Brando and Newman and Me

This week's entry is a short one. It started as another email conversation with my father, poet Rowell Hoff, who currently lives with his wife Carol in China.

Dad:

We just watched last night the Paul Newman movie "Nobody's Fool". We sort of think he may be, if there is one, the best actor around. What I notice is that I forget about Newman; the person I am seeing is the person in the movie.

I read a review of this movie, the reviewer mentioned that Newman and Brando started out at the same time, the same classes, etc. But what happened to Brando after all? He started maybe imitating himself, maybe just tired of it all, maybe confused (certainly confused!) maybe whatever. Newman perfected his art, there is no other word for it. Did you see him in the movie about Earl Long (don't remember the title)? Cool Hand Luke? Butch Cassidy? The Sting? etc. etc. etc.

Me:
That movie was called Blaze, but no, I haven't seen it. Interesting that you should mention Paul Newman. He is by far my writing partner's favorite actor, Cool Hand Luke his favorite film. And of course both Butch Cassidy and The Sting are two of my absolute top films. I too think he is close to the best actor around. Nobody's Fool was not a great film, but certainly a very good one, and he was fine in it. That particular class at the Actor's Studio produced a lot of wonderful actors, not the least of which were my two acting instructors in college who met and married there. (In other words, my training was second hand the same as Newman's and Brando's. Sort of... Okay, that's really inconsequential to the conversation at hand, but what the hell.)

In terms of raw acting ability, I do think Brando far outweighs Newman, but Brando got very bitter about the industry very early on and Newman just dove in and made it work for himself, becoming a director, producer and better actor. After just "phoning in" (I hate that phrase, but it does describe it) performances for many years, and doing things just for the money, (such as Superman for goodness sakes. A fun film, but what the hell is he doing in it? Not much. Feh) Brando did kind of disappear. He didn't make a movie for almost ten years after Apocalypse Now (what a performance that was!) and The Formula. You can see that he probably had resistance to his whole life by looking at his physical body over those years. Then he started doing some small roles in things and it looked like he was choosing movies he wanted to do and really did his homework. He had only one scene in a movie called Dry White Season with Donald Sutherland in which he never stood up from his chair but walked away with the film. (It was one of those films that bother me a bit because it is about a non-white ethnic group, but seen through White Man's eyes as if that were the only way to communnicate the strange, bizarre Other. Or as if to say, the white oppressor isn't all that bad, see? Look how he feels for the downtrodden. Feh. In this case, the movie is about the struggle of blacks in South Africa but seen through Sutherland's eyes, who plays an upper middle class Afrikaner. But Brando is so wonderful, subtle, he almost makes up for that.) Of course, he followed that up with The Freshman, a movie even he disparaged.

Brando did a slightly bigger role in a caper film a few years before he died called The Score that was a hoot (although one major plot point didn't make a lot of sense) with two other actors that are close to being in Newman and Brando's league: Edward Norton and Robert De Niro. (De Niro was also an Actor's Studio alum, although much later.) I think it was Brando's last movie. Before that he went back and forth between great stuff and trash, following Don Juan DeMarco, a delightful film in which he is delightful, with The Island of Dr. Moreau, a dreadful film in which he is dreadful.

Newman has done some clunkers (don't see Twilight, even though it has another couple of favorites of mine in it, it's almost unwatchable...) but I will see anything he's in and I rarely see a film just because Brando is in it.

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel "Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend".

Baseball Movies (Believe it or Not) and Passion

I recently saw the end of Field of Dreams on television, one of those movies that whenever I stumble across it I end up watching from that point to the end. (Two others are The Usual Suspects and Shawshank Redemption. I've watched the end of those movies more times than I can count.) When Field of Dreams first came out I almost didn't go see it because I thought it was a movie about baseball and I simply wasn't interested. I did go, it was the only thing playing at the time that a friend wanted to see, and I'm very glad I did. It's sort of a modern fairly tale, I guess, and it's about a lot of things but mostly it's about father's and sons. I've probably seen it all the way through twenty or more times and I doubt I've ever made it to the end without crying. Okay, my mother used to say she cried at supermarket openings and I am her son. Don't get me wrong, it's funny and charming, not sad at all, but the emotional impact always hits me broadside.

Interesting that I was objecting because it was a baseball movie; turns out three of my favorite films (of which there are hundreds, I must confess) are baseball movies: Field of Dreams, of course, then Bull Durham (another movie with Kevin Costner, who I insist I don't like, but really love in both of these films) and The Natural with Robert Redford (who I almost always love.) League of Their Own is another good baseball movie, not high on my favorites list but good in any case.

Bull Durham is interesting for many reasons. It was the first time I saw Tim Robins, who I have come to think is one of the bigger talents of the last few decades, and who is close to the top of the list of people I want to meet and work with. The next thing I saw him in was Jacob's Ladder (a strangely compelling, surreal contemplation on war, responsibility and individual redemption that stays with me even though I've only seen it a very few times) and I was shocked to realize it was the same actor who played the punk kid in Bull Durham.

