I was doing a little cleaning around the house this morning and ran across this scrap of paper, one that has managed to travel half-way round the world with me, but that I've yet to transfer to a ledger I use for these little scraps—I keep setting it aside for later—it's a quote from Chekhov's short story "Lady with a Dog":


I was actually thinking of Chekhov, and had mentioned him to a friend the other night.  We'd just seen "The Rabbit Hole" at the Huntington, a play by David Lindsay-Abaire.  It could have used a little Checkhoving-up, is what I told my friend afterward. 

The most obvious problem with the play is that it's written like a sitcom, but one rejected by the networks that ends up on USA or something.  It's about a suburban couple (and some wacky relatives) whose four-year old son is hit by a car and killed, and how they try to work through their grief. It's an ordinary but powerful scenario, but I thought the play was flat.  It skittered along the surface, like a sitcom, and felt contrived whenever it tried to dive deeper. Jordan Lage's performance as the father of the boy was particularly wooden and his emoting was embarrassing to watch.  Good thing he covered his face whenever he had to cry. 

The crystallizing theme of "the rabbit hole" was not in the least effective, either, and felt like a playwrights 101 trope: this being a play, it needed, well, a metaphor, or something, right?  But nothing crystallized, and the playwright's attempt at catharsis (the mother's meeting with the teenage boy—played by the very dishy Troy Deutsch—who was driving the car and who has written a story called "The Rabbit Hole," dedicated to the boy, about alternate universes in which we live out other fates) doesn't feel particularly cathartic so much as it feels like it's supposed to be cathartic.  But I don't go to plays to humor the playwright.  It's not enough to want to do catharsis.  If you can't do catharsis, don't waste my time.  Art, at a minimum, should move us.  And yes, that is The Royal We.

Having said this, the banality of the script does unwittingly point to a crisis of motivation, and possibly of depth, in art, if not in life.  Whether it applies to life obviously depends on the degree to which you believe art does imitate life, and, further, whose life?

The thing about the play's topic is it seems fool-proof. I mean, who could not be moved by a situation like this?  The problem is, art isn't life, however much it may imitate it—in this case, a child did not get hit by a car—these people aren't suffering that unimaginable loss.  Knowing that, we have to wonder why you called us here, and why we should sit through it. 

I went to see The Fountain last night after Thanksgiving dinner.  I hadn't read any reviews of it.  I'd seen the trailer, and thought, yeah, why not?  I mean, Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz.  Nice.  But as my friend and I negotiated (his pick was Stranger Than Fiction), I got more adamant about my choice.  And I have to say, I was not disappointed.  This film was a weeper, and I don't care what anybody says, I got a damn good weeping out of it.  I love a good cry in the dark of a movie theater. There's nothing like it. 

I'll tell you this: Jordan Lage could learn a lot about crying from Hugh Jackman.  He cries in this film every conceivable way there is to cry, and every time he does you want to cry along.  (I see a great drinking game in the making here.)  But seriously, I have never—in all my years of movie-going—never, ever seen better crying than I saw from Hugh Jackman in this film.  He should get a special award.  I'm not joking.  This is historical. 

But I don't honestly know if, objectively speaking, this movie is really as moving as it was for me, subjectively speaking, so buyer beware.  Personally, I fell for everything: the gorgeous score (by Clint Mansell, much of it performed by his group, the Kronos Quartet), the mystical, mesmerizing imagery, the beautiful actors (even if Weisz can't quite settle on an accent and Jackman as conquistador sometimes looks disturbingly like a wild-eyed Mick Fleetwood—for the most part they're presentable enough).  I yielded my critical faculties, threw open my arms, and said, "take me!"  And it did. 

But I was willing. 

Partly this is because of my intimate experience of my dad's death from cancer a couple years ago.  The Fountain deals with something similar, and does it in a way I found original, if sometimes seriously overwrought.  There was silly dialog, which I chose to ignore, and there was always the risk of overripe performances, with such an over-the-top concept film.  But I think the risk, and the small failures in execution of such a big idea, were worth it.  We don't have a precise language for what was being explored here.  When you are losing or have lost someone you love, this is all too clear.  And in a way, that's what this movie gets at, and most beautifully in its greatest excesses.

The boldness of some of the imagery (tempered by the fundamental conventionality of the plot arc, despite the story taking place on three different planes) reminded me a little of Tarkovsky.  Particularly of Solyaris.  Which addressed some of the same issues, but without the comfort of the archetypal religious imagery and the sentimental metaphors.  Solyaris succeeds through sheer filmic effrontery, without deigning to explain itself.  The Fountain fails—inasmuch as it fails (I seem to be regaining some of my critical faculties)—because as audacious as it wants to be, it still wants us to like it.  Too much to be truly audacious.  

Do you think that someday filmmakers will start to trust their audiences enough again to really blow us away? 

Until they do, we'll just have to settle for a good cry on cue with Hugh.