Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

It would be hard for the two movies I saw last week, Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, to exist at further ends of the cinematic spectrum. Evil Does Not Exist is a new film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the writer and director of Drive My Car. It is a Japanese arthouse drama, and almost punishingly slow. If you’re inclined to like that sort of thing (I am), maybe you’d describe it as patient. “It’s boring,” I wrote in my notebook, a neutral acknowledgement of a seemingly objective truth rather than a complaint.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, is the fourth installment in the current iteration of a long-running blockbuster franchise. “Very excited to watch some apes beat the shit out of each other,” I texted a friend before heading into the theater. I got exactly what I wanted.

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The slowness of Evil Does Not Exist is a lot to deal with. This is a movie with a 15- or 20-minute town hall meeting, and that’s arguably the most dynamic scene. I love a slow movie in a theater. Slow movies that should be snappy drive me nuts, but movies that have no intention of being anything other than a sensory bath are great excuses to relax in a distraction-free environment. I can let my thoughts off the leash to drift where they may. That’s often the point of slow movies.

In the midst of the many things that passed through my mind in the first forty or so minutes of Evil Does Not Exist, I spent a lot of time thinking about climate change. It felt intrusive, a distraction spurred by a coincidence. Evil Does Not Exist takes place during winter in a heavily-forested town. Everything is dusted with snow. The village of Mizubiki may be in rural Japan, but the way of life depicted didn’t look all that different from my childhood in the heavily-forested outskirts of Connecticut. An early scene in which Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) splits firewood and loads it into a wheelbarrow stirred up strong memories, memories that led me to think about the infrequency with which my childhood yard now likely sees any snow at all.

For a few minutes, I was worried this sudden focus was derailing my experience, but it quickly became clear I’d been played. Far from intrusive, thoughts of climate change had been cultivated. I got there via an unusually personal and immediate route, but Hamaguchi takes great pains throughout the first third of Evil Does Not Exist to establish the patterns of life in the village, and to get you thinking, on some level or another, about threats to those patterns. It’s hard to watch a man ladling water out of a creek without thinking about the fact that a lot of people can’t do that anymore. What once would have seemed quaint now seems precious.

* * * * *

The single aspect of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes that I found most remarkable was the physicality of the apes. I was always aware of their strength, in a sort of tactile way. “Can you imagine,” I thought to myself during an early fight scene, “getting punched by a gorilla who meant it?” Throughout all of the set pieces, the effects team and the animators in particular never lose sight of the weight of each hit. We are meant to marvel at them without ever feeling them to be fantastical. The power and presence of the apes reminded me of the day many years ago when I gazed in awe at the underwater scenes from Disney’s Pinocchio, processing the fact that Jiminy Cricket had weight.

The protagonist is Noa, a young chimpanzee on a mission to free his clan, who were all taken prisoner in a raid. Along the way, he encounters and befriends a human woman, Mae. Within the world of Apes, humans exist, but they are feral and pre- (well, strictly speaking, post-) verbal. The same virus that gave apes speech and intelligence, took them from humans. Mae is unusual. She can talk, fully fluent and cognitively unimpaired.

From that revelation, the movie loses its way a bit, sacrificing what it’s great at (world-building, mood, general vibes) for what it isn’t (plot and emotional payoff). Part of the reason it starts to wobble, I think, is because the creative team is never quite sure what they want to do with Mae. Is she the new audience surrogate, or are we supposed to dislike her? The movie itself seems unable to decide. It’s ambitious, and I like that the movie tries something, even if it doesn’t work. “The fact that she sucks is probably the most interesting thing about that movie,” a friend texted me after seeing the movie, and he’s right.

The movie ends with Noa and his tribe rebuilding their home, and Mae setting off to help humanity do the same. Before she goes, they have a final, standoffish conversation, during which Noa asks if humans and apes can ever live side-by-side. His question is hopeful, even if he asks it despairingly. He wants the answer to be yes.

There’s an insert shot there, brief enough that I almost missed it, of Mae holding a pistol behind her back. It is jarring, a fantastic and unexpected directorial choice. I love that shot, and how it collapses everything the movie has been struggling to articulate into a single frame. The gun is a visceral betrayal of Noa, who’s harmless, but we say that as the audience. The gut reaction of judging Mae is replaced almost instantaneously by self-reflection: Would you feel safe living side-by-side with these apes? Would you live with Noa? I realized in that moment that I wouldn’t. Because of the work that the production team put into making the chimps and gorillas—boy, that gorilla—feel real, I realized that I’d already known that for at least the last hour.