In any case, Field of Dreams is about a man "who never did a crazy thing in his life until he heard The Voice," which tells him to plow a third of his corn field under and build a baseball diamond on it so that Shoeless Joe Jackson (played by Ray Liotta fairly early in his career) can redeem himself from the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal. But, as is often the case where it's used in American stories from Bernard Malamud on, baseball is really a symbol for something else, something often quintessentially American, but also something universal. Baseball is the one thing Costner's character had to connect with his father, who died before they reconciled, and is something he teaches to his daughter. It is the one thing he can use to connect on a personal level with his favorite author (played magnificently larger than life by James Earl Jones), even though the author refuses to admit he ever liked the sport. It makes me want to be a fan of the sport so that I can have that same connection with my father. Of course, that wouldn't help, as my father isn't a fan of it, either, as far as I know, so we'll have to stick with movies and writing as our bond.

Often, there is something intangible that makes a movie work. In the case of Field of Dreams, a lot of its success was due to the passion that everyone who made the film had for the project. They all believed in it and that belief practically glows from the screen. Passion is my favorite word and I am attracted to that kind of passion even when it is directed toward something I am not passionate about.

In Bull Durham, I think, baseball stands in for passion. And it's a very passionate film. It's a very different movie from Field of Dreams, much more lusty, and Costner is again quite good in it. It was where I fell in love with Susan Sarandon and, as I say, where I discovered Tim Robins. (It seems it was where Susan Sarandon discovered him, also, they've been living together ever since.) It makes the distinction between youthful, undisciplined passion, embodied by Robins' character, and that of Costner's, no less lusty, but grown up, matured, partly because of the added element of respect. One of the best speeches Costner has ever delivered on screen is the "what I believe in" speech. What he believes in includes the hanging curve ball, the soul and the small of a woman's back. Every time I watch that film, by the end of that speech, I believe in all those things, also.

Where Field of Dreams finds a powerful emotional core in its gentle examination of family ties and following a dream, Bull Durham is simply a delight from beginning to end. It is delightful to watch this young buck (Robins) be forced to grow up and this slightly over the hill ringer (Costner) fight against making his peace with the world. And Kevin Costner is in both of them, of all things. Who knew?

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel "Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend".

Woody Allen, Manhattan and the Art of Film

Some people don't like, or don't get Woody Allen and wonder why he is so revered. I think he can be brilliant. The films of his that I have liked, I have loved. Manhattan is one of my favorites. Yes, it is, as some might say, about "whiny aimless people with boring neuroses". That, I think, is part of the point. It has always fascinated me that the most mature, stable and intelligent character in it is the teenager played by Muriel Hemingway. The thing I find amazing about it, though, is that practically every shot is a work of art. This is the beginning, I think, of Allen's experimentation with cinematic technique, and it pays off handsomely. I think you could pull any one frame at random from the film and it would be composed brilliantly. And it is composed that way in order to tell the story, not as an end. I find directors that show off beautifully lit and angled shots often get in the way of the film. I find that often of Allen, actually, (take a look at the nausea inducing hand held camera work in Husbands and Wives) but not in Manhattan. In fact, Allen insisted that it be presented on television, VHS or DVD only in widescreen format to keep the integrity of the shots intact, the first (perhaps only?) film maker to ever do so.

And, yes, given that, most of his stories are about whiny aimless people with boring neuroses. I do recommend "Broadway Danny Rose," though, as a charming tribute to spunk. It is (very) loosely based on a real New York talent agent who actually had a roster much like the one portrayed in the film, an agent who took on the oddest of talent, but who believed in them and supported them beyond all reason. The real agent that it's based on had Andrew "Dice" Clay among his talent pool, but most of his acts were odd variety and specialty acts. I haven't seen it in a while, but remember being utterly charmed by it. It is told as a series of tales by actors and performers sitting around a table at a New York deli, trying to outdo each other telling "Danny Rose" stories, until one comes up with the ultimate tale. And there is one scene in a hanger full of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade floats that I remember as making me almost choke with laughter. Love and Death is also a good film; a fairly silly but intelligent comedy about Napoleon of all things.

Hannah and Her Sisters is another one that I liked a lot. Allen seemed to grow up in an odd way with that film. I mean Allen himself, not necessarily his art or film making. There seemed far less neurotic, juvenile behavior and the situations, characters and issues presented in it also seemed, somehow, more mature.

The latest by Allen, Match Point, surprised me. It was placed in London rather than New York, which everyone seems to think is the main point of departure and the most notable thing about the film, but it was other things about it that surprised me. It is unrelentingly nihilistic, I think, the whole point being that you win or lose completely by chance, by where the ball falls after it hits the top of the net, not by any endemic goodness or strength of character or act of redemption or even effort on your part. This seems to me to be the biggest point of departure from his other films. (And perhaps he needed to travel to London to make that departure.) Yes, his characters have often been obsessed with death (especially the characters he plays) and have been neurotic and frequently even selfish, but there has usually been an underlying goodness, even sweetness in all of his people. Even the animalistic brutes in Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy played by Jose Ferrer and Tony Roberts (what ever happened to him? He used to be the quintessential white bread foil for Allen) learn about the higher levels of love and human relationships by the end of the movie. The performances in Match Point are quite good (not unusual for Woody Allen, who has gotten the best performances ever from many of his actors) and the story is compelling, but his departure of mood and intent left me a bit cold.

There are so many other Allen films that I love (how could I not talk about Zelig or Purple Rose of Cairo, for goodness sake?) but they will have to wait for some future post. Anyway, I think Woody Allen is revered partly because he has experimented with the art of film making and brought it places other film makers haven't had the foresight or courage to go, partly because he tells compelling, interesting and unusual stories, partly because he gets such intimate performances, but mostly because there is simply no other film maker even remotely like him.

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel "Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend".