MAHLER (director/writer: Ken Russell; cinematographer: Dick Bush; cast: Robert Powell (Gustav Mahler), Georgina Hale (Alma Mahler), Richard Morant (Max), Antonia Ellis (Cosima Wagner), Lee Montague (Bernhard Mahler), Rosalie Crutchley (Marie Mahler), Angela Down (Justine Mahler), Miriam Karlin (Aunt Rosa ), David Collings (Hugo Wolfe), Gary Rich (Young Mahler), Ronald Pickup (Nick), Otto Diamant (Prof. Sladky), Benny Lee (Uncle Arnold), 1974-GB)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The always obstreperous Ken Russell (The Music Lovers/Listomania/Tommy) has come up with a wonderfully impetuous Freudian-like biography on turn-of-the-century (1860-1911) Austrian musical conductor and composer Gustave Mahler (Robert Powell), who obsessively plays him with proper conviction. The troubled life of the neurotic Jewish composer, who converted to Catholicism to appease the anti-Semites in Austria, especially the powerful voice of Cosima Wagner (Antonia Ellis), so he can gain career advantages, is powerfully covered by Russell elaborately using a series of tableaux to get into the maestro's head and into his music and into his perplexing marriage with Alma (Georgina Hale), who is played by her with a succinct elegance.
Dreams and fits of anguish, interspersed with flashbacks to his pressured upbringing by his pedlar Bohemian father who demanded he succeed for the family's honor, and then to further flashbacks of other important events in his creative life, enthrall this biopic with strong emotional feelings, that make it clear that Mahler was someone who struggled with his musical genius as he kept hearing music inside himself, as well as his struggle with his hostile surroundings (always the outsider), and with a wife who told him "You have succceeded in taking the tunes out of me."
The film opens with the kind of excessive dream sequence one comes to expect from Russell, where the composer's house on the lake is in flames, and his wife is tightly wrapped in white linen, struggling to free herself from the garb and is crawling on the rocks to a bust of Mahler, which she embraces. Mahler tells his wife that the dream, which she did not look kindly upon, thinking it was just another one of the ways he always uses to put her in place; but to him, it was actually a homage to her, as he tells her, "She is the living creature struggling to be born." His bust on the rock, he says, signifies that, "I was the rock and the rock was me." The visionary dream is evocative of the music he created for the 1st movement of the third sympathy, as it is heard and interpreted by Russell in a way that is highly complimentary to a composer whom he obviously admires, flawed personality, not withstanding.
We pick up the Mahlers on their last train ride before his death, where the famous composer of ten symphonies (nine numbered) is returning from a conducting stint at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Arturo Toscanini, after hostility fomented by sections of the press forced his resignation in 1907 from his prestigious conducting postion at the Vienna State Opera. From a reporter who boards the train, we learn that Mahler might have been forced to leave TheVienna State Opera because of anti-Semtism, though Mahler claims he left for a change of environment and is returning for the same reason. He also emphatically says, "I conduct to live; I live to conduct," indicating that it is his composing that makes life interesting for him, as he contemptuously dismisses the reporter.
As a timid child, he meets a puckish sort of man in the woods (Pickup) who saves him from drowning, and teaches him an invaluable lesson about music, "The man who doesn't live in nature can't write a true note of music."Mahler sees his compositions as a tribute to the music of the spheres; and for him, a symphony is a farewell to love. When asked, "What religion are you?" by a smug army officer named Max (Richard Morant), who is a suitor of his wife, he replies, "I'm a composer."
What gives the film force and a sense of inspired madness, and makes this a work the musical aficionado might question regarding its authenticity but the film buff might applaud for its richness of visuals, are a few very inventive scenes. At a mental institution he visits his dear friend and fellow student at theVienna Conservatory, who cracked up, Hugo Wolfe (Collins). He addresses Hugo as his majesty, and from this charade he is grilled by the lunatic, accepting him as if he were the real Emperor Franz Joseph, and comes away from this visit realizing that he can only get places musically if he converts, since his religion is holding him back in this anti-Semitic milieu. The conversion scene becomes the most powerful and outlandish one in the film, as it is filmed as if were a silent movie changing to a talkie at the moment of the conversion. This scene comes on so strong as to drown out any other attempt by Russell to have a more subdued film than he usually shoots for. There are symbols galore, of crosses, Jewish stars, Nazi insignias, money and fire gods. Cosima is depicted as a Nazi and he, as a willing servant of hers, prepared to go into a cave and slay the dragon of the old gods to gain her appproval, as she smilingly tells him, when he has slain the dragon "You are no longer a Jew, you are now one of us." He will then eat the non-kosher pig meat and drink a glass of milk with it, completing his conversion.
After his real conversion, he will say it reminded him of having a toothache. For Mahler, man is his own God, and God shares his love with us all. But this conversion affected him greatly and continued to eat away at his famished psyche, already terribly damaged from a childhood of constant nagging.
Always insecure and troubled, never happy, always irritable and petulant, a most unpleasant person, and a sexist; but, a musical genius, is the impression of Mahler that Russell convincingly leaves us with. As Mahler, in despite of his pettiness, bravely tells his wife, choose between me and Max, but do not choose me because of duty, duty always destroys. The choice in marriage must always be love. In a film, that plays at times like a soap opera story of a beautiful wife who learns to live with her genius husband, as the husband and wife fight for their beliefs and for their love. But it is the music of Mahler that is refreshingly digested, admittedly a music for acquired tastes, but a music that I most heartily appreciated, that gives the film its resonance. The film also plays like Visconti's Death in Venice gone astray, where homo-erotic shots are coupled with coarse hetero-sexual shots. The passion of Mahler's Germanic symphonies, evincing childlike death-cries from his renown 6th symphony, as coincidentally, one of his little girls died soon afterwards and he received one of his many heart attacks after the symphony was completed... which result for Russell, a director who has proven himself to be a music lover, who knows how to be flamboyant and controversial, into making a film that was very impressive. Though the film, like Mahler's music, is clearly not for everyone.
REVIEWED ON 10/5/99 GRADE: A
Dennis Schwartz: " Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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