Stereophonic at the John Golden Theatre

The set for Stereophonic, which recreates a 1970s recording studio, is immaculate. Walking into the Golden, I wasn’t sure what decade the play took place in, but I understood the moment I saw that set. The carpet, the pillows, the big beautiful Cadac G Type console, the sheer brownness of the whole thing, it was all correct.

Stereophonic was dreamt up by playwright David Adjmi and musician Will Butler, and what a fabulous idea for a play this is. The audience is presented with a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the tumultuous and torturous recording of a major 1970s rock album. Think Led Zeppelin or, far more accurately, Fleetwood Mac.

It’s easy to describe this as a play about Fleetwood Mac, but Adjmi has said that he researched dozens of bands and did not consciously choose Fleetwood Mac as his model. It is hard to believe, though I don’t think the man has any reason to fib. That there are so many similarities—three men, two women; three Brits, two Americans; a year-long recording process funded by the largest budget ever given to a band; an insufferable but very good lead guitarist who is newer to the band but drives its music—suggests a sort of carcinization process, as though the Fleetwood Mac constellation were ideal for creating a group of people who can’t stop fucking or fighting or, god help them, making great music.

And boy, that music. The music in Stereophonic is astonishing. If the band’s album were available to purchase, I would have bought it on the spot. Ryan Rumery can be congratulated in advance on his upcoming Tony Award win for Best Sound Design of a Play, but I worry Butler and orchestrator Justin Craig will be overlooked in their respective categories. Stereophonic has the best new music I’ve heard in a theatrical production since The Band’s Visit. It may not be a musical, but let’s not let that stop us from getting carried away.

Not only is the music excellent, the show’s relationship to it is exilarating. Every time the band picked up an instrument, the energy changed. Each performance feels spontaneous, carrying the energy of discovery and creation. I don’t know, I truly don’t know, how the performers do it, night after night. One scene has them attempt to record the song “Masquerade” five or six times in a row. I didn’t mind. The final take was exquisite. The sense of place in this production is strong enough that audience applause after takes felt jarring, but I clapped all the same. It’s good shit, man.

The play itself, the material surrounding the music, is uneven. Adjmi’s script is wondrously funny when it wants to be, a cascading series of jokes effortlessly based in character and situation, but too often it turns to dramatic interactions that carry little weight. The day-to-day matters concerning the band are always compelling. There’s a late interaction between the drummer and guitarist, discussing the band as a whole, during which they don’t mention either female member once. That’s smart.

The problems arise when we’re asked to engage with the lives of the band members outside of the studio. Those moments don’t work because the characters never cohere into compelling individuals. They’re archetypes. The guitarist is a narcissistic control freak with a unique vision. His girlfriend is the more gifted songwriter, despite having no self-confidence. The bass player has substance abuse issues. These aren’t people, they’re stand-ins.

As a result, and despite having numerous enthralling sections, Stereophonic is long. There is at least half an hour that could be cut from this three-hour play, and it would be easy to do it. The characters don’t have arcs. There are precious few through-lines of any substance. The characters change, but in bulletins. The bassist was a louche and then he’s clean. Cool. When’s the next song?

Adjmi has talked in interviews about how he consciously avoided making a musical. The songs here are “just” songs. They’re a vibe, an energy, divorced of what’s going on around them. That could be spun as a significant flaw of the show, particularly given its subject. “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” is so compelling because you can picture Lindsay Buckingham singing it while giving Stevie Nicks a death stare in the booth, and you can tell it pisses him off that she’s ignoring him. This music shouldn’t exist divorced of what’s happening around it, at least not in the dramatic portions of this play.

On the other hand, there’s a stretch at the beginning of Act IV, probably about 15 or 20 minutes long, during which the show becomes an out-and-out comedy centered on the premise, “Can you imagine what it must have been like to be the poor engineers working on Tusk?” Three of the band members, two of whom now cannot stand to be in the same room with one another, are recording vocal overdubs. In between takes, they take potshots at one another that are turned up to 11, so heightened that the interaction has no choice but to serve as comedy. The engineers struggle to maintain peace long enough to get what they need on tape. The singing is magnificent, and everything else drops away each time they start singing. There’s a sense of tragedy in it, and a sense of wonder, that these people who so fully loathe one another can still create this magic. The scene is also hilarious. A masterful stretch of theatre.

