You Can't Take It With You

Last night I watched - for the first time, I think - the 1938 movie, You Can't Take It With You. I've had a DVD of it for some time, but apparently have never got round to viewing it! Though it's based on the stage play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, it substantially changes a number of things, drops some characters, adds others, and in general makes a much more successful fist of things than if it had stuck to the layout of the original play.

A good deal of the original script survives, especially in terms of the main characters, but the snobbish and extremely wealthy Kirbys are given a much greater amount of screen time than they get on stage, and this adds strongly to the contrast between them and the eccentric Vanderhofs. In this version, Mr Kirby, a ruthless businessman, is about to take over entire blocks of the city in order to build a massive munitions factory.  In the process, a whole community will be torn apart. The only thing standing in his way is Mr Vanderhof, who refuses to sell his house - it's right in the middle of the proposed development. Apart from the romance between Kirby's son (James Stewart at his gawky best) and Vanderhof's granddaughter (Jean Arthur, not as dizzy as in some of her comedies) the film focuses on the contrast between Kirby and Vanderhof's philosophies of life: the latter is content to live with what he has, and to enjoy life; the former can only see life in terms of making money, and lots of it, yet he enjoys it not at all, and is told at one point he has stomach ulcers - though he claims it's merely indigestion.

The eccentric Vanderhof family look a little unlikely these days, and the idea of them just surviving on next to nothing, and welcoming others into their home to do the same, was probably somewhat improbable even when the film was made. However the point of their eccentricity is that they're not driven by ambition, or money, or any of the other things that give people emotional disease. Furthermore, in the film at least, they express a certain kind of Christian ease with the world, and it's notable that people flock around them (Vanderhof himself in particular) because there is a kind of charisma about them. Vanderhof even walks (or rather limps - he's sprained his foot) into a busy office and persuades an unhappy worker to give up his job and do what he really enjoys doing - making crazy toys.

Mr and Mrs Kirby live the life of wealth - he is full of greed and ambition and ruthlessness; his wife is a snob who's only hobby is spiritualism. This 'hobby' is trounced soundly by one of the Vanderhofs at a later stage of the movie as being nonsense.

It would be interesting to know how much input director Frank Capra had into the script. Though it's credited to Robert Riskin (who collaborated on several Capra movies), it seems as if Capra may have had a great deal to do with the structuring and characterization.  The film is full of typical Capra touches and scenes, the sorts of things that couldn't have been added at the last minute.  These include the hectic night court debacle with four attorneys turning up to defend the Kirbys (who've been arrested along with all the Vanderhofs), a host of reporters getting wind of the story, a crowd of the Vanderhofs' friends and neighbours - who at one point pass the hat around raucously to fund the Vanderhofs' fine - and the arguments and interactions between all the main characters. It's the kind of thing Capra revelled in, and did very well.  He seemed very capable of directing crowd scenes in which every person visible has a part to play, rather than just being in the background, and of bringing chaos to the screen without losing his audience.

The film is probably more Christian in tone than the play. Twice Vanderhof prays a grace before a meal, and on both occasions (addressing God as, 'Well, Sir') his prayer is simple and humble, showing a willingness to go along with the Lord's plans rather than his own. The parable of the wise man who built on a rock, and his opposite, the foolish man who built on sand, is brought to mind frequently, even though it's never overtly stated. There's a sense that everything happens according to a plan rather than randomly in spite of the chaos of the household, and there's a wonderful ease amongst the characters who live in the house - even though some of the things they do are basically pointless. Vanderhof's daughter (Spring Byington) spends her time typing plays - because a typewriter turned up one day.  Her own daughter, played by Ann Miller, spends her time dancing - yet she's not very good at it, and never will be. Her husband enjoys printing things, some of which are misinterpreted as revolutionary - he also plays the marimba, accompanying his wife at the drop of a hat. Byington's husband, and the iceman who arrived one day to deliver ice, and never went away again, spend their time in the basement making fireworks for the sheer pleasure of it. Two black servants seem as relaxed around the place as anyone. Though they're still servants, they have as much honour as anyone else.

