At dinner, after the play, it occurred to me that one explanation for the audience’s oddly tepid response to Zoe Kazan’s We Live Here, which we had just seen, toward the end of its run, at MTC, might be that the playwright forced the material for two rather different plays into a comedy-drama that runs for about two hours with intermission. Regular theatre-goers are all too familiar with the kind of show that begins with an awkward but funny family reunion, steadily leaks laugh lines, and bumps to a stop in soap-opera recriminations. Whatever the name for this dramatic form, Kazan has composed an excellent exemplar; We Live Here is an admirably well-made play, especially for a debut. The characters are intriguing and their secrets, strategically revealed, always turn out to be slightly different from their foreshadowing. But theatregoers have arguably had enough of this sort of thing, and, after all (sad to say), the extraordinary cast featured only one big name. There is much to like in We Live Here, but most of the members of last night’s audience wasn’t in the mood to look for it on their own.

They might have been more enticed, as I say, had Zoe Kazan cleared her work of one of her two stories and expanded the surviving one — and then, gone back and done the opposite. (We might even have had a double show, like Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, performend simultaneously in adjacent theatres, with some but not all of the characters running back and forth between the two productions.) One play would be about the inability of two “happily married parents” to cope with their gifted children, at least one of whom is depressive. This play would expand on the Greek-myths angle that Kazan worked rather well into her textures; it would tell us more about a Harvard classics professor (Mark Blum) who is dumb enough to name his twin daughters Althea (Jessica Collins) and Andromeda, and about his wife (Amy Irving) who, deeply uninterested in scholarship of any kind, thinks the names are cute. This play would be about tempting fate, and fate’s taking up the challenge with a vengeance.

The other play would be about the fraught relations between the daughters, and this play would have more room for the men in their lives, two very different men who never had the chance, in We Live Here, to stand up to one another. Sandy (Jeremy Shamos), Althea’s fiancé, is such a good man that his prospective mother-in-law finds him “a bit gay.” Daniel (Oscar Isaac) is, in contrast, the sexy boy next door who is totally bad news; he comes equipped with that engine of destruction, a motorcycle. Stripped of the parents’ presence, the recognition scene in which Allie learns that Daniel has moved in on her younger sister, Dinah (Betty Gilpin), now “all grown up,” might have been incandescent, and not the occasion for a stagy blackout.

In the alternative (to splitting her play in two), Kazan might have insisted on a, shall we say, more Greek setting, and not the sprawling, many-chambered family home that bore the impress of a recent upgrade from television sitcom to legitimate theatre. Especially not a set so loaded with visual distractions. John Lee Beatty’s work, as usual, we eloquent, but that’s the problem: it constituted a mini-essay on the play, such that there was no need for any acting by people. Aspiration — books aplenty, the tail end of a grand piano, an easel painter’s kit — floated uneasily above middlebrow inattentiveness to detail; the boxes from Crate & Barrel served as more than ostensible wedding presents, and a marionette operation, in which they contrived to open themselves when the bride wasn’t present, would not have been ineffective at scoring the playwright’s main points. (I complained to Kathleen that there was not a single crave-worthy object on the stage; although I did fall into unwilling fascination with a Civil-War era armchair composed of tapestry and carved wood.) And the doors! Aside from the front door (nicely used), there were two sets of interior glass-paned doors and two ponderous pocket doors, one of which was briefly closed, the other of which was presented in half, thrust out toward the audience. I had no idea how six actors could fill such a space, and it turned out that they couldn’t. The best scene — the fiancé, trying to loosen up his sister-in-law-to-be, so that he can paint her portrait, asks Dinah about the things that she likes, and Betty Gilpin delivers a thrilling monologue of despair, desire, and barely-contained madness that howls for full-length dramatic treatment — the best scene takes place in a small corner of the domestic barn, the rest of which is momentarily consigned, by lighting director Ben Stanton, to darkness.  

