SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Stockard Channing, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland. Screenplay: John Guare. Director: Fred Schepisi.
There are few greater cinematic challenges than adapting a stage play for the screen. The two media are so different -- one primarily of words, the other of images -- that some plays just don't lend themselves to a film rendering. For every AMADEUS, a play which was opened up into a grand period drams, there is one A FEW GOOD MEN, too talky and stagy to succeed fully. That is the problem I fear many viewers could have with SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION. Thematically, John Guare's play is quite rich, as it is in character. However, its rapid-fire dialogue and exaggerated acting will strike those unfamiliar with live theater as too stylized and unrealistic.
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION unfolds primarily through flashbacks, as wealthy Manhattan art dealer Flanders Kitteredge (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Ouisa (Stockard Channing) describe a unique encounter to friends. One evening, a young man appears at their door, apparently the victim of a mugging. The fellow (Will Smith) claims to be Paul Poitier, son of actor Sidney Poitier, as well as a friend of the Kitteredge's children at Harvard. He dazzles the Kitteredges for the evening, but they soon discover there is more to Paul than the story he has told. They learn that he has had a similar encounter with a doctor and another couple, each also beginning with an apparent mugging. Gruadually, as they investigate the connection between their incidents, Ouisa begins to wonder about connections in general, and to examine her life.
The characters at the heart of SIX DEGREES are marvelously intricate, tying together an examination of the vagaries of fortune. On one side is Flanders Kitteredge, a high roller whose gambles on art deals leave him perpetually one step away from poverty, and consequently obsessed with the trappings of wealth. On the other side is Paul, forced to the margins of society for the threefold sin of being poor, black and gay, and wanting to do more than just look in from the outside. In the middle is Ouisa, who realizes the fragile links between every human being. "Every person on this planet is connected to every other person by a chain of six people," she tells her daughter, "six degrees of separation," and in her consciousness of this chain she reaches out to Paul. Where this theme could have come off as a liberal social manifesto, SIX DEGREES treads lightly, making the obsession of the Kitteredges and their cronies with finding the man who had duped them comic but clear in its message: their world is threatened if just *anyone* can appear to be one of them.
The snag in SIX DEGREES is that even with its clever editing, even with its location photography, it still feels far too much like a stage play. Don't misunderstand, I love live theater. It is just that acting styles and narrative choices which work when a performance is in real time by actual size human beings one hundred feet away don't work when those same human beings are twenty feet high. Scenes involving college-age children berating their wealthy parents come off as ridiculously overacted, with staccato epithets overwhelming each other. Will Smith's genteel Paul Poitier persona seems too forced and phony for anyone to accept, even the star-struck Kitteredges, and the problem is that he's giving a big, broad performance much better suited to the stage. As a result, although I was intrigued with what SIX DEGREES had to say, the staginess of the production didn't allow me to get caught up in it.
To be fair, not all of the performances have that quality. Donald Sutherland does an extremely sharp reading of Flanders, never permitting him to appear stupid, which it would have been exceedingly easy to do. His sense of outrage grows as his facade crumbles, and he conveys that tension with subtlety and style. Stockard Channing, who played Ouisa on Broadway for three years, clearly knows her character inside out, and her telephone conversation with Paul late in the film is fantastic work. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION provides some very funny human comedy in an extremely well-constructed story. It's also a story which works much better on stage.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 degrees of separation: 6.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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