The plays themselves are very weak and very dated. They lack effective central themes, relying instead on the novelty (a century ago) of a slice-of-life look at unlikely stage characters, rough and tumble sailors who quarrel and drink too much. A press release suggests that The Early Plays “explores themes of longing and eternity,” but press releases are known to be generous.

“Mr. Maxwell himself was unsure if they deserved staging,” according to one report, “since he felt the plays sounded as if they were by a writer finding his voice.”

In trying to replicate the cadences and dialects of sailors from around the world, O’Neill created a casting nightmare. This language problem apparently stymied even the estimable Elizabeth LeCompte of The Wooster Group, who had wanted (for some reason) to do the plays for years but finally decided that only Richard Maxwell could solve the problems.

The New York Times reported that Elizabeth LeCompte said “I didn’t know how to deal with the dialect of the play without it becoming cliché, so I figured Richard, a writer of real rigor, could figure it out.”

And he did. Or at least he decided to eliminate the problem of accents. “When we read through with everyone trying the accents, it just wasn’t working,” Maxwell told Gothamist. “Happily, we found a way to satisfy the requirements of the text without doing accents, and it’s dialect. There’s a distinction between dialect and accent. If you say the lines as they’re written, that’s satisfying the dialect without worrying about, well what’s the accent going to be.”

Sounds reasonable. It also helps to get around  Eugene O’Neill’s efforts, an embarrassment even at the time, to recreate black dialect in some of his plays.

“I feel like once we did that,” Maxwell said about eliminating accent,  “it became easier for us to attack the text. It made it easier for us to get it across in its pure form.”

Unfortunately, the pure form loses its musicality when delivered by an actor following the director’s flat, minimalist delivery style. In fact, parts of this production sounded less like a live production than like actors “running their lines” when they are learning their parts.

That New York Times article characterizes Maxwell’s directorial style as “a process of purification, focusing on stripping away artifice, cutting away excess interpretation and aiming for lines delivered neutrally.”

I have no quarrel with that minimalist style, when it is appropriate to the text, but early O’Neill isn’t early Pinter. Nevertheless it is churlish to criticize a contemporary director who so respects scripts.

Because O’Neill’s early scripts are truly weak, I was eager to see what New York City Players and The Wooster Group would do to bring them alive to a 2012 audience. Perhaps I missed a great triumph of production over material, but I suspect instead that the inherent problems Richard Maxwell acknowledged while developing the production are beyond anyone’s abilities, even The Wooster Group and New York City Players.

The young Eugene O’Neill was not only looking for his voice (never to find it in the cacophony of sailors’ voices), he was looking too for the playwriting principles that bring theater alive. He was looking too for tragic characters and compelling stories, not the vignettes and sketches that comprise these early plays.

[Edit Feb. 24, 2012] Ben Brantley of The New York Times just reviewed The Early Plays and came to a similar conclusion: “The style is stripped-down, straightforward and somnolent in the classic Maxwell manner, but without — I’m sorry to report — the usual Maxwell impact.” My thinking is that the fault lies primarily with the young Eugene O’Neill, who wrote these one-cats while still learning playwriting. He was so enamored with language that he had not yet learned the power of silences. Of course, few playwrights before the 1950s understood that.

John Hurt in the Gate production of Krapp’s Last Tape Photo Anthony Woods

Michael Colgan directed and James McConnell designed the light. While my guess is that an actor probably needs greater skill to play Lear or Hamlet than Krapp, John Hurt’s performance seems so great as to be inimitable. After this experience, my next trip to Dublin will certainly include the Gate Theatre, just as my trips to London usually include Donmar Warehouse productions.

Krapp’s Last Tape presents a dismal, fatalistic world view, but Beckett’s comedy, moving between clownishness and irony, provides a workable happy ending of sorts. If we cannot finally deny the grim realities about life and ourselves that we try hard to ignore most of our lives, at least we can join Beckett in getting past a narcissistic reaction. Using Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, Krapp ends in the depression stage, tipping perhaps into acceptance, but Beckett reached acceptance long ago. Beckett is Ecclesiastes with a sense of humor.