Vanderhof is played by Lionel Barrymore, that bastion of many movies of the period, and member of a well-known theatrical family.  He was only sixty at the time - Samuel S Hinds, who plays his son-in-law, was two or three years older than him. Edward Arnold (who once supposedly said, in regard to not losing weight, "The bigger I got, the better character roles I received") is Mr Kirby, and he brings a great subtlety to the role, which may well have been expanded to fit his talents.  Incidentally, the theatrical poster pictured above must rank as one of the worst in terms of disfiguring the actors' faces. Most of them are unrecognizable.

Triptych

In a bit of a movie splurge, caught up with three movies last week: Shutter Island, A Serious Man, and, Adaptation. All of them are unusual, each in different ways. Shutter Island is the most mainstream, in that it has plenty of money to throw around, stars Leonardo Di Caprio, and is directed by Martin Scorsese. It's a fairly bleak psychological thriller with echoes of Hitchcock, and overall, I thought was worth watching. The cast is uniformly good, but the thing that stood out for me was the cinematography. Since dreams and memories are a significant part of the story, there's a dream quality to much of what goes on, even when it's meant to be the 'real' part of the story. (The thing hinges on a trick, somewhat like The Sixth Sense, or Hitchcock's own Vertigo.)

A Serious Man was a puzzle. I'm sure it's the sort of movie that leaves plenty of open ends so you can ask questions, but equally, in answering almost nothing, I found it just unsatisfying. It's as if the Coen brothers wanted to make a black comedy where they didn't have to explain anything; they could just go with whatever came up. Again there are dreams that at first appear to be reality.

This isn't to say that it's a poor movie in any sense; the cast are wonderful, with even those characters who are seen only for a minute being fully inhabited by the actors; the cinematography is again rich and full of detail, and it has lots of subtle (often 'Jewish subtle') humour in it. There's even a Jewish folk story sequence at the beginning which is wonderfully done, but appears to have almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie. An article in Wikipedia has this to say about this sequence:

The Yiddish story that introduces the film was created by the Coen Brothers, as they did not find any folk tales they thought were suitable. They note the story has no developmental relationship to what follows other than to set the tone. One possible interpretation of the faux folk tale at the beginning of the movie is that the couple seen in the folk tale are Larry's [the main character] ancestors and may through their action toward the Visitor have introduced a curse or a strain of sin into the family tree, as Yiddish folk belief would have construed the story. A portrait of Reb Groshkover [the 'visitor'] is glimpsed on the wall outside the Rabbi Marshak's office later in the film.

I suspect that several viewings of the movie would reveal a good deal that isn't picked up in one viewing.

Adaptation is a movie that plays constantly with the idea of movie-making, of adapting books to movies, of screenwriting, and of teasing the audience. In the opening credits we see that the screenplay is written by Charlie Kaufman - who exists, and is played in the movie by Nicholas Cage - and Donald Kaufman - who doesn't exist, and is also played in the movie by Cage. (Charlie Kaufman is the somewhat fat and morose twin - who'd probably benefit from a course of curvatrim - while Donald is the upbeat guy for whom life falls into place, even when he doesn't expect it.)

Three other real people appear in the film, but are played by Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. What these three 'characters' do in the movie isn't what the original 'real' people did, or are likely to do. And then there are several real people who play themselves - if that's what you do when you're just being you.

Kaufman the character is trying to adapt a book by the Streep character - and it's an actual book that was on the NY Times bestselling list. His earlier movie, Being John Malkovich, is seen being made early in this film, and becomes yet another part of the real/fictional/adaptative aspect of this movie. Adaptation also occurs in other areas: in relation to the orchids that are the subject of the book being adapted, in relation to changes in the characters' behaviour, in connection with Charles Darwin's theories about evolution, in relation to the way the movie itself adapts to its audience, since Robert McKee, the scriptwriting guru (he's the person played by Brian Cox) tells Kaufman that there has to be a satisfying third act - so Kaufman, after much internal debate, provides one, which of course, he's part of. Trying to describe this movie is a task.

Of the three movies I think I enjoyed Adaptation the most - its twists and turns at least contributed to a satisfying whole. Serious Man remains something of an enigma, although I enjoyed it while I was watching it. Shutter Island is overlong; some cutting would have improved the suspense and edge.