I’d vote for the divided play, and the one with the parents could keep the complicated set. Amy Irving, reminding me at every turn of Dianne Wiest, was not the monster mom that might have tempted her with histrionic possibilities, but, more effectively, a parent who has come to terms, more or less, with her failures — and she has you wondering if that’s really a good thing. There isn’t time for Mark Blum to do more than deliver, very ably, some telling remarks on Aristotle and hamartia while looking chastened by the gods. There was a good story there, about how the plodding classics scholar caught the vibrant beauty, and how perhaps the relationship, like many Olympian ones, ought perhaps not to have produced offspring. Jerry Shamos did a great job with the thankless nice-guy role, while Oscar Isaac squirmed and jiggled as if sex itself were going to rip out of him, Aliens-style. It was the sisters, however, who owned the show. Where had I seen Jessica Collins before? This hugely distracting question bothered me throughout the first act; it wasn’t until the intermission that I could read that she starred in the ill-fated serial drama, Rubicon. Happily, I could give her second-act flashback into sullen, slutty adolescence, a master turn, my individed attention. Betty Gilpin I was well-prepared to admire; her performance in That Face is one of my most pungent theatrical memories. She did not disappoint, to say the least. At the end, after an eternity of wary circling and fake smiles, she and Ms Collins demonstrated that only the two sisters could put an end to the family curse.

***

For weeks, I’ve been asking the nice people at Crawford Doyle for a copy of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and, for weeks, they’ve been telling me that the book hasn’t come out yet. I finally joked that, by the time the book was actually published, I’d have read most of it in reviews. Blue Nights is a slim, somewhat gnomic volume, as you would expect, and I knew that my joke wasn’t the exaggeration that it might be. But it was the review that I read at lunch, yesterday, right before heading over to the bookshop for the now-available memoir, that surprised me with an almost unimaginable anecdote from Didion’s daughter’s childhood, extracted by Mary-Kay Wilmers in the LRB. Here’s the original:

I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra. On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.”

It turns out that there’s quite a lot of this vaguely Mommie Dearest material in Blue Nights, this time presented by Mommie, and I wonder how long it will be before a hailstorm of denunciation befalls Joan Didion. Premature viewing of a traumatically wound-up family saga cannot be causally linked to the fatal infection (or whatever it was) that killed Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, two years after her marriage, in 2005. But what about the disagnosis of “borderline personality disorder”? I doubt that anything in Blue Nights is going to dim my ardor for the rippling sinews and snapping tendons of Joan Didion’s art. But. “when she was four or five”? 

Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, which seems to have been a Times notable book when it came out, originally, in the Nineties, has appeared in a second edition, which I’m enjoying hugely, although I only found out about it from a recommendation by Amazon. (People who bought Jeremy Black’s George III bought Colley’s book as well, and I can see why.) Above and beyond the historical instruction, Britons affords some irresistibly good writing.

All aristocracies have a strong military tradition, and for many British patricians the protracted warfare of this period was a godsend. It gave them a job and, more important, a purpose, an opportunity to carry out what they had been trained to do since childhood: ride horses, fire guns, exercise their undoubted physical courage and tell other people what to do.

It doesn’t get any better than that. Yesterday, I encountered an equally precious gem, although it’s inadvertently marvelous and not by Colley herself. A Tory divine called Richard Polwhele urged ladies to remember that “the crimsoning blush of modesty, will always be more attractive than the sparkle of confident intelligence.” I couldn’t disagree more; I’m like the dude in Last Picture Show who tells Cybill Shepherd to come back when she’s got her virginity fixed. The “crimsoning blush” fixation is what finally made it impossible for me to read Trollope; he’s so into crimsoning blushes and girls’ modesty that it begins to sound like child abuse. I don’t think that there’s anything sexier than the sparkle of confident intelligence, which is why I’m looking forward to seeing Stockard Channing in Other Desert Cities. We have tickets for my birthday.