My experience of Stereophonic can be summed up by my reactions to two different moments in Act IV. When the drummer told everyone that his wife and kids had left him, I was more or less indifferent. I was sorry for him, sure, but only in the abstract. When the guitarist casually mentioned during a band meeting that they’d cut “Masquerade.” I was absolutely heartbroken. I think I may have even gasped out loud.

Beauty and the Beast (Work in Progress)

I love process. I love drafts and iterations, watching something take form. I often wish we celebrated the process more, instead of just focusing on the results, but I recognize I’m in the minority there. Nobody wants to see Yo-Yo Ma practice a piece for hours, they want to see the soaring performance that comes after.

There is evidence, though, that people may want to see more of the process than they realize. The world (correctly) lost its mind three years ago when the Beatles documentary Get Back showed Paul McCartney will “Get Back” into existence over the course of about 45 minutes. The recent deluxe edition of Revolver offered something similar, as “Got to Get You Into My Life” thrillingly took form over four distinct versions.

Aside from the technical knowledge you can gain by consuming multiple drafts of something, the invaluable insights surrounding the “why”s behind each decision made, observing the process also makes great works seem within reach. The picture book Princess Mononoke: The First Story, for example, collects a series of conceptual paintings from a young Hayao Miyazaki. The story, which he wrote and illustrated in the early 80’s, contains the seeds of what would become not only Princess Mononoke, but also My Neighbor Totoro. That those two ideas were at one point intertwined makes both masterpieces seem less impossible as individual accomplishments, while it seems all the more magical—to me at least—that each arrived at its final, “inevitable” form.

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In September of 1991, as Disney Animation was putting the finishing touches on Beauty and the Beast, the studio made the unusual decision to bring a work print to the New York Film Festival. Though it is not uncommon for live-action directors to screen rough cuts, this was an unprecedented choice for an animation studio. My guess is that Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg—for some reason I always want to call him Jeffrey Katzenberger—was eager to publicize Disney’s next musical. While The Little Mermaid had been a big success, subsequent release The Rescuers Down Under was a bomb.

The NYFF print was not a rough draft. The film had been locked for ages. The audio was basically finished. What made it a work in progress was the animation, 30% of which was raw pencil drawings, storyboards, or even concept art. In the age of the Internet, and having lived through the era of the DVD extra (RIP), we’ve grown accustomed to this sort of look behind the curtain. This was 1991. Most of the people in that audience had probably never seen anything like it. By all accounts, it was a success. Viewers responded with a lengthy standing ovation.

While I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in that theater, I don’t have to imagine what it’s like to watch the print, which was included when Beauty and the Beast made its DVD debut in 2002. Despite having owned the print across two formats and two decades, I realized last night that I’d never watched it. I was surprised. I adore animation as a medium and technical process. I almost majored in animation in undergrad. The work in progress version of Beauty and the Beast feels like something I should be screening annually at my apartment, and I’ve never  seen it? I decided to put it on.

It was wonderful, obviously. It’s always wonderful to experience something you know and love in a new way. In my lifetime, I have watched Beauty and the Beast well over 100 times (if my mom is reading this, she probably just scoffed out loud at the idea that the number could be so low, but I’m being conservative). Over time, it has settled into something familiar. Not closed off, necessarily, but finished. The work print cracked it back open. Because I was paying more attention, watching it as a new work, I experienced it more intensely.

More than that, the unfinished pencils, storyboards, and concept paintings encouraged me to really think about the people who made the movie. Rather than focusing on the animation, I started thinking about the animators. I do that all the time when watching stop-motion, whose tactility actively encourages the audience to think about the artisans. Finalized hand-animation renders the process, and therefore the people behind it, invisible.

The rough pencil lines of unfinished animation bring a similar tactile quality. Much as you cannot see a slight indentation on a plasticine puppet without thinking of the thumb that made it, you cannot look at unvarnished graphite without imagining the pencil and the hand holding it.