Disillusionment, where is thy sting! It’s hard to be upset about mortality, loss, waste, and personal failure when theatre is this good!

Beckett’s script is so tight and perfect as to seem impervious to tinkering. Every director doing Shakespeare seems to cut out or rearrange scenes, but who could do that with Krapp’s Last Tape? Good sense would forbid it, even if Beckett and now his estate did not strictly forbid deviation from his scripts.

The brevity of Krapp’s Last Tape is utterly appropriate to its theme, both vast and simple, about the brevity of life and our isolation in the present moment. This performance opens with a remarkably long part in which Krapp sits motionless, a minimalist, painterly coup de theatre that simultaneously creates suspenseful anticipation and embodies the suspended animation of life in which Beckett’s characters so often wait.

Beckett remains a master of theatrical effect whose gestic and temporal devices make text secondary. The timing in this production seems perfect, perhaps paradoxically since most of Krapp’s actions seem casual. One impulsive sweep of Krapp’s right hand conveys a staggering moment of recognition for Krapp, and perhaps for the audience.

The very best theatre is not comforting entertainment. It fulfills the classic role of Greek tragedy by bringing a community together to confront home truths about themselves and their society, not just about characters on stage. American theatre today too often does the opposite, pandering to our need for reassurance, our desire to feel superior to others, and our wish to splash happily in the shallow end of the emotional and political pool. In evidence, I offer Love, Loss and What I Wore.

John Gardner once asserted that although Beckett’s audiences should “cry out with tragic recognition,” they instead merely laugh, while sensing no further connection than that they, too, once felt as miserable as Beckett’s characters, but snapped out of it.

Perhaps. One cannot actually know how individuals in an audience absorb and are changed by what they see on stage, but everyone who goes to serious theatre has been profoundly moved there once in a while. We can hope that most in an audience are moved towards deeper understanding. At theatre prices today, why waste the opportunity?

To the extent that we do glimpse reality and then fall back into denial, we emulate many of Beckett’s characters. To the extent that we muster the courage to experience our own recognition scenes, we acknowledge Beckett’s greatness.

I enjoyed this production immensely, because its successful moments were solid and its weaker aspects, as I see them, are both consonant with the director’s apparent intentions and interesting to those of us who want to learn something about theatre from every production.

Charles Isherwood rightly calls the production “operatic” and “relentlessly turbulent” in his New York Times Review. Director Lucy Bailey and William Dudley, the set and video designer, do not leave the gathering and clashing armies to our imaginations.

William Dudley’s videos, especially looped crowd scenes and Roman cityscapes engulfed in flames, are constant, effective reminders that the characters are small and the world outside is large. This seems very effective at supporting the director’s political emphasis, suggesting that the most fearsome potency lies in barely controllable Roman mobs, not in the characters.

This production rivals Broadway for sheer scale, elaborate setting, large cast, and emphasis on spectacle. In short, for cost. Whatever quibbles an audience member might have about aspects of this production, we are comforted by the idea that all of the cost went to support a worthy script, not Spiderman.

Expensive productions even by The Royal Shakespeare Company might end soon, as the UK dramatically cuts arts and other spending. The UK is moving away from the European model of serious state arts support to the American model, far more dependent on box-office sales and the frugality of  two-character scripts and monodramas.

Most great and affecting theatre is about the uneasy interplay of character, ideology, and events. Ideology might be too strong a word, but central characters have belief systems that are essential to their functioning and are often agents of their destruction, like Willy Loman’s notions of fairness and dignity.

For the Greeks, those external events are more often matters of fate and the gods’ poking sticks about, and for Shakespeare those external events are usually about political power. Either way, theater at its best considers who we are and what we believe, and why much of that is illusory.

This threesome of character, belief, and events lacks the stability of a three-legged stool, and is instead as inherently unstable as a three toddler play date.

