like his radiantly colorful lensing on other films. (You can sense some aspects of Leaving Las Vegas around the corner, but even that film has more color in the backdrops of its comparably probing, compassionate close-ups.) Nancy Baker's editing was surely just as decisive as Louis Malle's direction or André Gregory's longstanding midwifery and oversight or Quinn's camera setups in choreographing Vanya's remarkable rotation of our assigned points of emphasis, over time and in individual scenes. Some beats in the movie are about who we see, expectedly or unexpectedly. Some are about the intuitive or provocative combinations of people in the frame, given who is talking or what is happening. Some are about withholding our gaze from whomever we expect to be scrutinizing, whether to make the audience lean in or to extend empathy and discretion to the character.
I love that Joshua Redman was recruited to compose the score, since this whole production feels so scrupulous about Chekhov but also so willing to riff on the elements he provides. I love how the shots of the majestic yet crumbling New Amsterdam theater evoke something of the imperiled Russian estate under constant discussion, but without offering a direct analogy, much less belaboring one. I cherish how Vanya doesn't just stake out a captivating convergence of cinema and theater but also between rehearsal and performance. A whole series of actorly choices—Shawn's mewling like a puppy dog, Pine calling various forms of attention to Shawn's baldness, Moore filling her sad performance with sudden laughs at unexpected lines—feel just as much like cast members trying things out and surprising each other as they feel like performance notes arrived at through long-term, focused exploration, executed to feel more extemporaneous than they are. As we watch this movie, the difference hardly matters, but both registers are offered to us. That said, in heightening our attention to performance, itself a name for something in flux and something stabilized, Vanya doesn't lose the threads of characterization, theme, or milieu that are essential to the play.
What a movie, and what a final movie. I'm not sure anybody ever signed off their career with more poignancy or graceful perfection than Malle did. Grade:A
