newcritics

"The Red Sox are always winning, until they lose."—Nicky Rogan, Game 6.

For some reason I’ve been watching a lot of movies set in New York City lately.  Heights, which stars Glen Close as a famous Broadway actress engaged in a sexual rivalry with her photographer daughter.  The Photographer, a strange and annoying little independent film filled with touches of magic realism about a, you guessed it, photographer who has lost his artistic soul and spends a dreamlike night wandering through the East Village trying to get it back.  Everyday People, another little independent film, this one about the last days of a restaurant in Brooklyn, a neighborhood institution, surrendering to gentrification.  The Great New Wonderful, which is really five short films about people trying to find their mental feet again after living through the shock and horror of 9/11.  And those three movies by Edward Burns, only two of which I wrote about despite my promise, Sidewalks of New York and The Groomsmen.

Next up:  Roger Dodger, about a womanizing jerk trying to teach his nephew how to be a womanizing jerk, and 13 Conversations About One Thing, which, I guess, chronicles thirteen conversations about one thing, but I don’t know what that one thing is.  I’ll let you know after I’ve watched it tonight.

The other night I watched Game 6, starring Michael Keaton and Robert Downey Jr as, respectively, a playwright with a new play about to open and the meanest, most dangerous, craziest drama critic in the world who is coming to review it.

If you like theater, like baseball, like the Red Sox especially, like New York City, like taxi cabs, like Don DeLillo, who wrote the screenplay, like Michael Keaton, like Robert Downey, like Bebe Neuwirth, who plays Keaton’s producer/mistress, like Bebe Neuwirth’s rear end, which gets a lot of attention, you will like Game 6 and like it enough that you’ll forget to notice while you’re watching it whether or not it’s actually a good movie.

Also if you like haircuts….  Michael Keaton’s character puts great faith in the power of getting a haircut to save a bad day that’s getting out of control.  Feeling down, feeling anxious, feeling confused, frightened, angry, or just a little off, get a haircut.  Settles you right down.  Puts things in perspective.

I like all those things, so I liked the movie and failed to notice whether or not it was actually good.

I did notice that all of the performances, by Keaton and Downey and Neuwirth, but also by Griffin Dunne as another playwright friend of Keaton’s, Catherine O’Hara as Keaton’s soon to be ex-wife, Harris Yulin as the star of Keaton’s play who happens to be suffering the effects of a parasite in his brain that makes him unable to remember his lines, and Ari Graynor as Keaton’s daughter, a rebel who just can’t put her heart into her rebellion, are very good.  Nobody does anything flashy.  They just do the very hard work of making their characters people apart from themselves—that is, of making us forget we are watching famous actors and think we’re watching real people.

I also noticed that Bebe’s Neuwirth’s rear end, although very lovely, is a very human rear end, which is neither here nor there, except as a compliment to Neuwirth’s lack of the usual movie star vanity that would have had other actresses hiring a personal trainer, requesting a body double, or murdering the costume designer who said, "In this scene, I see you in a G-string!"—but then she isn’t a movie star, she’s a Broadway song and dancewoman who does TV and movies to pay the bills—and as a reminder to Hollywood producers and regular human beings that very humanness in all body parts, faces as well as rear ends, can be very lovely.

Game 6 is set in 1986—on a very particular day in 1986 that Red Sox and Mets fans have already identified, Saturday, October 25, when the World Series between Boston and New York was five games old, with the Red Sox up 3 games to 2, one game away from their first World Championship since 1918, a day that finished in real life and finishes in the movie with the ball rolling under Bill Buckner’s glove and through his legs and the Sox and their fans having to wait another 20 years for their Championship.

Keaton’s character, Nicky Rogan, although born and bred in New York, is a lifelong Red Sox fan.  It’s because the first World Series he remembers was 1946’s, between the Sox and the St Louis Cardinals, and his fate was sealed when Pesky held the ball.

Since then he’s been devoted to the Red Sox.  Not really to them so much, though, as to the myriad, miraculous, and even artistic ways they’ve managed to get his hopes up over the years only to lose it all in the end and break his heart.  Nicky has been a very successful playwright with a career that sounds as though screenwriter Don DeLillo was modeling it on Neil Simon’s.   He’s written a number of well-crafted comedies, all box office smashes, but his new play is more serious and realistic, an autobiographical play about his childhood, his Brighton Beach Memoirs, a big risk for him, professionally and personally, so of course he’s nervous about its opening and it doesn’t help when he hears that Stephen Schwimmer (Downey), the most vicious critic in the history of theater criticism, a man who has made himself so despised among actors, playwrights, directors, and producers that he has to come to the theater in disguise and packing heat, will be reviewing his play.  To distract himself from his anxiety, Nicky tries to focus his attention on that night’s upcoming game.  Which means he spends most of the movie trying to talk baseball with the other characters whose attentions, naturally, are on other things and don’t want to talk baseball with him.