Depleted — c’est le mot juste! Thank you, Daniel Kahneman. I’m not sick, I’m not really even tired. I did drink a tad too much wine last night, more than I’m now used to drinking. I spent almost the entire day yesterday catching up with feeds on Google Reader; it’s difficult to imagine anything more depleting. In any case, I’m going to spend today repleting.

At some point, I must say a word about the two movies that I’ve seen recently but not written up — not written up because, by Friday afternoon, I am no longer quietly at home, but running errands for the weekend. I have my stay-at-home days and my out-and-about days, and the latter cluster toward the weekend, with the result that I am depleted at the beginning of the week. (If I’m depleted today, I was even more depleted yesterday.) For example, this past Friday I was determined to mail out the new round of postcards of Will on the beach this summer. The project was so overdue that it had to be done at once. This meant that I had to go out again, late in the afternoon, to buy Dymo labels that I didn’t know I’d run out of. What drove me crazy about this errand was that I could have done it in the morning when, finding that I’d shown up at the movie theatre forty minutes early (this is what happens when you’re depleted: you forget to check Movie Showtimes before leaving the house [and I see now that I was depleted at the end of last week]), I quickly ran a round of errands that could have easily included a stop at Staples. Had I thought to do so, of course, I wouldn’t have bought a new paper shredder, which I did do in the afternoon, thus necessitating a walk straight home and a separate outing to Fairway — all very depleting. It’s depleting just to read about this!

It’s just one of the many things that they didn’t teach us when we were young, viz, that you can’t get anything done properly without being adequately rested. This was as true when I was twenty as it is now, but I was like most twenty year-olds a shambolism of inattentiveness when it came to personal management.

So, enough depletion.

***

The movies were Margin Call and The Rum Diary.  I enjoyed them both very much, but my thoughts about writing them up were scrambled by all the Pauline Kael that has been in the air lately. When the Library of America collection of Kael’s reviews was announced, I thought about buying it. I remembered how sharply I had disagreed with Kael during her New Yorker days, not so much with individual judgments as with her general world-view, which, all too apparently, did not take in the place I call home. Just hearing her name revives wearying waves of pointless dismissals of bourgeois this and bourgeois that, made in case after case by utterly bourgeois writers who would have traded in a limb to cleanse themselves of their bourgeois provenance. Paul Kael was certainly one such. Like so many critics coming from the Left, she failed to see that almost everyone in America, aside from smarty-pants like herself, who did not already belong to the bourgeoisie was keen to do so, and that the mission to educate the uneducated into a state of utopian transcendentalism was trans-Quixotic. It’s people like Kael who did everything but lick Reagan’s welcome-mat clean.

I don’t think that Kael would have liked either of the movies in today’s hopper. She wouldn’t have liked Margin Call at all, and she would have wanted more Deppness in The Rum Diary. There is nothing in The Rum Diary that wasn’t presented in sharper focus in Public Enemy, and there was a lot more Deppness in The Tourist, that underrated romp in which two of Hollywood’s biggest Big Stars completely, and with hambones dangling from their mouths, upstage Venice. The Rum Diary is clearly a valentine from its star to his idol, soul brother, and sometime housemate, the late Hunter S Thompson, and this makes it more of a literary work than a movie. Qua movie, it’s composed of worthwhile scraps of other movies, covering a range from the Bournes to Body Heat. If you had to say something nasty, you could say that it is The Quiet American without the everything. What it really needs is not so much Deppness as Ribisiness: everything that has ever made you raise your eyebrows in amazement that Giovanni Ribisi ever got into the movies (with that squeaky voice especially) is given the mighty Wurlitzer treatment here, and you want more of it. You also want more of Amber Heard’s dress-up doll act; rarely — not since Now, Voyager, anyway — has an actress been rendered, within the context of one movie, so protean by makeup. Aaron Eckhart is his usual, cool-cucumber-gorged-python self; you have to wonder where he goes to get bank loans. But, hey, it’s a fun movie, as guilty a pleasure as raiding the minibar. The LSD trip taken by the hero and his sidekick, Sala (Michael Rispoli), is a masterpiece of articulate understatement that manages to convey the dynolysergic experience with only one loony special effect at the start; the natural look and feel of a fishing pier on a breezy, somewhat foggy night is just about as accurate a postcard as director Bruce Robinson could have sent from the late great’s gonzo files.