Glen Keane, the supervising animator for the Beast, delivered something particularly astonishing. Because I was paying so much attention, I even noticed new details in the finished material. Take as an example the scene after the Beast rescues Belle from the wolves.

“If you would hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much,” Belle chides.

“If you hadn’t runaway, this wouldn’t have happened,” Beast replies, a smirk on his face.

“If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away.”

“Well,” he begins, frantically searching for a reply, “you shouldn’t have been in the West Wing.”

Look at his face! He is grinning! Grinning! In 33 years of watching Beauty and the Beast, I never before noticed that he is enjoying the flirtation, the back-and-forth. He is so pleased with himself for finding a riposte. “Keane should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Actor,” I muttered to myself during another scene. I stand by it.

The ultimate outcome of all this is that every pan, every zoom, every vocal inflection, every subtle bit of squash-and-stretch, all of it became transparently the result of human choices. Of course, it always was. Just like Yo-Yo Ma’s transcendent performances of Bach’s cello suites, the electric final arrangement of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and the forms into which My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke ultimately settled, Beauty and the Beast as a movie exists because a remarkable, driven group of people got together and did the work. The NYFF work in progress print is a wonderful reminder that you have to build a house brick-by-brick, that the process is just as worthy of celebration as the end result.

If anyone wants to attend next year’s screening, please know ahead of time that seating at my place is limited. Tickets go on sale May 1st.

Merrily We Roll Along at the Hudson Theatre

I wonder how much time and energy has been put into deconstructing Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim’s infamous problem child. I wouldn’t be surprised if more ink has been spilt over Merrily than any other show in his canon, and I wonder, I do I do, if any show with so short an original run has received as many revivals. The strangest part of all this is that the general consensus remains the same, forty years later: Merrily We Roll Along does not work.

People love a project, though, and that may account for the show’s enduring popularity among theatre types. It’s also about theatre types, which can’t be discounted. Whatever the reason may be, every five or ten years someone has a high-profile production that “fixes” this unfixable show. The current production, under Maria Friedman’s direction, purports to do exactly that, and the general audience response seems to find it successful.

Imagine if I did? How boring would this be to read?

Merrily is an uncomfortable creation, a musical told in reverse. It tracks the dynamics between three friends—Franklin Shephard, composer; Charley Kingas, playwright; and Mary Flynn, journalist and critic—over the course of 25 years, from about 1980 to 1955. The show opens at a party hosted by Frank, who has recently transitioned from successful theatre composer to successful Hollywood producer. As the show unspools, or spools, or respools, or however you want to put it, events from the past make sense of what we’ve already seen in the future.

It’s a clever idea, one that feels like it should work. That may be another reason why Merrily keeps finding new gasps of life: it is easy to convince yourself that it’s only a few small tweaks away from humming along. Given the creative team involved—Hal Prince as original director, George Furth writing the book, and Sondheim on keys—that’s understandable. Nevertheless, every production leads people back to the same conclusion: everyone is so unlikable when the show starts, it’s impossible to care about them by the end.

I don’t know if that’s the problem. It might be a problem, sure, but I don’t think it’s the problem. There are plenty of unlikeable characters littering the aisles of American theatre, and we don’t bandy that criticism around. I think the issue is more complicated than that. I think Merrily, for all the work the writers put into it, feels kind of lazy.

That is, prima face, an absurd statement. If there are negative words to be associated with Stephen Sondheim, “lazy” ain’t one of ‘em. To clarify, I don’t think the show is lazy. I said it feels lazy, which is not the same thing. Because of its structure, Merrily has no choice but to take shortcuts to try and elicit emotional responses it hasn’t earned. That’s what happens when you show the post before the hoc. Structured as it is, the show is asking for the audience to experience the payoff without first having invested.

The entire score is built around reversing song and reprise. Embittered or warped renditions of songs transform back into their original purity, mirroring the journey of the characters. Look at “Not a Day Goes By,” which, chronologically, is first sung at Frank’s wedding. The song appears again when Beth and Frank get divorced, a fairly traditional use of song and reprise. The song they sang to one another at their wedding is now a lament of the fact that she’ll never stop loving him. 

The problem? We don’t know Beth yet. Her solo performance of “Not a Day Goes By” is the first time we see the character. That’s a heavy song that requires a lot of audience investment to work, but we don’t get that. Instead, it feels maudlin.

