Christine Ebersole – Movie Musings

Young romance in a changing time in Paul Thomas Anderson’s unconventional love story

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Alana Haim (Alana Kane), Cooper Hoffman (Gary Valentine), Sean Penn (Jack Holden), Tom Waits (Rex Blau), Bradley Cooper (Jon Peters), Benny Safdie (Joel Wachs), Skyler Gisondo (Lance), Mary Elizabeth Ellis (Momma Anita), John Michael Higgins (Jerry Frick), Christine Ebersole (Lucy Doolittle), Harriet Sansom Harris (Mary Grady)

Is there a force harder to understand than love? That’s basically the theme of Paul Thomas Anderson’s delightfully whimsical film, which explores an unlikely relationship in Los Angeles in 1973, played out to a backdrop of the OPEC gas crisis. Told with a dreamlike grace and overflowing with affection and warmth for its characters, it’s a deceptively simple film that is a masterpiece of heartfelt craft.

Standing in line to have his photo taken for his High School picture, 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is instantly smitten with cynical photography assistant, 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim). Much to her surprise, his claim to be a child actor in the movies is actually true – he’s co-starring with Lucille Doolittle (Christine Ebersole, in a thinly veiled spoof of Lucille Ball) in a movie. He’s also a budding entrepreneur, setting up a business selling water beds in LA. Alana still doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, but finds herself drawn to Gary, despite her acute awareness of their age difference. The two of them become business partners and drift in and out of friendship, never quite sure exactly how they feel about each other.

Now I guess you might well have checked yourself there at the thought of a romance between a teenager and a 25-year-old. But there is no prurience here, no masturbatory coming-of-age fantasy with an older woman or sleazy grooming. This is instead a very genuine, sweet and moving romance between two people who only really have numbers keeping them apart. It particularly works because Gary in many ways feels about 5 years older than he actually is and Alana often feels about 5 years younger than she is. In many ways they are both twenty-year-olds – and it’s only the fact that they are not which puts a barrier between them being together. As such it becomes very easy to accept their potential relationship, and even root for it.

That’s massively helped by the fact that these two characters are marvellously embodied by two first-time actors. Anderson specifically wrote the role for Alana Haim, member of family rock group Haim (Anderson has directed several of their music videos, and was taught by Haim’s mother). She’s stunning: prickly, quick-witted, cynical but also vulnerable and sensitive. She’s desperate to find some sort of purpose in her life: exploring the role of trophy girlfriend, businesswoman and political campaigner, but always seems like she’s slightly lost, for all her defiance. Haim is also wonderfully exasperated and befuddled by the interest she feels for this younger guy, barely able to acknowledge she might have feelings for him. Haim is superb.

Gary, played by the son of regular Anderson collaborator the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, is equally well bought to life by Cooper Hoffman. Gary’s career as a child actor is coming to an end: as we see through a disastrously over enthusiastic audition, which the casting directors watch out of a polite respect. But Gary has the go-getting hustling skills of someone much older. He’s got an eye for business opportunities – water beds, film productions, pinball machines – that would be the envy of others. He’s smart, confident, frequently cocky, assured – but at times also staggeringly immature (like a teenage boy he’s obsessed with boobs and Alana watches with frustrated despair as he and some friends drag out miming a wanking gag for what seems forever). He’s also still sometimes just a kid: mistakenly arrested at one point, he sits in terror in a police station and, even when uncuffed and released, is too scared to leave the station without Alana’s encouragement.

That arrest scene is yet another moment that reaffirms the deep bond and love between these two people. Wrongly arrested for nominally fitting the description of a suspected killer – “Look forward to Attica!” the police taunt him – he’s hauled from an Expo. Alana follows, running full pelt after the squad car – even though at this point they’ve not spoken for weeks – and then holds him for what feels like forever when he is released (before, of course, slapping him and saying “What did you do?”). Later, when Alana falls while taking part in an ill-advised late-night motorbike stunt, Gary will run the length of a golf course to make sure she is alright (despite, again, the two of them having cut ties before this). Moments like this sing with a real romantic force.

Particularly as this is such a love-hate film. Alana and Gary constantly hurt each other, finding ways to get into perfect sync only to screw it up. Gary is heartbroken when Alana starts to date his older co-star (a smug atheist, played wonderfully by Skyler Gisondo). Alana is overcome with jealousy and pain when Gary flirts and kisses a school crush his own age at the launch of their water-bed business. After auditioning for a movie role, Alana delights in making Gary uncomfortable when he walks into the bar where she is enjoying a drink with the movie’s male star. Through it all, these two are drawn back to each other time and again – and when the chips are down their loyalty and love to each other is absolute, even if they can’t always admit it to either themselves or each other.

