NOISES OFF
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
NOISES OFF is a film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, from a screenplay by Marty Kaplan and adapted from a play by Michael Frayn. It stars Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, John Ritter, Marilu Henner, Denham Elliott, Julie Hagerty, Mark Linn-Baker, Christopher Reeve, and Nicollette Sheridan. Rated PG-13, for mild profanity, mature humor.
NOISES OFF is structurally a farce-within-a-farce about the out-of-town tryouts of a mild British sex comedy, "Nothing On." Michael Caine is the director, who is just trying to get through it while his mind is on other projects, personal and professional. Carol Burnett is the aging star with her own money in the project. Ritter, Henner, Elliott, Reeve, and Sheridan play the actors who are similarly distracted by love, jealousy, brainlessness, deafness, and/or dipsomania. Linn-Baker and Hagerty play the stage director and his assistant.
It took a while for me to warm up to the broad physical humor and rapid-fire, throw-away dialog, but by the middle section of the movie I was howling. The cast is to be lauded for the tight, faultlessly and energetically complex timing of their comings and goings in front of and behind the set. The onstage farce is a virtual study in the art of door-slamming so essential to the bedroom farce since at least the heyday of Feydeau. The action gets even more complicated as the relations between the cast members heat up and the line between play and life softens and finally dissolves. Although the final scene is a given from the first, it is a delight to get there.
This is not a film that is going to find a mass audience, which is a shame, given the huge amout of talent used to present it. Everyone was at the top of his or her farcical form, and Bogdanovich has a penchant for casting wonderful performers who don't get nearly enough exposure, such as Burnett and Ritter. Ritter especially seems to be wasted by Hollywood, although I vastly prefer his movies, such as Bogdanovich's earlier THEY ALL LAUGHED and the glow-in-the-dark comedy he made for the director of VICTOR/VICTORIA, to the rather annoying "cutie" persona that television saddled him with. Bogdanovich elicits from his cast some genuinely inspired teamwork and split-second timing of non-stop gags.
It is true, however, that NOISES OFF is very obviously a filmed play, not a movie per se. It is impossible to get this story, in love as it is with the craziness of live theater, out from behind the proscenium and into the streets, as movies generally require.
I recommend NOISES OFF, but you might as well pay matinee prices as not. It's a confection, but a very entertaining one.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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