Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme five, part two - stage to screen adaptations!
(Chosen by Jackie!)
Let's open with some shop talk, shall we? There's some belief amongst critics, both professionals and amateurs like myself, which posits the best example of any artistic medium is one whose most exemplary qualities best exemplify its medium's most unique qualities. The video game that could not be any other than a video game, the painting one could not imagine as quite the same as sculpture or photograph, the film whose qualities are most vitally and enduringly filmic in nature, sort of thing. It's a nice little maxim with quite a lot more going on beneath the surface than its simple "This is the best because it is the most" position would indicate. A dance, for instance, might stand as an exemplary example of dance because it emphasizes the fluidity of motion possible through a highly skilled/trained performer's responses in time with music, or perhaps the strength required to achieve such fearsome or strenuous moves in so quick a time or else over such a long period, or maybe the beauty constructed by two or more in perfect, graceful sync with one another, or just maybe the elemental dance requires many in a clockwork tick-tock creation defined more by the choreographer's skill than any one dancer's choices. What makes any dance more dance-like than the other? Same basic problem arises when you try to concretely define what makes film film. We can get into matters of temporal and emotional effects achieved by editing, the personalized nature of acting compared to traditional theater thanks to the camera's intimacy, the ability to visualize the impossible on a grand scale while still making room for quiet contemplation, more esoteric matters like how the picture's filmed or to what degree it is or isn't reliant on other artistic disciplines like music and whether or not the synthesis achieved by merging sight and sound is superior or inferior to their separation; but how are we to tell we're right? And furthermore, in a time when many of film's most unique qualities at its birth (real time contrast of images, being able to move images of real things without their physical presence in the first place, animation as a discipline in general) are no longer wholly unique to it thanks to the rise of television, video games, and online video content, how exactly can we say there's any one thing that makes a movie the Most Movie?
In discussing 1966's A Man For All Seasons, I think it best to narrow the discussion's focus, and talk primarily about what makes a play so captivating, and whether or not transferring one to the silver screen without undertaking some special effort to make it more film than stagework makes a successful approach. See, in reading reviews of the film in a search for perspectives to tackle, I found multiple pieces and posts noting how Fred Zinnemann's direction and Robert Bolt's adaptation of his own script do little to take the story of Thomas More - High Chancellor of England, author of Utopia, and noted martyr who silently refused to condone King Henry VIII's schism from the Catholic Church after so many years of opposing the Protestant Reformation under the same king, and was beheaded for it - a distinctly cinematic experience. The film is, from this perspective, still very stagey, dependent on its words and actors to generate tension and interest in a manner more derived from the theater than the moviehouse. It supposedly lacks a certain flair in editing, or shooting, or even acting after a fashion, which one expects from a film. Film, after all, is not theater, and the same techniques which can thrill a live audience won't work so well on the moviegoer. I confess to indulging in this line of thinking myself from time to time when critiquing literary or theatrical adaptations - just this last week, I put marks against The Pajama Game for lacking a more expansive manner of staging its musical numbers and confining them to soundstages in the same way its theatrical counterpart was contained by the physical limitations of the stage. My question to you for this piece is: is it right to take the movie to task for this?
Well, yeah, depending on how you want to look at the thing. If someone's not engaged by a film, they're not engaged by a film, and their lack of investment doesn't confer a lack of effort or thought on their part unless they give distinct and solid testimony about WHY they weren't engaged to communicate such a lack. More likely and more fairly something in the film or else their personal taste in film that didn't click. When the discussion surrounds fitness of adaptation from medium to medium, though, I think the question worth examining. Certainly in my own watching I can admit A Man For All Seasons isn't quite the liveliest film from a shooting perspective. I can't fault Ted Moore's cinematography any of his framing decisions, as he often finds interesting ways of blocking the actors to emphasize the fiery disagreements between their characters, nor can I say he totally lacks any flair beyond just filming the people, not when the repeated motif of introducing illusory power through reflections and contemplating nature when considering More before shifting to dark, brutal stonework for the corrupt institutions he stands against are so prominent features. I CAN, however, say his deployment of these more thematically-based filming techniques are far more infrequent than one might hope, some of his extreme angle choices seem jarring against the more conventional work elsewhere, and on the whole he's not a very showy cinematographer. He doesn't NEED to be for this story, but one more than understands the complaint about how a drama predicated on men of extreme conviction losing their tempers and communicating through grand declarations doesn't take a more daring, stylish approach to cinematography. And though I'm going to come to his defense shortly, editor Ralph Kemplen largely strives for invisibility without too many showy cuts or unusually long takes; also fine qualities you understand, yet not what one might want from a film with this potential for explosive impact.
