Antecedents

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Produced by Michael Brandman and Emanuel Azenberg
Written and directed by Tom Stoppard
Released by Cinecom

Scenes From a Mall
Produced and directed by Paul Mazursky
Written by Roger L. Simon and Mr. Mazursky
Released by Buena Vista Pictures

It is usually a reliable rule that when moviemakers decide to “open up” a stage play to adapt it to the screen with its voracious appetite for scenery, they lose more in focus and intensity than they gain in pretty vistas. I worried, therefore, about the opening shots of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, a dazzlingly depressing panorama of cliffs with a narrow road on which two figures appear. Where are we? What’s going on?

The cliffs are, almost certainly, somewhere in Yugoslavia, where much of this film was shot. And the two figures are Ros and Guil, on their way to Elsinore, where they have been summoned by the king who wants their help in understanding the reason for Prince Hamlet’s melancholy and peculiar behavior. The Yugoslav scenery and, indeed, the Brezice Castle that stands in for the seat of the Danish Royal House are stark, lavish but primitive, the kind of thing that Kurosawa finds all the time as backdrops for his semi-mythic Samurai epics. The film is certainly gorgeous (Peter Biziou, who won an Oscar for Best Cinematography for Mississippi Burning, is the director of photography), but that doesn’t get in the way of Stoppard’s vision of the funny cruelty of life. He has, since 1967, when the play opened at the Old Vic, rethought the whole matter, so that now, instead of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern standing in place as the play rushes past them, they are racing around, trying to figure out what is going on, popping up at the wrong time and at the most awkward places, overhearing snatches of conversation—lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet mostly—and utterly failing to understand anything at all. They haven’t a clue about the enormous tragedy on the fringes of which they are darting and feinting, and because of their epic denseness they enlarge, as Vladimir and Estragon enlarge in Waiting for Godot, or as the Fool enlarges in King Lear.

The film is, on every count, and by any measure, an enormous success. All the energies and inventive liveliness of Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman), Guildenstern (Tim Roth), and the player (Richard Dreyfuss) go to distracting us, but the vision of the film keeps our attention fixed nevertheless on its mournful heart. Stoppard seems finally to be telling us that Shakespeare didn’t have it wrong, after all.

According to one interpretation of the story in the Bible of Abraham and Isaac, that whole business about the sacrifice is a kind of charade. God isn’t really asking Abraham to do such a barbarous thing. God knows this, and Abraham knows it too, even as he climbs the mountain with Isaac at his side. Even Isaac, at some level, understands that this can’t really be happening. But for the ram, the innocent bystander, these theological jokes and games turn out to be deadly serious. It is always the innocent bystanders who suffer. This is what happens in Stoddard’s play and film. The players do a mini version of Hamlet (something like Stoppard’s own Five Minute Hamlet) and at the end, the chief player says, “A slaughterhouse! Eight corpses all told. It brings out the best in us.” Rosencrantz counts them up, and says, “Six!” and the player glares at them and insists, “Eight.”

They don’t know that he’s talking about them. They don’t know, can’t know, anything. Indeed, one of the sublime elegances of this film is its representation of stupidity, of amazing invincible ignorance, over and over again. It is the signature of these two oafs, and they are rather sweet about it. What Stoppard has contrived for them is a series of great moments in the history of physics. An apple falls on Rosencrantz’s head, and he thinks about it, considers it quite deeply, and then remarks, “I say . . . Would you like a bite?” He drops a feather and a wooden juggling ball from the gallery of an indoor tennis court, and of course in his experiment the feather floats down much more slowly than the wooden ball. He sees a series of hanging pots that are arranged in the manner of those toys for executives’ desks. He raises one, lets it hit the others, and watches in amazement as the energy is transferred to make the pot at the other end swing out. “Here, watch this,” he says, does it again, but raises the pot too far so that all it does is shatter.

Incomprehension is the basis of the jokes, but it is also a statement of the human condition. At one point, just before the conclusion (which is not a surprise, if we have been paying attention to such hints as the title provides), one of the unfortunate pair says to the other that there must have been a moment when they could have escaped this, when they could have avoided this whole ruinous business, “But if there was, we missed it.” They may have missed it, but we catch it clearly enough, as we watch them betray—unthinkingly—their boyhood friend, Hamlet.

Language is not what film does particularly well, but even here, Stoppard manages remarkable feats. He was obliged to do this, for, in his vision of the world, language is not merely an occasion for show-off vaudeville routines but is itself the snare in which his characters are trapped. They struggle in it, only to enmesh themselves more completely. They get referents wrong, and do show-biz turns that are entertaining but are also totally useless, that won’t get them out of Elsinore or keep them from the terrible fate that waits for them like a large vicious dog. (The sound of barking dogs is heard over and over again, a low-comedy leitmotif.) The player tells them, “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily—that is what tragedy means.” But they are not warned.