Beth is my favorite character in the show. If the whole thing were presented chronologically, I would probably find her performance of “Not a Day Goes By” devastating. As it is, the best I can give you as an audience member is “I trust that the song currently being sung is motivated by something I will understand later,” which puts me at a remove. Musical theatre is all about feeling. That is its primary motivation as an art form. You cannot separate an audience from what’s on stage emotionally like that and expect it to work in the same way.

Another curious side effect of putting things in reverse order, one I wouldn’t have expected: as the final scene pulls everything together, it feels pat. The show ends with Charley and Frank on the rooftop of their new New York apartment building, watching Sputnik fly overhead. During that scene, a few of the show’s biggest dots are connected. We see Charley and Frank become collaborators, and we watch them meet Mary. We also, finally, see the moment Mary falls in love with Frank.

All of these dots that get connected feel cheap, though. The most tragic moment in the show, discovering that a piece of advice Frank cynically gives a young writer in the first scene was taken from a compliment Charley paid Frank in the moment they decided to become collaborators, elicited a laugh from the audience. Somehow, presenting the whole thing backwards turned everything that’s meaningful into a punchline.

The backwards structure makes the show a puzzle, like the similarly-designed Memento. Instead of living in each moment, we are constantly wondering about what happened next [sic.]. Memento is a thriller. Trying to solve the puzzle is part of the fun. Merrily We Roll Along is a tragedy about three friends, success, and ego. These are not the same. I continually found myself thinking about that joke from the pilot of Mad Men, when Don Draper says “It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.” Mad Men never made a joke like that again, and for good reason.

Merrily We Roll Along fails for reasons the writers never could have predicted. The current production is very good, but the material is too clever by half. Musical theatre is inherently, and I say this as someone who loves it deeply, a medium for dumb-dumbs. Even at its most intelligent, at its most daring, musical theatre needs to be immediate, something you can entirely lose yourself in. Merrily doesn’t give the audience the space to do that. We’re too busy balancing ledgers and keeping track of questions.

You know, before I saw Merrily We Roll Along, I assumed Mary was the bookwriter in a three-way collaboration. I do think the show would be much better if she were. It would raise the stakes around her, make the dramatic triangle into a real triangle…Hm. Maybe I really can fix it.

Into the Woods at the St. James Theatre

This piece was originally written in the fall of 2022.

I’ve had the good fortune to see the current Broadway production of Into the Woods twice now, once at Encores! and once at the St. James last night. To say that the reception has been positive would be an understatement. “Euphoric” would probably be an understatement. The ovation the audience gives the fully-assembled cast at the top of the show competes in my memory only with the applause that greeted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s entrance at the top of Hamilton back in 2016.

It’s easy to understand the excitement. Into the Woods is uniquely beloved amongst musicals, thanks in large part to its ubiquity in high schools, and the ready availability of a filmed performance of the original Broadway production. It’s been ten years since the show was seen in New York City, and twenty since it was last on Broadway. The audience was ready.

The cast, too, seems to have been ready. You can feel love for the material undulate off the stage. In both performances, Sara Bareilles in particular gave off a sense of being thrilled just to be doing this. It was readily apparent at Encores! that Heather Headley, Gavin Creel, David Patrick Kelly, Annie Golden and Julia Lester all love the show. It was also readily apparent, as it always is, that Neil Patrick Harris loves an audience.

At both Encores! and the St. James, I got the feeling that I wasn’t watching a production of Into the Woods so much as I was watching a production of a production of Into the Woods. The energy suggested the March sisters performing Jo’s plays in the attic. That kind of joy in the material is infectious, and I wish we saw more of it in professional theatre. With this material, though, that approach is a double-edged sword. Everyone is having too good a time to be thoughtful. The audience and the performers were so obviously in love with the material already that none of them seemed terribly concerned with doing the work to embody what makes it great.

With a show like Fiddler on the Roof, say, that wouldn’t be a problem. Get me a cast and an audience that loves the material in Fiddler and I’m going to have a great night. Into the Woods is different. It is a messier, trickier creature. Its themes are subtler, and the fluctuations in its moods will get away from you if you don’t work very hard to pin them down.

