Few film-makers have as varied a CV as Richard Linklater’s; from the box-office hit School of Rock to his experiments with rotoscope, he is indefatigably curious and surprisingly consistent — with style and substance. This time around, he is testing himself with a chamber piece: a drama set almost entirely in one room and focused on a single character. The setting is the upscale New York bar Sardi’s on the night in 1943 when Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is having its triumphant premiere; the character is American lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, there was Rodgers and Hart. They’d met when Rodgers was still in high school, going on to write a slew of hit musicals including such well-known songs as “My Funny Valentine”, “Isn’t it Romantic” and the enduring “Blue Moon” of the title. Ethan Hawke, Linklater’s friend and frequent collaborator, somehow manages to shrink himself to fit the agitated, alcoholic, short and desperate Hart, now 47, discarded by his former creative partner and knowingly washed up. Seven months later, the drink will get him. In fact, it’s in the process of getting him right in front of us.
After 26 years spent working around Hart’s erratic binges and missing mornings, Rodgers (Andrew Scott at his most urbane) has found a new partner in Oscar Hammerstein, a large, bluff man (Simon Delaney) who reveres Hart as his profession’s sage. Hart despises him and his blundering height, despises the hokey sentimentality of Oklahoma!, is swimming in bitterness. His wit hasn’t deserted him, however, which gives his hatred a poisonous potency. While he is unctuously complimentary to the gathering Oklahoma! afterparty, he shares his most waspish barbs with the genial barman (Bobby Cannavale) and the young pianist he christens Knuckles, who obligingly twinkles through a bundle of his old hits. They still seem to love him, but he has a lot of songs in the bank.
Hart is probably gay – he certainly exudes the misery of persecution — but, as he says, a writer should be omnisexual, able to feel life like a man, a woman or a horse. He is currently obsessed with a young woman, Elizabeth Wieland (Margaret Qualley, suitably glowing with youth among these sun-starved theatrical reprobates), a Yale fine arts student 27 years his junior. Her elaborately embroidered accounts of her sexual debacles excite him, even as he tries to court her. Their real-life letters served as a basis for the script by Robert Kaplow, who also wrote Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles.
Spending so long with this vituperative, helpless man is not exactly the pleasant night’s entertainment you might have imagined, given this is the fellow who wrote “The Lady is a Tramp”. Wheedling or opining: he’s the half-cut whisky warrior anyone would dread sitting next to, with Linklater’s camera locked on him for the duration. Worse than his malice is his neediness, which seems to break through that fourth wall to put its sticky fingers around our throats. In a bravura theatrical performance, Hawke makes the genius truly pathetic.
What’s more purely enjoyable is the felt sense of a very particular period in New York, then in its last stages, when wits destroyed themselves around the round table in the Algonquin Hotel and their patrons put on the Ritz. There is a tug of nostalgia as the Oklahoma! party gathers around the single phone to hear the critics’ reviews, read out from the late editions as they roll off the presses. Sardi’s, so synonymous with that time on Broadway, is bathed in a golden glow, the piano trilling through its empty space. Linklater treats that space as a stage, moving around it as Hart moves. A single evocative shot of a wistful Hart seen through a gap in the gauze curtain, framed by a half-closed door, is poignant because unexpected.
Even in this luvvies’ safe space, however, there is the sense that the spirit of the world that allowed for men like Lorenz Hart to dissipate (a verb he likes) and snark at anything he considered cliched or weak-minded is being replaced by something else. This kind of broad social analysis is absolutely in Richard Linklater’s wheelhouse; you feel him rising to the bait. The world outside is at war. Knuckles the pianist plays in uniform; he is waiting for his deployment. Patriotism is in the air; the whole bar joins in a rowdy rendition of “Over There”, the rallying cry that announces that “the Yanks are coming”.
At the time, Oklahoma! was criticised in some quarters for being too frivolous a show for a country at war. Eighty years later, that froth and bubble is still working a treat; Oklahoma! had a triumphant West End run just two years ago. Hart, a dinosaur from the adventurous Jazz Age, wants to mock pretensions and show human beings as they really are; Rodgers knows they just want to see the boy get the girl and a rousing chorus. Oklahoma! represents a nostalgia for an America that never existed, as Hart observes. But that’s what people want, counters Rodgers. And this is a business. He’s nailed it: the 1950s are around the corner.
Title: Blue Moon
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Richard Linklater
Screenwriter: Robert Kaplow
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
Sales agent: Sony Pictures Classics
Running time: 1 hr 40 mins
