Deborah Lipp

Godspell (1973) 3/10
Jesus (Victor Garber) comes to New York with big clown feet and paints the faces of his followers. Then he dies.

I’m trying to decide if Godspell is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Maybe not. But it’s a contender. Yet, it’s the kind of bad movie I’m fascinating by, as I attempt to understand the choices that the filmmakers made. In other words, what were they thinking?

Now, I’d heard that Godspell was a bad movie, but when I know the score of a musical, I like to see it, because I like to see the songs in context, and this leads me to seeing some real turkeys. Like A Chorus Line. And less than halfway through Godspell, I realized there is no context. All these songs that I know so well, that I’d wondered about—where in the story of Jesus do they fit?—don’t fit anywhere. They’re just sung by a traveling troupe of Jesus clowns.

The movie opens with a bunch of ordinary New Yorkers doing ordinary, frustrating things. Getting stuck in traffic, serving coffee at a lunch counter, using the public library. Then John the Baptist calls them to come and worship the Lord. As they gather in Central Park, their ordinary clothes are transformed into hippie clothes. Okay, I can get behind that. Certainly the idea that Jesus was a hippie of sorts in his own era is not unheard of, and was popular in 1973. Rejecting the material and all that.

Then the group finds a junkyard, and there they find the makings of clown costumes (apparently this is where the circus dumps its stuff when it leaves town). They dress up, act goofy, and Jesus paints everyone’s faces with cute little clown stuff.

The whole time this is going on, it’s very shticky, very over-acted, with lots of big gestures and wide-eyed facial expressions. I’m thinking, I guess they’re making a case for innocence and childlike openness to the wonder of God. The problem I’m having is that they’re not really distinguishing between childlike innocence and actual brain damage. Some of these people are acting innocence so broadly that I fear they will wander out in traffic. Maybe they’re suffused with the joy of the Presence, but they seem more like they’re off their meds.

But hey, innocence. Gentleness. Love. I’m still suspending disbelief mightily. And then Jesus delivers his first message. And it’s about the importance obeying every letter of the law. Well, thud. That’s definitely not about love and innocence.

The entire movie takes place all over New York City, in locations empty except for the Jesus clowns, as diverse as Lincoln Center, Ward’s Island, and the top of the World Trade Center (still under construction at the time). The group walks from spot to spot, acting out parables. The parables don’t relate to the locations, nor do they flow one to another. Each is entirely separate, as if each was a part of a different performance. No flow, no plot (not even, y’know, Jesus’s life), no sense of who the characters are. Meanwhile, who they are is a group of the shtickiest overacters ever born. Each parable is acted out with “funny” voices; often more than one per character, AND broad movements, AND silly props, AND mime. It’s like it’s their last day at Clown School, and they have to use everything they’ve learned. Everything. Over and over.

There were some charming moments; the All for the Best number was wonderfully done, and Jesus in the Garden in his moment of doubt is quite touching, although by that point in the film I was too impatient to appreciate it. But everything is so broad that the enjoyable moments get buried.

And yes, the music is excellent. In my own mind, I am judging the movie entirely separate from music, since the music pre-dates it. And maybe that isn’t fair, since some movie musicals certainly do butcher original scores. The vocal performances are outstanding, although it’s hard to pay attention to Lynne Thigpen‘s magnificent rendition of “Bless the Lord” while she is wearing a funny hat and face paint and a choker made of giant beads in rainbow colors and ruffled sleeves and a polka-dot vest and lavender tights and funny shoes.

I’m going to listen to the soundtrack and try to forget I saw this.

Marie Antoinette (2006) 9/10
At the age of 14, a member of the Austrian royal family (Kirsten Dunst) is sent to France to marry (the future) Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). There her name is styled Marie Antoinette and she struggles with loneliness and a sexless marriage, while under great pressure to produce an heir. Written and drected by Sofia Coppola.

Shortly after I finished watching Marie Antoinette, I realized how very much it resembled Coppola’s previous picture, Lost in Translation. Both involved lonely, privileged young women in foreign lands and with inattentive husbands. Both women mask their loneliness with partying and gaiety. That Coppola chooses to direct her attention to sad, disaffected women trying to find themselves amidst noise and clamour speaks of her as a director. It’s also working to create some very effective films.

The film is not concerned with perfect period recreation. 1980s dance music is used to create an atmosphere of fun and intensity, brighter-than-period colors are used to express Marie’s youth and playfulness. Nonetheless, the story sticks pretty close to history, albeit with its sympathies squarely with Marie.

It’s wonderful. The movie stays committed to being a character study, and yet Marie Antoinette’s character is revealed amidst noise and color and costume and pageantry. It’s got all the visual wealth that a movie can provide, and its imagery is very mischievous, having fun with the shoes, the bedchamber, the hairstyles, and all of that.

Dunst is wonderful, and deserves accolades for this role. She is a stranger in a strange land, lost and confused in all the pomp of Versailles. But she is blue-blooded and grew up in a court, so she cannot simply act confused. It’s a delicate balance, as is aging from 14 to 38 (or so) with little makeup. Her face is on-screen almost all the time, and she remains captivating.

The movie becomes a bit confusing at the end, if you don’t know the particulars of how the final days of Louis & Marie played out, the script is not terribly interested in telling you. At that point, the movie really runs out of steam; it feels like Coppola is less interested in this part. That probably sounds like a bigger flaw than it is, it’s more of a quibble, really.

Marie Antoinette doesn’t glamorize royalty, but it doesn’t exactly deglamorize it either. There’s definitely some lovely pageantry and cool clothes. There’s also the simple reality of being a young girl sent away from home forever, and having even your beloved dog taken away from you (she is allowed “to have as many French dogs as you like” but can bring nothing of Austria with her, she is told as she weeps helplessly). It finds a truth in the humanity of whoever ends up in any overwhelming situation, and sees her with great sympathy.

I thought it was a hell of an achievement. Frankly, the descriptions I’d read sounded kitsch, or coy, but this was a very honest film, just done in an unusual way.