Not only does this production fail to offer any substantive work as far as the themes are concerned, worse than that, this is Into the Woods as vaudeville. This is a first-class production of Into the Woods directed as though it were the school version that omits the second act. It’s all comedy, no contemplation. Not that Into the Woods isn’t written to be funny; the show is filled with space for comedy, with lines that can be milked for laughs as much or as little as the actors want. Director Lear deBessonet appears to have told everyone to milk the show dry as Milky White.

This makes the first act a breeze, but the second crumbles into dust. Into the Woods is based on classic fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. The first act, which more or less depicts these fairytales unchanged, is followed by a second act that interrogates the assumptions at the heart of those stories. What if you escape the tower and your mother, but the world really is dangerous and unpredictable? What if life with Prince Charming isn’t all you expected? Was Jack right to take from the giant?

Without deep and sincere character work in the first act, which is the egg that holds this bake together, the audience has nothing to hold onto when the tempo and mood suddenly shift. The darker and more thoughtful turn taken by the second act is so ill-served by the choices here that I found myself wondering during the Encores! performance if “No One Is Alone” makes any sense as a song. It was unmoored from any dramaturgical sense of place.

Though most of the major issues persist, the Broadway production is a marked improvement. The production itself hasn’t changed at all, but the cast has. Phillipa Soo was magnificent as Cinderella. She brought a subtlety to “On the Steps of the Palace” that most of the first act lacked. Brian d’Arcy James, as dependable a leading man as you can get, made sure that the Baker is a coherent individual rather than a series of laugh lines. When their rendition of “No One Is Alone” started, from the moment Soo’s phrasing choices crystalized on “Mother cannot guide you,” it was a revelation.

D’Arcy James and Soo are such experienced, thoughtful actors that they are able to push against the limitations of what the production is asking. They can feel in their bones what the show is meant to be, and they instinctually steer it in that direction. My greatest disappointment in all of this may be that the two of them were not in the production their performances deserve. That would be worth all this euphoria and then some.

I find myself thinking again and again about what the reviews and audience response would be like if this had been the first-ever production of Into the Woods. Rest assured that the reviews would be nowhere near as kind. They’d fall more in line with the gentleman I overheard leaving the St. James, who said “I loved the first act but the second act was kinda…” If this were the show’s debut, it would have almost immediately vanished into obscurity. What I saw a month ago at Encores! and last night at the St. James was a good musical comedy with a messy second act. Lord knows we have enough of those. Into the Woods is, as both the cast and the audience know, so much more than that.

The Zone of Interest

If there’s a single argument to be made in favor of The Zone of Interest being a great work of art, it’s the fact that I have walked away from each of my two viewings with entirely different impressions. The first time I watched it, I was at home, and I disliked the majority of what I saw. Save for the very end, I found it self-consciously arty and pretentious, a film that took two slow and tedious hours to say exactly what The Look of Silence had said a decade earlier.

Zone of Interest depicts the day-to-day home lives of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. It is not, and the movie will not be upset to hear me say this, interesting. He sits through a pitch meeting for work in the study, or takes his children fishing. She tries on a fur coat, tends the garden, receives her visiting mother. The children see daddy off to work as he mounts a horse. It is all achingly, intentionally quotidian.

The ending, in contrast, absorbed me completely. As Rudolf leaves an opulent Berlin party, he stops on a landing and stares off into the dark. The camera cuts to contemporary footage of staff preparing Auschwitz for a day of visitors. They sweep, and wipe, and vacuum. The sound of the vacuum was violent in the context of what had been a quiet, restrained film.

Despite my disinterest in the rest of the movie, I thought about those shots for days afterward. The staff of the museum echoed the staff at the house, bustling here and there on behalf of the museum’s visitors, on behalf of the Hösses, and, somehow, on behalf of me. The shots in the museum felt pointed at the viewer, asking me if I’m all that different from the people I’ve spent the last two hours watching.

I don’t mean that in a boring way. I’m not talking about the Banality of Evil. Events like the Holocaust are far away, we tell ourselves, separated by so much time and civilization. We put our memorials behind glass and tell ourselves that it won’t happen again, which isn’t really all that different from how the Höss family conducts their business. They separated themselves from the realities of their lives with trellises and vines. “This will grow and cover everything, you’ll see,” Hedwig says to her mother about the vines surrounding their yard.