That instability, the vulnerability of character and belief when stuff happens, underlies the greatest plays ever written. Its faint, etiolated shadow can usually be sensed even in the most trivial television sitcoms.

The costumes of the early scenes in this production puzzled me, and seemed too effeminate for the play, but by the end of the play that made sense. By the end of the play all of the characters were in brutish combat gear, looking nearly black with filth and sporting mismatched leather belts and pads. The descent from political debate to large scale physical savagery was emphasized.

Similarly I was at first a little discomforted by the fact that the actors were not physically imposing and seemed to lack gravitas, even Brutus. Caesar made his fatal decision to go to the senate with more camp affect than seemed appropriate. No one but Mark Anthony looked ready for a bar fight, let alone a military campaign.

But those effects properly underscore the play’s suggestion that events are big, men are small.  The most thoughtlessly dangerous conspirator, Casca, was wonderfully cast: Oliver Ryan demonstrated the frenetic danger of a physically slight and intellectually uninterested man who is eager for violence, underscoring the production’s apparent point.

Seeing and hearing this production while America’s debt ceiling theatre farce was playing its closing scenes in Washington, I looked hard for parallels. I found parallels not in the bad acting and bad lines of dueling politicians, but elsewhere in America, in gun rights advocates’ posturing call for resistance and the Tea Party’s vainglorious recital of Thomas Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots.”

Small minds with no sense of unintended consequences and with noble intentions, like the conspirators in Julius Caesar, can bring ruin. The Royal Shakespeare Company has done well to bring us theatre with ideas in the production as well as in the text, and New York was lucky to have them with us.

The film follows the opening adventures of a middle aged woman responding to a mid-life crisis. Naomi, who gave up hopes of a theatre career to marry a stuffy British civil servant, is known wrongly to her husband as an incompetent because of her domestic inadequacies, whole days being spent ruining dinner and breaking antiques.

In fact, however, Naomi is an accomplished fixer, as writer-director Michael Bergmann has said. If Naomi cannot fix a problem herself, she finds someone who can. Before she leaves her husband she thoughtfully arranges for a friend to see to him, knowing that friend is up to the task. The audience catches on to Naomi’s strengths as slowly as her husband does. Late revelations of her electrical wiring talents and her fluency in Arabic help our understanding of her character, as those talents help the plot.

As the film opens, Naomi has become so lost in domestic ineptitude and marital scolding that she has forgotten her love of theatre.  After a final marital scolding, Naomi sets out to fix her own life by renewing her acting career.

Her determination crosses the border into obsession and stalking, and prompts her to several impulsive acts that she, unlike the audience, hardly notices are crimes: auto theft, grand theft, gun violence, kidnapping, and hijacking. Desperate actors have been known to do desperate deeds in pursuit of a part in a film.

While telling this comic story, Tied to a Chair also manages to parody caper movies and international thrillers, play off of iconic scenes like the airfield ending of Casablanca, and allude surely to other cinematic tropes that I missed. Like many Hitchcock protagonists, Naomi is an ordinary person accidentally caught up in a high-stakes criminal plot.

That plot leads to the film’s finest scene, Naomi’s confrontation with a group of suicide-bombers in a Manhattan parking garage. Her ability to befuddle those radicals on matters of theology ends any thought of her being incompetent, as does her gun trick and her hasty scheme to save Manhattan.

Screenwriters are often advised to have their protagonist succeed against all odds by using one fundamental personal strength established early in the film. Naomi succeeds against all odds because she is an actor. She might never get the movie role she desperately wants, but she gets plenty of acting opportunities along the way.

Good indie films usually have a charming eccentricity that compensates for, and often arises out of, the rough corners and loose seams that Hollywood would edit to death. Tied to a Chair has this charming eccentricity. Breathless and other French films of the 1960’s demonstrated the potential power of films that eschew technical perfection in favor of a more overt audience awareness of the director’s stye.