“There is something they’re not telling us,” Guildenstern says. “What?” the other asks. And of course Guildenstern shouts louder, “There is something they’re not telling us.”

Thus they persist in their entertaining and yet pathetic word games, one of the best of which is the Question Game. On the stage, it was played down in one, before the footlights. In the film, Ros and Guil are on a tennis court, serving and volleying over a bedraggled net, and moving about the court in inevitable ways. (The object of the game is to keep talking but always to avoid declarative statements. One must remain in the interrogative mode.)

It is Monty Python-ism but not sheer, not pure, because it is rooted in humane feeling. The comedy dazzles all the more brightly for its woeful cast, as it did with Keaton and Chaplin, as it did with Jacques Tati. The undergraduate send-up of this monstrous cultural icon, which is what Stoppard began with in his original one-act burlesque, has deepened and darkened, has become, itself, a more than respectable success (with a Tony and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award), and yet Stoppard has not been at all intimidated by his own play’s reputation. He is free and breezy, easy and sure, both as a screenwriter and director. Richard Dreyfuss is splendid as the ominous clown, carrying himself with a dignity that could serve in one of Ingmar Bergman’s mannered extravaganzas. And Oldman and Roth are fine as Ros and Guil. There is also a remarkable Yugoslav puppeteer, Zlkatko Bourek, who does the play-within-the-play-within-the-play and is properly eerie and yet, also, funny—as the larger action is and has to be. It is a remarkable achievement, one I applaud without reservation.

My expectations were less guarded about Scenes From a Mall. I had liked Mazursky’s previous picture. Enemies, A Love Story, and I am a Woody Allen fan and a Bette Midler admirer. Malls are funny. How could they go wrong?

Well, they don’t really. Indeed, the problem may be that the film gets so many things nearly right as to suggest earlier and better movies. The antecedents it summons to mind only dwarf the picture that is before us. The concept is an odd one—take Ingmar Bergmari’s Scenes From a Marriage and shoot most of it in a huge shopping mall, to approximate Jacques Tati’s Playtime. And with Woody Allen and Bette Midler, there will hardly be much need for characterization. Those actors bring character with them, after all.

What this works out to is a diverting enough representation of dire luxury and its stresses. There are a number of quite funny moments—from a series of foreign cars, all of them caught in a traffic jam at the entrance to the mall’s parking area, and in which all of the drivers are talking on their car phones, to a woeful moment in which Deborah and Nick (Midler and Allen) are drafting a separation agreement and a mariachi band descends upon them to serenade aggressively. There is a mime working the mall (Bill Irwin), and he keeps following the distressed couple around from one setting to another, making light of their misery or getting their moments of happiness wrong. This is all pleasant, clever enough fun, so that one feels slightly churlish demanding more.

But the Bergman references, both in the title and in the structure of the film, remind us how much better this kind of material can be. The pain of a Bette Midler is never far enough from comedy; Allen’s distress is exactly what he has made a living by flaunting for years and years; and the script doesn’t give either one of them a whole lot of help. Their extramarital affairs are just not believable and therefore not consequential. But it is the other reference, to Playtime, and the recollection we have of Jacques Tati’s brilliant exposition of the oppressive inhumanity of Mies van der Robe architecture that’ leaves us feeling all but swindled here. This is a great mall Mazursky has found—or confected out of the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut and the Beverly Center in California, a truly surrealistic temple to consumption, acquisition, and instant gratification. What Tati did demolishing that pretentious restaurant, should have been done here. There ought to be more small incidents, more telling faces, more surprising grotesques and caricatures—more of anything than the slightly pained smile Mazursky managed to generate and wants to share with us.

What I am demanding, of course, is vision, poetry, anger, idiosyncratic and extravagant personality, hysteria, hilarity, disgust . . . anything real. Real human qualities and emotions can’t exist in the little modules the malls provide. The air is processed, the decor is all contrived, and their purpose is to dazzle and benumb the customers, the better to part them from their money or, more likely, make imprints from their plastic. Malls are monstrous selling machines, and their resemblance to any actual life forms is temporary, arbitrary, and capricious. Tati’s mournful assertion of awkward dignity in the face of these impersonal monuments to commerce is just what Mazursky and his friends cannot afford to suggest. It might have been within Allen’s range—one remembers that huge photo-mural in the dining room of the apartment in Stardust Memories (1980) of the Vietnamese at the point of being executed—but Mazursky wasn’t crazed enough or desperate enough to take the necessary risks. About the worst disaster that happens here is that Nick forgets where he left the personalized surfboard he has been schlepping around from scene to scene. But it is hard for us to care much, because it was impossible to imagine either Nick or Woody Allen on that surfboard, hanging ten or even just hanging on for dear life.

Either Mazursky was too smart and too shrewd or else not smart enough, but, sure, see Scenes From a Mall. It has its pleasant moments. Afterwards, though, you should rent the videocassette of Playtime and look at that, two or three times, in order to refresh your notions of how good a movie can be.