What’s striking about the museum in that instant is the sanitation of the whole thing. The glass is a transparent barrier, that’s better than a wall, but it’s still a barrier. Plate glass separates you and me from piles of abandoned shoes, from thousands of ownerless suitcases, from the systemized subjugation and murder of how many millions of lives. The thing about plate glass is that it can, as we have seen recently, shatter.

As for the rest of the film, what struck me as pretentious at home felt finely-tuned in the theater. Dozens of smaller details leapt out. The Zone of Interest is all about those details. Auschwitz does not exist save for an ambience at the edge of their lives, an inconvenience that continually insists on making itself known. The fishing trip ends suddenly when he realizes that the camp, located upstream, has dumped incinerator ash into the river.

At home, I rolled my eyes. In the theater, I understood that I wasn’t meant to have a reaction to what I was seeing so much as I was meant to observe the characters’ reactions. Imagine having to scrub your children down to rid them of human remains and then going back to work.

A pair of scenes set at night, treated to resemble a photographic negative, show a young girl of about 10 hiding food in the fields where the prisoners work. She pushes apples into the soil and hides pears among their shovels while an ominous sound repeats over and over. Hers are the only altruistic actions in the film, the only time a character steps outside of themselves to think about others without resenting the implications.

Everyone else seems content with their lot, or content to look away. Hedwig’s mother has the most complex reaction of any German we see. At first, she is happy for her daughter, for her house and her successful husband, but that doesn’t seem to last. She vanishes in the night, after waking up to the eerie red light of the incinerator. That’s as close to an act of resistance as any of the Germans get, a quiet “nein, danke.”

The characters we spend the most time with have chosen to lean in, and none with more alacrity than Hedwig. “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice,” she offhandedly snaps at one of the Polish housemaids. She understands the hierarchy of this world. The cruelty, to borrow from Adam Serwer, becomes the point. The Zone of Interest isn’t talking about the Banality of Evil either. It isn’t about evil rendered with indifference. It is about evil realized with surgical precision, with aplomb, because it works. This is a depiction of evil as means.

In their last on-screen conversation, one held over the phone, Hedwig asks Rudolf about the party. “Who was there?” “I didn’t really pay attention,” he replies. “I was thinking about how I would gas them all. It would be a particular challenge, because of the high ceilings.”

As he descends the stairs, just before the contemporary footage of Auschwitz, he stops twice to retch. It is 1943. The worst of the Holocaust is about to begin. Höss has that day accepted responsibility for the military operation that bears his name, the transportation and extermination of Hungary’s 700,000 Jews. The retches seem to me his body’s last attempt to expel all of the evil he has so willingly imbibed. He swallows it down, fixes his cap, and continues to descend the stairwell into absolute darkness.

Ennio

Ennio Morricone, the beloved Italian film composer, left behind a remarkable body of work. Active well into his 80’s, Morricone’s scores are remarkable not only for their sheer quantity—he scored over 400 films and television programs over the course of sixty years—but for their quality. The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly; a handful of deeply influential gialo films; The Mission; Cinema Paradiso; Once Upon a Time in America; The Hateful Eight. On and on, the list goes. These are some of the greatest scores of all time. You could talk about Morricone’s work for days without running out of things to talk about.

So wealthy a corpus should be ideal fodder for a documentary, but Ennio, the 2021 Italian documentary, doesn’t know what to do with that much material. It’s far too long, too repetitive, and all while nothing that’s mentioned gets the time it deserves. We learn very little of consequence, about either him or the work. While you would hope a 2.5 hour documentary about one of the greatest composers of the 20th century would provide a buffet, it’s more a loose assembly of Costco samples.

That is not a knock on Costco samples, I was raised on Costco samples, but they don’t make a meal.

It started off strong, overlaying audio from various talking heads with footage of il maestro doing stretches. Exercise will keep you, it seems, pretty damn limber. I salivated at the thought of going through his office, lined as the shelves were with albums, scores, and books. The only real glimpse into anything profound comes on two occasions when Morricone reveals an exceptional sensitivity, something that he seems to keep guarded much of the time. It is easy to see how that type of sensitivity would have contributed to his work, which exudes raw humanity.