Around the two outstanding central performances, Anderson constructs a series of scenes and skits that drift from one to the other. The whole film has a curiously dreamlike transition structure: it’s frequently hard to tell how much time has passed and the narrative omits overly functional scenes, so we frequently see a situation has changed but only an implication of why (example: Gary’s mother tells him she can’t chaperone him to New York for a TV appearance – next shot Alana and Gary are on a plane. How was this agreed? Who cares!). Each of the sequences plays out with a shaggy-dog story charm, directed with the confidence and brilliance of a director who is happy to make it look easy. And let me tell you, very few could pull off something as light and charming.

The film is stocked with delightful cameos. John Michael Higgins is very funny as the owner of a Japanese restaurant, with two successive Japanese wives who he “translates” for by repeating in ludicrously Japanese accented loud English whatever has just been said. Harriet Sansom Harris is very funny as a plugged-in agent. Ebersole is a monstrous attention-hungry star. Sean Penn is funnier than he’s ever been playing a version of William Holden, pissed and barely able to distinguish between his film roles and real life, cajoled by an equally pissed director (Tom Waits on top form as a sort of Peckinpah-Huston combo) to perform a motorbike stunt late at night. Best of all is Bradley Cooper, who burns through his brief scenes as an unhinged Jon Peters, a whipper-cracker of unpredictability and insatiable horn.

But it’s the two leads that give this heart, and Licorice Pizza is an amazingly sweet, tender, endearing and deeply charming love story about a couple who can’t quite understand why they want to be together and spend most of the movie making sure they’re not. Anderson brings it altogether with immense homespun charm – this is almost a home movie, Haim’s family play he character’s family, the cast is stuffed with Anderson’ family and friends – and Licorice Pizza is the sort of delight that shouldn’t work, but very triumphantly does.

Tom Hulce is the childlike genius in Amadeus

Director: Milos Forman

Cast: F. Murray Abraham (Antonio Salieri), Tom Hulce (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Elizabeth Berridge (Constanze Mozart), Roy Dotrice (Leopold Mozart), Simon Callow (Emanuel Schikaneder), Christine Ebersole (Caterina Cavalieri), Jeffrey Jones (Emperor Joseph II), Charles Kay (Count Orsini-Rosenberg), Kenneth McMillan (Michael Schlumberg), Richard Frank (Father Vogler), Cynthia Nixon (Lorl), Patrick Hines (Kapellmeister Giuseppe Bonno), Jonathan Moore (Baron von Swieten)

Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus was a smash hit play, both at the National Theatre and on Broadway. With such a delicious plot line – captured so beautifully in its tag line “The Man, the Music, the Madness, the Murder!” – is it any wonder that this fable about the life of Mozart, framed around the envy of his contemporary Antonio Salieri who, as an old man, claims to have murdered the great genius, was swiftly bought to the screen? Radically reworked and restructured by Peter Shaffer for the screen, Amadeus may stand as one of the few times where the script for the film is superior to the script for the stage. And the film itself is so carved out of radiance, that every single production of the play will forever live in its shadow.

As an old man Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) confesses to the murder of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce). After a suicide attempt, he tells his tale to a young priest (Richard Frank). As a younger man, Salieri was the court composer to Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones). He has everything he dreamed of as a young man – fame, riches and a life of music – all of which fortune he sees as a sign from God. His world view is shaken with the arrival in Vienna of the young genius Mozart. A brilliant artist and composer, with a God-given gift for composition, Mozart is also everything the reserved Salieri is not – brash, rude, impulsive and a man of once-in-a-generation talent. How, Salieri wonders, could a man like him be given all the gifts, while Salieri’s music is merely competent? Salieri believes this is a cruel joke played on him by God – made worse by the realisation that alone in Vienna society, Salieri seems able to recognise the genius. Salieri decides to destroy this chosen child of God once and for all.

Shot on location in Prague – and Czech defector Milos Forman was treated as a returning hero when he bought the film there – Amadeus is perhaps one of the most strikingly beautiful films ever made. The cinematography is luscious, the production design – utilising every inch of the almost untouched-since-the-18^th-century Prague settings (Thank God for Communist inefficiency Forman joked) – sinks you into the era completely while the costume design is striking, imaginative and excellent. The film is an opulent feast. But it is a million miles from being a staid period piece – instead this is something fresh, bold and modern.

Amadeus is perhaps one of my favourite films of all time. I just think it gets everything more or less right. Not least, capturing the idea of the passions and struggle of creativity. It’s clear why this story spoke so clearly to Hollywood, because no film captures as well as this one, the horrible plight of the competent journeymen, working every hour, while watching an effortless genius create masterpieces as easy as breathing. That’s the real tension here – and what makes us all empathise with Salieri, at least on some level. All of us have looked at the things we create – be it putting up a shelf to writing a play – and frustratingly seen our grasp exceed our reach, while seeing others do what we have so failed to achieve with frustrating ease.

