VANYA ON 42ND STREET
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1995 Jon A. Webb
VANYA ON 42ND STREET is David Mamet's adaptation of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," as directed by Louis Malle. The adaptation seems faithful so far as I can tell (I've never seen the play or read it, but it sounds authentic) and shows great respect for the conventions of the theater as well as great love for actors. Still, as much as I wanted to like this film, I found it dull and flat, except for a few scenes where the actors and Chekhov's material break through and I felt I was really learning something about humanity.
The story is a play within a play; Andre Gregory is the director of a production of "Uncle Vanya," currently in rehearsal in an old rundown theater. The decrepit theater helps create the right tone for the story, which takes place in a now-neglected farmhouse on a Russian estate.
The story opens with Wallace Shawn, who plays Uncle Vanya, eating a knish outside the theater, waiting for the others. He complains of being tired and lays down to take a nap on a convenient bench on the stage; at that moment, the casual conversation between two actors begins to change, and you realize that the play has begun; when Shawn wakes up, he is Uncle Vanya. This is a neat, elegant transition that is quite in tune with the overall tone of the film, which tries in a gentle way to bring us into the mood of Chekhov's play.
Another thing I liked about the film were Julianne Moore's performance as Yelena; her striking beauty is the main subject of the play, and she has a complicated relationship with Uncle Vanya--he is ardently pursuing her, as his one last hope at achieving transcendent joy; she finds him disgusting but at the same time she is grateful for his jokes and friendship as she feels herself wasting away.
I was quite struck by the performance of the woman who plays Sonya, Uncle Vanya's niece. She is called upon to portray a plain woman who is painfully conscious of how inferior she is as an object of desire to Yelena, and she conveys this very well. As an actress she is of course beautiful but you can see how she thinks she is not beautiful enough to be anything more than "plain"; you can see how this belief in itself renders her plain and makes her unsuccessful in her own bid to get out of the trap she finds herself in.
In spite of all these good points, I found the film hard to take. It is simply too much of a play to work well in the less fluid and interactive medium of film. Several times I found myself bored. I feel educated, and eager to see good stage productions of Chekhov; but I don't feel the uplifting sense of having seen something really first rate that I sometimes get from film.
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