Despite my disappointment in the film itself, I found myself walking away consumed with thoughts about the magic of The Movies. This was only my second time hearing Morricone’s music in a theater, despite the fact that he has been one of my favorite composers for as long as I’ve had favorite composers. I’ve seen clips from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly dozens of times over the course of my life, and I have always had an academic interest in seeing it, but watching those scenes play out on the big screen, surrounded by darkness and those glorious sounds, having nothing else to distract me? I became positively desperate to see them.

I know every note of “Gabriel’s Oboe,” one of the main themes from Morricone’s score for The Mission, and I heard it in a completely new light on Thursday. How many times have I heard the coyote call from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly? Even in the midst of a documentary that was too long, during which I found myself dozing off intermittently, the power of those great scores wed to those great films, presented in a room in which I had no choice but to completely surrender myself to what I was seeing and hearing?

Fuck, man. The movies.

The Silence of the Lambs

It was impossible for me to read The Silence of the Lambs in a vacuum. I’ve seen the movie too many times. The book had to exist in conversation with its adaptation, which does seem unfair, the parent justifying their own existence to the child. I was immediately struck by the tone, and the degree to which the movie gets the tone right. There is a quality to the opening chapters, a studied remove, a sense that something nearby (but not here) is wrong. Director Jonathan Demme captured that perfectly. I have no idea how. How do you translate something as ephemeral as texture to a different medium? It’s a magic trick, as far as I’m concerned.

With the book fresh in my mind, I rewatched the movie. It has long been one of my favorites, and the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that I now experience the movie as an adaptation while I’m watching it. Just about everything I love about The Silence of the Lambs, it turns out, comes from the book. Even the way Demme explores the experience of women in male spaces, something that I’ve always understood to be Demme’s own exploration of the material, is right there on the page. The film is remarkably faithful to the source material.

Most, if not all, of the changes are about focusing the material. Jack Crawford, the FBI agent in charge of Behavioral Psychology, no longer has a dying wife, which makes sense. The movie is concerned entirely with Clarice Starling. No need to venture away from that. Exposition is far deadlier in a movie than it is in a book, and a number of adjustments are made to spare the audience an explanation. All in all, it’s entirely successful.

The one thing that suffers in this adaptation? Hannibal Lecter.

It feels as weird for me to say it as it probably does for you to read it. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is an iconic performance, one that still reverberates within culture at large. More people know references to Hannibal Lecter than have seen the movie or read the book. Hopkins won an Academy Award, for god’s sake.

Nevertheless, if there’s one character the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs lets down, it’s the good doctor. A series of small and individually innocuous changes come together to turn Lecter into a bogeyman. In the film, he destroyed his medical records before the FBI arrested him, something the fastidious and studied Dr. Lecter of the novel would almost certainly never consider. It’s an act of impropriety. “Discourtesy,” as he says, “is unspeakably ugly to me.” They were destroyed in the book as the result of a court order, which also feels more in keeping with Harris’s worldview in a way that I can’t entirely articulate.

There’s a scene in the novel where Lecter discusses a fellow inmate with Starling, talking about how the poor fellow has been misdiagnosed by the viscously unpleasant head of the asylum, Dr. Chilton. You get the impression in that scene that Lecter does, to some extent, care about this misdiagnosis, even if it is because the misdiagnosis itself is more of an affront to him than this unfortunate individual being left to live an unnecessarily catatonic life.

The biggest change, a throwaway bit of exposition that explains Lecter’s awareness of the presence of a human head in a Baltimore storage locker, makes it sound like the locker is his. In the novel, the story is more complex, undoubtedly trimmed down for time, but Lecter had nothing to do with the head being there. He knew about it through a patient. The problem with this, only obvious once you see it, is that Lecter becomes, through that exposition, entirely monstrous. He is no longer a terrifying human being, but a sort of a bogeyman. He puts heads in the backs of cars of storage units. In the book, Hannibal Lecter is a terrifying man. The movie is content to make him a Monster.

As for the book? Magnificent. Within 50 pages, I had stopped thinking about the movie at all. Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs is incredible, full of great writing and memorable scenes. He knows how to do quite a bit with very little. I was sad every time the subway arrived at my destination. For one blissful week, any ten-minute pause in my schedule was an opportunity to make progress. In the last year and a half, I’ve read two other books I loved this much: The Grapes of Wrath and The Poisonwood Bible. That puts The Silence of the Lambs in remarkable company.