Critical reviews of Tied to a Chair are mixed, as always, but this film seems to thrive in independent film festivals. Slant Magazine reviewer Diego Costa misreads a trope when he writes about Naomi’s “erotic bondage fantasy.” Richard Brody, movies editor of The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town, admires the film, especially as an expression of the personality of Michael Bergmann. Like Brody, I look forward to Bergmann’s next film.

There is something to this view, of course. Surely many people have found themselves one day at the dining room table wondering how they ended up in a family accreted by the addition of a spouse here and a child there, with strange old people at the table, too, as if they belonged there.

But Octubre aims at a broader, more fundamental truth about the human condition than mid-life crises, which are probably better explored when they happen to otherwise prosperous and successful people. The marginal existences in Octubre do not allow characters the luxury of sudden disillusionment.

In Octubre, human relationships arise out of emotional and economic necessity, not out of desire. Every human interaction has a price, obvious enough to the central character (a casual pawnbroker), and the price is often relatively arbitrary and unclear. How much do I owe you, Sofia asks Don Fico, after he prepares a lottery-like newspaper contest entry for her. How much should a repairman get? How much does a prostitute charge for both sex and information about another prostitute’s whereabouts? Similar questions recur often.

Even in poverty, even when the cash nexus marks human relationships, there are no villains in this film.  Despite petty attempts to wheedle money or otherwise manipulate other people, functioning human relationships are reluctantly and sometimes accidentally formed out of economic imperatives. The human condition. Clemente, for all his sullen passivity and his seeming power over desperate borrowers, is defenseless when life wedges into his squalid apartment and life. His life, not just his apartment, is taken over by squatters.

In Octubre, all human relationships have a cash basis. This sets up the central symbol of Clemente’s stalled life: a flimsy, tattered, counterfeit 200 nuevo sol bill. Accepting the phony bill in a moment of distraction, Clemente cannot pass it off on anyone else. People cannot live on inauthenticity forever.

His unlikely counterpart in what might almost be called a romance, in its own pathetic way, Sophia, is given to superstition and religion, while Clemente is driven by economics.

We are surprised that a thief stealing a wheelchair turns out to be sympathetic, as Don Fico steals it in order to spirit his comatose wife out of Lima toward what he imagines might be a better life. He has to bribe an accomplice to manage the theft, and then bribe a hospital nurse to manage as escape. Ironically, this old man’s laboriously accumulated savings are the funds that Clemente lends out as a pawnbroker, the money simultaneously exploiting and rescuing the desperate wretches who pawn items.

On Clemente’s birthday, a bizarre parody of a family photograph shows the central unfortunates who have been brought together by necessity, and held together by a little reluctant decency. Clemente and Sophia are like husband and wife, there’s the baby, and two grandparent-like figures, Fico and his comatose girlfriend. This grotesque variant of smiling family photos is one of several beautifully framed scenes.

If you have been waiting for cinematic sex scenes with a purpose other than satisfying our voyeurism, Octobre is for you. Clemente’s grim interactions with several prostitutes, like Sophia’s trickery with Clemente, will cure prurience.

Critics have called Octubre a comedy, and it is, although the comedy is mildly grotesque, understated, dark, and ironic. Critics have called Octubre slow, and it is, although it is pleasantly slow, like the largo movement in a string quartet. Critics have noted that Octubre is often beautifully shot, and it is, successfully presenting muted colors and shabby interiors in a painterly way. Hollywood does not know how to achieve this, and has forgotten how to make a film in which necessity so dominates free will.

One critic has called Octubre “a blasé work of social observation, a trifle of a story with fuzzy characters and weak political, social, and moral dimensions, notable only for its ostentatious framing of its proletarian characters’ lives using the style of more accomplished filmmakers.” Don’t believe a word of it. Octubre is a carefully constructed and beautifully filmed work of social and moral observation. The final scene is richly ambiguous, a fine ending to a fine film. Don’t look for this film at your local Cineplex.

If translators operate in one of three basic modes, Grossman prefers the middle ground of the paraphrasts, translating so the reader “will perceive the text, emotionally and artistically, in a manner that parallels and corresponds to, the aesthetic experience of its first readers.” She has no use for either of the two extremes, literalists or imitators.