It’s interesting to reflect that Aaron Eckhart is not in Margin Call. You might at first wonder how a movie about Wall Street sleaziness was made without him, but the very point J C Chador’s astonishing directorial debut seems to be that Wall Street sleaziness is committed by people who aren’t very sleazy. Breezy, yes. Paul Bettany is, as it were, the reason why Aaron Eckhart isn’t in Margin Call. His character, Will Emerson, is a Brit who sends a piece of his winnings home to his folks and spends the rest on laddie equipment. He’s pumped by his income, not by master-of-the-universe powers that he doesn’t seem to believe in anyway. He likes being very well paid. He likes it well enough to risk never being paid again. He is a salesman, not a con man. If there’s a difference.

What Pauline Kael wouldn’t have liked about Margin Call, I believe, is that it is ultimately a filmed play. This isn’t to suggest that it suffers from the airlessness of that unfortunate genre. It’s only afterward, when you ask yourself what made the experience so powerful, so shattering, so overwhelming but in the end so satisfying, that you realize that the film’s production values — sets, lighting, and so forth — have been just good enough not to call attention to themselves while at the same time providing the perfect stage for outstanding theatrical performances. I’m not sure that Margin Call, even with its excellent cast (many of whom, and certainly the two principals, Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey, are stage actors of the very first rank), would be as effective in a Broadway theatre, but for all I know it might be twice as effective. I vote for the movie treatment because the story is already so claustrophobic — more than three-quarters of the action takes place during a very long night in largely empty offices perched too high atop Manhattan to feel attached to anything — that it needs the atmospheric rush, paradoxically more persuasive in the movies than in the theatre, of the morning ride across the East River that Will and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley) take to round up Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) at his Brooklyn Heights doorstep. The exhilaration of speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a convertible sportscar after an pulling an all-nighter at work is something that you appreciate in the audience every bit as much as the two bankers, one of whom knows, by the way, that he is about to be let go.

For some reason, the marketing angle on this film focused on Peter Sullivan and Mr Badgley, as if, I suppose, to bring in younger audiences. But they are the least important figures in the film precisely because they’re so young. At mid-range, you have characters, played by Demi Moore, Simon Baker, and Mr Tucci, as well as Mr Bettany (don’t let me forget Aasif Mandvi),  complicated people who are very ambivalent about the risks that they take at work. And, at the top, you have the head trader, played by Kevin Spacey, and the head banker, played by Jeremy Irons, uncoiling at full length the helices of their personal mystery (they are mysteries to themselves) while the actors themselves, well-known to you as they are, show you things that you’ve never seen.Their appearing on the screen, and not onstage, signals their immense powers of destruction; what’s wrong with modern banking is that it hasn’t taken place entirely in the movies.

***

In the interests of repletion, I have set one of my Nanos to play the Bach in Order II playlist, and it is repleting me nicely. Ralph Kirkpatrick plays the English Suites, Andras Schiff plays the Partitas, and Maria Tipo plays the Goldberg Variations. The Cello Suites are played by Pierre Fournier. The Corelli Concerti Grossi are performed very deliberately by an outfit called Ensemble 415. As I write, the late Scott Ross is dashing through the Italian Concerto. (With all the things that people have done to and with Bach’s music, I’ve never heard a “fleshed out” concerto version, with orchestra, of this piece.)

The postcards reached local destinations very quickly. We had dinner with a friend last night who, earlier in the day, encountered another friend of ours as he was walking down 72nd Street. She told him that she had just received a postcard of Will; he kept his miffed-ness at not being able to say the same to himself. When he got home and collected his mail, though, there it was. Small town.