FREE TODAY Christmas Day In The Morning. — a short humorous Christmas memoir, perfect for the whole family.
Also FREE is your own Kindle Reading App. The perfect last minute Xmas gift.
To find out all about it just go to http://amzn.com/B00AA59P5G and look around.
~ ~ ~
A Late Quartet – directed by Yaron Silberman. Drama. A renowned classical string quartet disintegrates before their very own eyes. 105 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★★
Five stunning actors claim our attention as this story of a quartet unfolding unfolds. The key piece is Beethoven’s Op. 131. And the music suggests something larger is at stake than the coherence of the group or the piece. It suggests that the group is held together by stories older even than the great music they play so perfectly, and that it is the purpose of the drama and the calamity of the group’s disintegration to learn this and to bring it into their song.
The ending is a little corny, which means that the director is telling the story counting on the usual tropes rather than what lies inherent in the material behind those tropes. But this does not discount the playing of these wonderful actors.
The five actors of whom I speak are Imogene Poots, a young violinist at Julliard as the daughter of Catherine Keener and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the violist and second fiddle. Mark Ivanir plays the egomaniacally obsessed first violin, and Christopher Walken the cellist and most senior member whose illness oversets the avalanche brooding on the mountaintop.
All five actors come at their parts from separate artistic rooms. In their crafts they do not resemble one another. Ivanir comes from the gutsiest European modern tradition and offers as well his powerful figure, sexuality, and chilling decisiveness. The Daniel Craig school of acting.
Poots brings a live-in-the-moment technique which well suits her essentially adolescent twenty-year old. She charms. And she does so because her craft enables her to be thoughtless but smart. And this enables her to bring to her character a delicious insolence essential to it.
Catherine Keener brings her famous default position of withholding. This gives her the sovereignty of making important the saying of what she deliberately does not say. She makes art of her defect. She can articulate the whole truth but she never does. She’s stingy and as such quite marvelous in a great taxi ride scene with Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Hoffmann seems to have no technique. He is one of those great actors who seem to walk into the scene by accident and might leave at any time. What does he get by on? An intestinal watchfulness perhaps. The power to spring into unexpected attack is his forte.
Amid these four strange people stands the enigmatic Christopher Walken with his Queens accent and high-up-back-in-the-throat delivery. His once handsome face is now a bombsite of 69 years. He delivers each line like every other line. It is as though his inner response mechanism had no inner connection to his vocal response mechanism. A freak.
They all are. The harmony with which they play their roles with one another and the harmony with which the music is played by them are a monumental monograph of The Human Possibility.