Implicitly endorsing this attention to the original is Burton Raffel, who in his notes on translating the prose portions of The Canterbury Tales, writes that “translation is not supposed either to worsen or improve what it tries to recreate. . .  in the case of Chaucer’s prose the difficulty lies in avoiding improvement.”

Literalists include Vladimir Nabokov, whose Eugene Onegin Grossman and I both find unreadable. Another is Ted Hughes, whose Selected Translations includes among the prose pieces several interesting defenses of literal translation.

The most recent advocate of imitation I have encountered is Paul Schmidt, translating the wonderful, tragic early 20th-century Russian poets in Stray Dog Cabaret. “For me,” he writes, “translation is a performance. I mean that almost in the same way you’d say it about an actor’s performance.”

In fact he sounds like Stella Adler counseling actors when he writes that translating is “a matter of trying to think what’s in that person’s head, what was their life like, what elements in their life can you identify with in your own.”

Whichever of the three approaches we might prefer in general, Edith Grossman has done readers a tremendous service with her translations of Don Quixote and several Latin American writers. In an ideal world, foreign language writers would be available to us in more than one translation. Comparing translations of Dante’s Inferno or the Iliad proves that here is no single right way to translate. Variety allows us the richest pleasure and understanding.

I wish that poets would carefully read Edith Grossman’s detailed explanation of how she translates poetry, as she takes far more care in translating than many poets seem to take in composing. I am convinced that far too many contemporary poets are sloppy, self-indulgent (“privileging” the authenticity of the spontaneous first draft), averse to revision, and dismissive of musicality. Edith Grossman can teach all of us who write poetry a thing or two.

The conceit of the play is that a few years after her acquittal for the infamous hatchet murders of her father and her step-mother, and after suffering the gossip and shunning of her townspeople, Lizzie Borden agrees to finally tell all for a Fall River Historical Society fund-raiser. She will identify the real murderer.

That makes the audience for this monodrama enact the roles of the people of Fall River, including presumably some who had wanted her hanged. During the course of her monolog, Lizzie calls the room about that, but she never loses her composure. At least not until the end. At times she notices in the back of the audience some particular persons involved in her case, including the judge, and she names them. She is cordial to them but we know that she is holding back.

From the very beginning, Lizzie Borden proclaims her innocence and most of her monolog demolishes the case against her like an Agatha Christie detective finally revealing everything in the drawing room.

Lizzie Borden takes pains to show how she could not possibly have committed the murder. In her interwoven account of family relations, every now and then a little stinkbomb of resentment and anger appears quietly to enrich her logical analysis.

This production is marvelous. Ellen Barry is a fine Lizzie Borden. Her remarkable stage presence is enough to maintain audience attention even during relatively long passages of exposition made necessary by the premise, and even though monodramas as long as this one are not easy to sustain. She is especially strong when the end of the play requires a delicate balance of emotions and hints of matters left unsaid. Mitch Giannunzio has insured that her monolog becomes increasingly intense as the play progresses.

The ending rises in intensity as Lizzie, perhaps overly refreshed with some elderberry wine and wearied by too much civility, starts to go off the edge.  She identifies the person she thinks did the murders. Suddenly we wonder if she is not indeed maniacal enough to have crushed the victims’ skulls, and perhaps too a few audience skulls. This unsettling ending is especially shocking as the opening of her monolog is comforting and reassuring about her innocence, with few undercurrents to weaken our credulity and our sympathy.

Mitch Giannunzio’s script is spare and visually evocative, providing rich mise en scene for the mind’s eye, to compensate for the absence of multiple actors and complex stage business. The few props have been chosen well.

Kenneth Tigar has directed the production astutely to achieve a crisp pace on a small stage. His own successful experiences as an actor in monodramas serves him well here.

Ellen Barry, Mitch Giannunzio, and Kenneth Tigar have worked together before, and based on this performance I hope they find occasions to work together again.

