Poetry courtesy of The Boss and The Bard is filling the mountain air at the Telluride Film Festival.
Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics can be as potent as William Shakespeare’s verse.
When Jeremy Allen White performs ‘Born In the USA’ during Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the audacity of it sends a charge of electricity right through you.
And listen: Springsteen was in the audience for the film’s world premiere in the Werner Herzog Theatre. No pressure then, right? Oprah Winfrey was also in the house. Such a picture of grace. She had exited her limo and led her posse to the back of the queue where some of us had been waiting in line for over an hour. A couple of people bet that she’d sashay to the front.
Nope, didn’t happen. Oprah Winfrey took her place behind us.
When we listen to music or take in the lyrics of a song, more often than not, we pay scant attention to how those words and those chords came to me. What were the circumstances? The process can be tortuously painful as an artist digs deep to uncover how to articulate through a song what is going on within them.
Springsteen’s oeuvre is full of such moments. Scott Cooper explores one in particular: How did Springsteen find the emotional resources to summon up his 1982 Nebraska album? Cooper underpins that search by pin-pointing the exact location of the pain that drives Springsteen’s artistry.
The result is rooted, no surprise here, in family. Specifically, a father and his son. That’s the heart of the movie, and it’s propelled by acting of the highest calibre by White and Stephen Graham, who portrays Douglas ‘Dutch’ Springsteen, The Boss’s dad. And by Jeremy Strong as longtime manager Jon Landau, who’s like a brother, and much more, to Bruce.
When he introduced his film Friday night, Cooper noted that he wanted neither “impersonation,” nor “mimicry” from the actor he would choose to portray Springsteen.
“I wanted somebody who could embody the Bruce that we all know, with an intensity, an authenticity, with a vitality but also a vulnerability,” Cooper observed. But he also required an actor with two qualities that he most wanted: “One is humility and other is swagger, and they don’t teach swagger at Juilliard.”
White succeeds on all counts. There was something else. Kinda strange to say this about an actor portraying a rock legend who sings for his supper, but it’s the moments when White is silent that tells us the most about the guy he has managed to embody.
Jesse Buckley pulls off something similar in Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel about William Shakespeare’s (Paul Mescal) relationship with Agnes, a soul of the forest, and how the death of their son, Hamnet, inspired the playwright to write Hamlet.
Anthony Hopkins once told me that the hardest thing for an actor to do, is to stay still and say nothing.
I can’t and won’t give away the instance in Hamnet where Buckley stands still and says nothing, but I will say that if you have any feelings at all, it will break your heart. I was compelled to ask the person seated next to me if she was okay. Of course, she wasn’t. Neither was I.
Julie Huntsinger, Telluride’s artistic director, has curated three films concerning Hamlet. There’s Hamnet; there’s King Hamlet, which I haven’t seen yet, about how Oscar Isaac prepared for his performance in Sam Gold’s 2017 production of Hamlet at New York’s Public Theater. That, I did see. Wow!
As I noted in a column that ran yesterday about Aneil Karia’s BBC Film and BFI-backed Hamlet, starring Riz Ahmed in the title role, people become obsessed about the play and with the troubled prince. Ahmed became hooked while at school 20 years ago, and he and writer Michael Lesslie spent the last 14 years bringing their funky, punky kick-ass Hamlet to the screen. And, like The Boss, Hamlet has daddy (and uncle) issues.
Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel, Ballad of a Small Player isn’t really Shakespeare-adjacent but the movie adaptation in the hands of the brilliant filmmaker Edward Berger with a searing, ferocious performance from Colin Farrell, is up there with the Bard. I certainly thought of Lear as I watched it.
The film’s a sublime exploration of one man’s search for redemption. Farrell’s study of a gambling addict is screen acting of a rare kind. It’s haunting.
The post Breaking Baz @ Telluride: Jeremy Allen White, Jesse Buckley & Colin Farrell Find Poetry & Artistry In The Mountain Air appeared first on Deadline.