The problem, I think, comes in considering A Man For All Seasons as something born in the theater, and a conception of what the theater capital-I Is. Laying aside less kind thoughts like "the people making these claims don't have much capacity to appreciate slow dramas without big displays of showmanship," I think it accurate to describe theater as the most essentially alive of the artistic forms. So many forms of painting, sculpture, literature, etc. strive towards preserving an idea in something eternal, in a way one can find equally captivating across the decades and centuries and perhaps even millennia. Art is referred to as the one true form of immortality, after all. While a playwright's words and possibly stage directions will endure across performances, one potential X-factor of theater lies with the fact that it is performed by living flesh-and-blood people right before your eyes, conjuring long bygone times and ideas in the here and now, no separation beyond the unreality of production. Those folks up there perform their craft in real time, and (one-time performances excepted) they have or will or both performed/perform again in a slightly different variation on another night. Others have taken the mantle before and likely will again in the future. The play is a living form of art, matched only by live music or the derived performance piece, and its ability to be something new on each repetition through hearts that beat in time with the audience's makes it Theater.
From this perspective, a play brought to film without some great transformation is a dead thing. The performances will always take the same shape, the actors' decisions always turn out the same way, the experience never alters beyond what is achieved on final cut. Maybe through alternate cuts in the future (cough George Lucas cough), but never in the same way a live performance can change from night to night, troupe to troupe, year to year. Cinematic life, though highly dependent on actors in 99% of all instances, turns on the camera, the edit, the impossible, and if we only consider the essentials of what makes a movie adapted from stage a worthwhile endeavor in this way, I can fully understand why A Man For All Seasons might come across as something boring and not all that special. Its most vitally cinematic elements stay out of the way and leave its most theatrical elements to stomp about as if they were still out on Broadway, with their warm flesh and blood replaced by cold, flat celluloid. Doesn't make the most appealing picture.
Hence, when a mode of consideration no longer serves any use in helping us enjoy or understand a work, it is best to modify. Although I've taken an unconscionably long time to say so, I DO still think of A Man For All Seasons the film an engaging, vibrant work. Robert Shaw's performance as King Henry VIII might be the same every single time one turns on the film, but this does not diminish the accomplishment or visceral effect of his decision to play bombastically jolly in a way that makes his outbursts of rage at perceived slights read as active efforts to make the more steady More flinch. Paul Scofield's lead performance as More still embodies a man of staunch religious principle whose manner and profound respect for divine law renders him a more palatable figure of spiritual conviction than many characters who hold similar beliefs (or, if we're fully honest, the historical More in all likelihood). He still trades immensely witty, multilayered barbs with a host of character actors who can hold their own in theological tongue-spars, yet never rise far enough beyond their self-serving nature to meaningfully overcome his hardline stance on the Church's right to define law and order. Its being an object of eternity derived from a play meant to encourage new perspectives on every performance does not, in any way, diminish the impact of Bolt's slow crawl towards realizing the hopelessness of the situation, and so redefining victory to mean standing by a single, righteous conviction above all else, nor the last minute whammy of a sudden bit of narration telling us the unhappy fates of those who persecuted More, leaving one to wonder at how evil any of them could've truly been if the vices that led to their villainy in this story ultimately produced the same fates as a man considered pious. The delight and dread in the dialogue, More's complicated relationship with his family and fate and office, the essential vibrancy of putting this all to screen for a single production that will play the same way for all screenings across all time highlights the virtues in Bolt's work, never detracts.
I believe the film works so well because Zinnemann employs Moore and Kemplen to unobtrusive, underscoring effect. Their work allows the film to function with minimal fuss, creating a quite lovely picture of early 16th-century England across multiple strata of life, and enables the actors to do what actors do best on film: be close and intimate with the audience. Those moments of lost tempers, selfish, self-righteous outburst are afforded the same quiet, non-interrupting distance as bits like More sad, stately admonishment towards Richard Rich over selling his soul for Wales, and places one right there in the spittle-flecked, red-faced thick of it. Joviality, despair, and stiff-lipped, steely-eyed conviction come across at our level, from a reality we can recognize and solid and authentic unto itself, and the ideas of what is best and right in confronting what one perceives as a moral wrong embodied by figures of great power and influence who are close confidants all the same can play out with the same immediacy as on stage. Just as one might argue a lack of flair leaves the film staid and boring, so too can one say the lack of flair at a cinematic level allows both flair and nuance at a performative level a chance at rising to the surface, and it is this tact I take far more than the devil's advocacy I advance above. Is it the absolute best example I've ever seen of these particular themes, or this style of performance, or this manner of presentation, or this mode of adaptation? In honesty and earnestness, no. But it is itself, and it is effective in captivating and teasing at my mind, and so I applaud the effort.
A thing being unchanging in form does not make it dead in experience. The dead, for all talk of an afterlife in this film, do not experience. It is always the living who come to A Man For All Seasons, the living who bring fresh eyes and new experiences through which to intake and interpret this one-time work. With fresh eyes will come those who find it a less than thrilling experience, be it because they don't jive with its manner of presentation or its mode of adaptation or a simple distaste for historical drama, but there will also come new historic events to compare it against, new ways of thinking through which to view its contents, new minds who've never seen its like, or seasoned minds who've seen the like or even the film itself many times before, and yet still have wholly new experiences to color their viewing. The great thing about film as film is difficult to define, and subject to ongoing debate - the great thing about art is its capacity to engage and inspire no matter the time or place or creed. So, though A Man For All Seasons from 1966 is dead as theater from a strictly theatrical standpoint, it is alive and vibrant and immediate as ever as art, and so gains life as film all the same.
4/5
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