This was a fine, engaging production. The simple lighting, bare stage, and street clothing allowed the language and acting to dominate.

Logue’s work retells in free verse the stories from books I and II of the 24-book Iliad by Homer. Logue has offered “an account” or retelling (not a translation) of other books of the Iliad in War Music, Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls, all fine poems that can be profitably read alongside a traditional translation, such as the justly acclaimed version by Robert Fagles and the unjustly neglected translation by Stanley Lombardo. Lombardo’s version in fact was made to be performed.

What has offended some reviewers of Christopher Logue’s retellings, that they are not faithful translations, delights the rest of us. He brings his characters and their situations alive in part with startling anachronisms, unexpected humor, and the fluidity afforded by free verse: sudden short lines, imagistic fragments, and cinematic jumps.

One inherent limitation facing Jim Milton in adapting Logue’s work to become this play is the limited scope of its story. While Achilles’ conflict with Agamemnon is the announced subject of the Iliad, a conflict whose resolution determines the outcome of the war and the fate of Troy, the first two books of the Iliad, Logue’s retelling of them, and therefore Kings: The Siege of Troy present only the initial events. Jim Milton has apparently added a few snippets from other Logue retellings.

The primitive conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, raw male ego rivalry, is not resolved in the play, but is put aside when Zeus sends a dream to trick Agamemnon into a hasty assault on Troy meant to  destroy the Greek effort. The play ends on the eve of that battle, the personal conflict forgotten.

Some audience members might be left puzzled and dissatisfied by Kings: The Siege of Troy. This being America (where pop culture references are inescapable and classical references all but forgotten), some in the audience might not know the Iliad, and thus struggle to understand the play’s storyline and to differentiate among the gods. But they would have neglected to read the notes in the program, hardly the fault of the production company.

Audiences expecting traditional dramatic unity and resolution might be confused by the incompletion of the storyline, and the long digressive account (Homer’s only comic relief) of the insubordination and punishment of Thersites. That comic element is thematically valuable as a foil to Achilles’ own insubordination, although this structural connection might be lost to anyone in the audience encountering the story for the first time.

However formidable these problems might be, the actual production and performances were suasive and pleasing. The pace was brisk, true to Logue’s account, and the stage movement was purposeful and clarifying.

The production employed two fine actors, Dana Watkins and J. Eric Cook. They moved fluidly from character to character, alternating between giving narrative and enacting events, and back again, each playing multiple characters. My intuition before seeing the production was that a stage adaptation would need three actors, but two were adequate. Three still might be better, but Jim Milton knows what he is doing.

Directing his own adaptation, Jim Milton staged a consistent stylized production, the actors now and then pausing convincingly in tableaus familiar to us from urns and friezes, or at least harmonious with our imagined memories of Greek figures in urns and friezes. The lighting designer, Heather Sparling, helped clarify and shape the play’s  rapid changes of place and mood.

An aside: I have come to believe that even very good actors sometimes speak subordinate clauses more rapidly and less expressively than wording in the same sentence that they think more important. Poets as skilled as Logue are not likely to think of any of their words as annoying speedbumps on the road to important language.

But theatre performance and poetry reading are separate experiences, and I defer to theatre professionals on this. The ones who have presented this Kings: The Siege of Troy have done well.

This script is not as far as I know available. Logue’s Kings is available as part of War Music.

The British have already figured out that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were blunders, that Tony Blair misled his country, that the UK economy cannot afford to continue the war, and that the wars have damaged their forces. Maybe some day we Americans will face those truths, too.

The national interests of the UK have been damaged, but that is not enough. Administrations, organizations, and systems have their own interests to watch out for. Consider this news, as reported in the London Evening Standard on Jan. 14, 2011.

The United Kingdom’s special envoy to Afghanistan (until he was dumped in the summer of 2010 for speaking too frankly), former ambassador Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, has told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons that in 2007 Sir Richard Dannatt (then the Chief of the General Staff) offered two benefits to British troops in Afghanistan.