Nicky winds up skipping his own opening night to watch Game 6 in a bar with the cabbie who drove him there and her grandson whom she is babysitting by letting him ride around with him.  The cabbie and the grandson are from Boston and the two of them and Nicky are the only Red Sox fans in the bar, which means that for most of the night they are the only three happy and hopeful people in the joint, as the Red Sox look to be on their way to a victory so certain that even Nicky forgets his pessimism and starts expecting them to win.

If for no other reason, if you’re a fan, watch this movie to relive the feeling of watching that game and realizing ever so slowly that in fact the Red Sox were going to blow it.

"Stanley?  Why’s he bringing in Stanley?"

Since I don’t actually know if Game 6 is a good movie, I can’t call this a review and maybe I shouldn’t even have written it, but the movie raised a question I haven’t been able to answer.

It’s not about baseball.

It’s about art versus craft.

Nicky is a successful playwright, but he doesn’t regard himself as a very good one.  He calls himself a craftsman and makes a self-effacing distinction between what he does and what his friend Elliott Litvak (Dunne) does.  Elliott, Nicky insists, to Elliott himself mainly, is the artist.

The trouble is that Elliott is actually a former artist.  His career was wrecked by the vicious drama critic who wrote a review of one of his plays that was so brutal that it struck Elliott like a physical assault and crippled him, psychically.  He can’t write anymore.  He’s a wreck.  His confidence and strength of purpose have been knocked right out of him.

DeLillo’s screenplay isn’t explicit but it’s implied that what theater people call Schwimmer’s viciousness is in fact his honesty.  They fear and loathe him because he writes the truth.  Not the truth as he sees it—the truth.  Schwimmer is gifted—and cursed—with impeccable artistic judgment.  His reviews are always dead on because he knows.  He knows what is good and what isn’t and he can say why in a way that makes you know too that he’s right.

Elliott may be the real artist, the one with a vision and with taste and ambition and a sense of what is good and what isn’t, but he’s a minor artist.  His talent and skill aren’t sufficient to his purpose.  He has everything it takes to be an artistic genius except genius and Schwimmer has made him feel this as a fact he can’t resist or deny.

Nicky, on the other hand, doesn’t know what’s good and what’s bad, he only knows what works.  He’s sensitive enough and educated enough to understand this as something lacking in himself and to admire its presence in others.  But he’s also smart enough not to try to do what he isn’t made to do.  His new play isn’t an attempt at great drama; it’s the result of his having become that much better at his craft that he can try something more complex than another rearrangement of his usual jokes.

The upshot is that while neither he nor Elliott will ever write a great play, both have written good ones, but Nicky’s plays are just that much better.

So here’s my question.  Whose career has contributed more to the theater?  Whose plays have been more important?

When I was in high school we studied American Drama by reading from an anthology that included plays that were considered artistic masterpieces in their day but which nobody but the most hopelessly literal minded college drama department ever staged anymore—The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, Winterset by Maxwell Anderson, The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, others I can’t remember.  I hated all of them.  They struck me as so dead as to be soul-crushing.

Ok, I was precocious when it came to theater.  I’d already read all of Shakespeare’s plays.  But I’m sure that most of my classmates recognized the difference too, between how alive the 400 year old Romeo and Juliet was and how dead and laid out as if for their own wakes those museum pieces, only a few decades old, were.

Art is long, life is short, but all art isn’t for all time.  Even brilliant works of art fade over time and die.  Much of what Arthur Miller wrote is already only being kept alive artificially because it was written by the same guy who wrote Death of a Salesman.  Tennesse Williams’ plays will live longer because he wrote so many great roles for women and there just aren’t enough of those.  Eugene O’Neill…I think he’s down to a handful of living plays now.  And if those three glories are beginning to pass from the earth, how long for the world can Neil Simon’s work be?

His funniest play has been long overshadowed by the TV show, that he had no hand in writing, based on it.  Krugman and Randall, not Matthau and Lemmon, are Oscar and Felix.   His next best, Barefoot in the Park, can only be done as a period piece with lots of apologies.  And are the plays in the cycle that began with Brighton Beach Memoirs interesting in themselves or for the insight they give into the life and mind of the man who wrote The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park, in which case they’ll be done when those early plays are done?

The grand thing, of course, is to produce work that survives through the ages.

Next best is to turn out something that outlives you by a few generations.

But both are rare.  Most writers, artists, filmmakers, poets, composers, and musicians have to be content with doing work that they know is worthwhile for the moment.

That being the case, monetary rewards aside, whose career would you rather have, Nicky Rogan’s or Elliott Litvak’s?  Neil Simon’s or Maxwell Anderson’s?

The talented craftsman’s or the minor artist’s?

Game 6. Directed by Michael Hoffman.  Screenplay by Don DeLillo.  Starring Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Bebe Neuwirth, Catherine O’Hara, and Ari Graynor.  Double Play Productions.  2006.