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"Joe Gould's Secret" | page 1, 2
In any other movie, he'd be right, but Davis is damn near invisible here. Only a few of the actors come through, like Jerry Mayer as a Village tavern owner, who exudes the experience of a man who's seen it all and has somehow retained the good humor to still be tickled by it, and Patricia Clarkson as a gallery owner and patron of Gould's. The movie perks up whenever Clarkson comes on screen; she's a little oasis of clear-headed life. For the most part, Tucci has made the movie with the same fussiness that Mitchell shows when he spreads a newspaper over the dining room table before cutting into a watermelon. Mitchell was perhaps that kind of a man. Tucci's skillful performance gets at Mitchell's genteel Southern deference, not just in the impeccable way he dresses but in the quietly lilting voice he employs, and the way he seems to wrap a pillow around his consonants. (He says "dudn't" for "doesn't.") And Tucci doesn't hide the fussiness of Mitchell the writer. In one scene, the New Yorker's legendary editor Harold Ross (played by Patrick Tovatt) practically has to pry a story out of Mitchell's hands to keep him from fine-tuning it into oblivion. Tucci has set himself a tough task: Conveying the paradoxes of a man he obviously esteems. The trouble is that the performance is so recessive it lays out Mitchell's dilemma without dramatizing it. Perhaps the only way to dramatize "Joe Gould's Secret" is as a sort of black comedy about a writer whose curiosity saddles him with an albatross that his good manners prevent him from jettisoning. But the movie itself is too good-mannered to take that tack. Holm plays Gould closer to the disagreeable character Mitchell wrote about in "Joe Gould's Secret" than the amusing nutcase he created in "Professor Sea Gull." The result is that we get Gould's torment without his ebullience. No doubt, as Mitchell wrote, that as Gould's desperation took hold, people began to dread running into him. We see his freeloader's contempt for the industriousness of people he benefits from. Gould is the type of guy who, sooner of later, makes you sorry for every break you've ever given him. But there had to be some cracked charisma that attracted Gould's benefactors. In one of the movie's best scenes, Gould works his shtick on a pair of secretaries who've ventured down to the Village for a taste of the Bohemian life. When Mitchell shows up, they're only too glad to make their escape. What's missing not just from Holm's performance but from the whole conception of the role is the shabby appeal that would have started the women talking to him in the first place. Ian Holm is one of the actors I most look forward to seeing in the movies. His Fluellen in Kenneth Branagh's film of "Henry V" is unlikely ever to be matched. And his performance as Lewis Carroll in the too-little-seen "Dreamchild" is one of the least-known great performances in the movies. (Going through an exhibit of Carroll's photographs and letters a few weeks ago, I couldn't get Holm's heartbreaking, halting ardor in the role out of my head.) What's missing from Holm's performance here is joy in Gould's nonconformity, some zip in his high-hatted rot-gut palaver, a touch of the freeing grossness you see in Michel Simon's performance as the bum in Renoir's "Boudu Saved From Drowning." For Gould to wind up tragic, he can't start that way. As solicitous as the movie is of Mitchell, it winds up doing him a disservice. Tucci falls back on the easy irony that the story of a man working on a nonexistent book was made famous by a writer in the last essay he wrote before 32 years of silence. That observation has cropped up in much of the commentary on Mitchell, and as an analogy it doesn't hold water. There's a difference between a half-mad alcoholic bum cadging "donations" in the name of a pipe dream and a published writer who, whether he dried up or was struck dumb by a distaste for his profession, left behind a fine, if small, body of work. It's one thing for Mitchell to invoke the novel he dreamed of and never wrote as a way of invoking sympathy for Gould. It's quite another for the filmmakers to use that story to draw a parallel. In one scene, Mitchell describes his imagined novel to a man he meets at a cocktail party. In his essay, Mitchell described the book as about "a day and a night in the life of a young reporter in New York City. He is a Southerner, and a good deal of the time he is homesick for the South ... [He] starts poking around the parts of the city that he knows best, gradually going uptown. As he wanders, he reencounters men and women who seem to represent various aspects of the city ... it dawns on him that it is not the South that he longs for but the past, the South's past and his own past, neither of which, in the way that he has been driven by homesickness to think of them, ever really existed." In the end, the reporter understands that he "is now a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world." That story never took the form Mitchell envisioned, but reading through "Up in the Old Hotel," it's easy to recognize it as the story he nonetheless told, the story of his love affair with the remnants of a vanished New York and the oddballs and hangers-on who lived there. It was a considerable accomplishment that, with the best intentions, Tucci shortchanges.
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