Neither reason involves al-Qaeda, terrorist attacks against the UK, opium production, nation building, or human rights. Care to guess?

The first benefit was that the war would assure more financial and materiel support for the forces, forestalling a cutback in defense spending. While financial support was never considered adequate, and the lack of helicopters was widely considered a scandal, the British army in general liked the additional equipment that they did get. These were “new resources on an unprecedented scale.”

Gen. Dannatt reported said that if the troops were not used in Afghanistan, they would be lost in budget cuts. Use them or lose them.

A bigger defense budget is a solid benefit that any defense contractor or military bureaucrat can understand.

The second bad reason that Gen. Dannatt offered, according to Cowper-Coles, was that fighting in Afghanistan was an opportunity for the British army to “to redeem their reputation in the eyes of the Americans after the criticisms of their performance in Basra.”

Oh, great, more death and maiming to restore some notion of “honor.”

Anytime we are baffled by why wars and other catastrophic real world events occur, events that require the decisions and collusion of many people who should know better, we should fall back on the single question that most often leads us to understanding. That question is cui bono? Who profits?

In the case of war, the profit usually goes to some defense contractors and their investors, to political parties and individual politicians who continue wars rather than risk votes, a few people in the Pentagon whose career success depends on various weapons systems, and those commentators who get paid handsomely to state opinions supporting the interests of those contractors and political parties.

The rest of us pay dearly, starting with the families who suffer casualties. America’s current wars are helping to bankrupt America, having cost about $1.1 trillion as I write this on January 19, 2011 (to see how much this has increased by the time you read this, look here).

Sarah Palin has declared herself a “tea party hawk,” arguing against any decrease in the defense budget (while arguing for a balanced budget). Her delusional stand has pleased some Tea Party supporters (furthering her TV and public speaking career and possibly her political career) and so we can count her among the people whose careers have profited from the wars.

Cui bono? Not you, gentle reader.

A film’s theme isn’t necessarily happiness in general just because half of the characters are miserable and half are happy. Another Year leaves the largest questions of happiness to philosophers, neuro-scientists, and self-help authors. Another Year seems far more narrowly to suggest one apparent necessity for happiness: being in a loving relationship. The coupled people are happy, and the single ones are miserable.

All of the actors are very good here, the best probably being Leslie Manville. She certainly has the most demanding role, playing Mary, a shallow, tedious, needy, risible, narcissistic chatterer. Unfortunately, none of us want to spend much time around such a person, whether it is a character as well played as Mary, or a real person.

Mary is on camera so much, despite not having any character growth, that Leslie Manville apparently had little choice but to continually intensify the character’s misery to the point at which in real life anyone around her would have called a psychiatric ambulance or the police. Surely few actors could have played that role for that many minutes without tipping into absurdity.

Each character is interesting enough, but everything important that we learn about each character is learned within the first few minutes. The film dwells on Mary, and while we see her decline into greater misery, there is no character arc for her, and there are no revelations of her character or backstory.

Chekov demonstrated that even quiet, reticent drawing room gatherings have tremendous potential so long as characters develop, secrets are revealed, and the play’s forward movement never stalls. In this film, forward movement stalls.

Character revelation is less important for minor characters, of course, like the helpless slob Ken, the laconic widower, and the widower’s angry son. Tom and Gerri, the central characters, experience lesser character arcs than their tomato plants. As a geological engineer, Tom bores deeply into the earth to see what construction can be supported, an apt metaphor for how the director might have developed this film.

I suspect that the shallowness is a result of Mike Leigh’s directing method, if Another Year was developed by the fascinating improvisational method that Leigh described in 1999 (see questions 6 and 10 here) and in 2005 (here). This process probably emphasizes character interaction within scenes, while it loses some of the plot and character coherence and complexity better achieved by a single screenwriter.

Karina Longworth of the Village Voice thinks far less of this film than I do, but several critics adore it, including The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, and The Telegraph’s David Gritton. They might be right; after all, when was the last time The Guardian and The Telegraph agreed on anything? (January 18, 2011)