Matched in with this, it’s a film that understands perhaps better than any other the burdensome process of creation. It’s easy for viewers to just remember the childish excess of Mozart – but Forman and Shaffer also show a dedicated and passionate worker. Hulce’s Mozart crouches over a billiard table, oblivious to the world around him while he composes (the soundtrack, as it often does, is flooded with the score he is composing, while his wife tries to get his attention – snapping to silence as soon as she succeeds). His dedication to his music is absolute – in his first scene, only hearing the orchestra starting to play his music before his arrival snaps him out of his raucously rude flirtatious banter with Constanze. Scenes of him conducting and directing rehearsals pinpoint his exactitude and perfection. Salieri as well is seen frequently labouring carefully and precisely over his work, while lacking the inspiration of Mozart.

It’s pinpointed with a beautiful late scene, where a bed-ridden Mozart dictates his Requiem score to Salieri. Mozart is electric, precise, his thinking fast-paced, complete, his passion for the score all-consuming – with poor Salieri desperately trying to keep up (“You go to fast” he frequently whines). It’s a scene that captures completely the intensity of mining creation. (Hulce apparently deliberately skipped lines during the scene, to add to Abraham’s confusion in the scene – with Abraham’s later agreement!). Its part of what the film beautifully captures, how being able to bring your ideas, perfectly formed, into the world is the most enchanting drug of all.

So you can see why Salieri grows too loath this blessed talent. In a wonderful moment – again perfectly utilising Forman’s decision to use the music as almost a character in the piece – he flicks through a portfolio of Mozart compositions, all of them first drafts devoid of any correction, the music playing in his head (and on the soundtrack) as he reads. It’s the sort of skill his diligent and slavish composition could never achieve.

It’s pinpointed even more in their first scene together, where Mozart arrives at Joseph’s court. The emperor plays a small welcoming march, composed by Salieri, which is fine. Mozart not only memorises the tune on first hearing it (“The rest is just the same?”) but then beautifully starts to play with it before suddenly turning it into an aria from The Marriage of Figaro, composing this beautiful piece on the spot. Nothing could be more devastating but to see your hack work improved in front of others into something genius – and the genius in question to be so oblivious of the impact, that he behaves like he’s done you a favour. No scene in the movies, I believe, has ever captured so completely this world of difference between the journeyman and the artist.

The film is crammed full of moments like this, all perfectly delivered by a perfectly chosen cast. The film was controversial at the time for using American actors – with their natural accents – rather than Brits (the “American accents jar the ear” whined Brit critic Leslie Halliwell). In fact it’s an inspired idea, that adds an air of modernity to the piece, but also principally opens the door to making the whole genre less stuffy (as if 18^thcentury Venetians would speak with received pronunciation). The only characters who speak with English accents are the most upper-class, Italian-fixated, Opera purists. Everyone else – with even Simon Callow (the original stage Mozart, here in his film debut) adopting an accent – speaks with a Yank twang.

F. Murray Abraham beat out seemingly the whole Western acting world to land the leading role of Salieri. (In a backhanded compliment if ever I heard it, Forman suggested on meeting Abraham that he simply was Salieri). Abraham’s precise, detailed and beautifully judged performance – which allows gallons of resentment and self-pity to bubble under the surface of a tight self-control. He also has a wonderful spry lightness as his elder self, who has come to terms with his failures. It’s a brilliant role – and one Abraham struggled to match for decades to come.

Tom Hulce is equally superb as Mozart. I’ve talked a lot about how wonderfully the film – and Hulce – captures inspiration. But Hulce perfectly mixes this with a childlike vulnerability, an impulsive foolishness and sense of absurdity. His Mozart is frequently rude, obnoxious and interested only in a good time – frequently losing nights to drink, sleeping around with a crude sense of humour. But he’s also sweetly childlike, who needs to be looked after – Elizabeth Berridge (very good, a late replacement for Meg Tilly during shooting) as Constanze frequently has to mother him and manage his life and career. The rest of the cast are equally strong, from Jeffrey Jones’ studied normality as the Emperor, to Roy Dotrice’s firmness as Mozart’s disapproving father.

Amadeus brings this all together superbly – Forman’s direction is faultless – and mixes it together with Mozart’s music. Not a single piece of music is used twice in the film, and each quote from the music has been perfectly chosen to reflect the scene, from the film’s opening with Symphony #25 to its close with the Requiem. Sections from opera performances are shown – with the actors conducting (both learnt). The music soaks through the whole film – Shaffer and Forman believed it was the “third lead”. And it perfectly captures the tone and emotion every time, deepening and enriching the film itself.

Winning eight Oscars (including Picture, Director, Actor for Abraham and Screenplay), Amadeus is not only the best film ever made about classical music, it’s also one of the most fascinating and profoundly engaging films ever made about creativity. Does it matter that historically it’s all bunk? Not really at all, as a fictionalised exploration of how the average can be tormented by the extraordinary it’s perfect.