Heroes, on Viaplay

These three characters would be sufficiently absurd for a Samuel Beckett play, were it not for their grouchy attitudes. Considering how difficult these old veterans are in their dotage, imagine what they were like during the unspecified war. They don’t do much, but they sure talk a lot about it in director-screenwriter Kirill Bin’s Heroes, a Ukrainian film based on Tom Stoppard’s English translation of Gerald Sibleyras’s French play, The Wind in the Poplars, which premieres today on Viaplay.

Considering the game of telephone Sibleyras’s original play went through, it is entirely possible that much was lost, or mysteriously “found” in the translation processes. On the other hand, it is not a particularly complex play. Three elderly veterans sit and kvetch in their favorite gazebo, talking perverse comfort in their shared anti-social misanthropy.

Gustav is probably the most crotchety and sarcastic. Fernand is the youngest, but often falls victim to fainting spells. He also holds fast to the irrational fear that the head nun is out to kill him, in hopes of freeing up his birthdate for a new resident. Of the trio, Rene might be the most rational, but he is an instigator and a bit of a romantic, in unhealthy ways.

There is also a stone statue of a dog, which Gustav considers the best company in the entire retirement home—and perhaps justifiably so. Indeed, it takes a bit of acclimating to the tone and rhythm of Heroes. The cranky trio are a lot and they have no on/off switch.

If you wanted a Grumpy Old Men sequel with more existential angst, than Heroes is the answer to your prayers. Admittedly, the three principal cast-members are amusing, particularly Aleksey Vertinskiy as gleefully sardonic Gustav. Nevertheless, a little of this film goes a long way. Honestly, if you finish it in three sittings or less, then you’ll have me beat.

Tulip Fever: Will it Still Bloom After Being Buried So Long?

The boom and bust of the Dutch Tulip market was so dramatic, it became one of the primary case studies in Charles Mackay's classic (and now more relevant than ever) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Despite what CBS might think, agitated masses often display foolish and reckless behavior, such as paying ten times the average skilled artisan’s wages for a single tulip bulb. Just when the market starts to look dicey, a pair of lovers hope to flip an exceedingly rare bulb to finance their happily ever after in Justin Chadwick’s notoriously delayed Tulip Fever (trailer here), which supposedly finally opens today nationwide.

The Dutch love their tulips. This was particularly true during the Dutch Golden Age. Like anything valuable, a commodities market for tulips sprung up, in which titles to bulb were traded by investors who never touched a spade in their lives. Old school merchant Cornelis Sandvoort is wise enough to steer clear of such wild speculation. Instead, his losing investment is his wife Sophia, whom he more or less purchased from her convent, but has yet to produce an heir.

In a cruel twist of fate, the Sandvoort’s housekeeper Maria has fertility to spare. She learns she is carrying her fishmonger lover’s baby soon after his is shanghaied by a press gang. Ordinarily, her master would turn out an unmarried pregnant servant without a second thought, but she has leverage over her mistress. She threatens to expose Sophia’s affair with sleepy-eyed garret-dwelling portrait painter Jan Van Loos if she is kicked to the curb. Thus, begins a desperate scheme to conceal her pregnancy and ultimately facilitate the lovers’ new life together, which will be financed by an exceedingly rare bulb Van Loos manages to claim.

Tulip Fever has been postponed so many times, it has evolved from an industry joke into an urban legend. Seriously, how hard is it to market a film penned by screenwriter Tom Stoppard, starring Oscar winners Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, and Dame Judi Dench? Although some have come to doubt it, the film does indeed exist. It is okay—respectable but nothing spectacular. Frankly, Suite Française, which the Weinstein Company shunted off to Lifetime, is a far superior film, but this is the wrong film to look for logic in its release strategy.

Regardless, the Fever’s problems are glaringly obvious, starting first and foremost with the gross miscasting of Dane DeHaan as Van Loos. DeHaan is simply not a romantic lead—not by the wildest stretch of the imagination. He is the guy you cast as the nebbish introvert with a facial tic. Not for one instant can we believe him as Vikander’s lover.

Aside from looking awkward in her scenes with DeHaan, Vikander is fine as Sandvoort. Arguably, Waltz tries a little too hard as her fastidious husband, but he has some surprisingly poignant moments in the third act. However, it is excruciatingly painful to watch Zach Galifianakis’s shtick as Van Loos’s drunkenly buffoonish sidekick. Dude, go back to the ferns. However, Tom Hollander darn near rescues the film singlehandedly with his slyly roguish portrayal of the morally flexible Dr. Sorgh.

Fever has obviously been recut so many times, it is no longer fair to judge Stoppard screenplay. The business of the tulip market is fascinating, but the film never displays his erudite wit. Again, the self-defeating cast does not help in this respect either. What could and should have been delightfully tart and indulgent turned out to be fatally middlebrow. Recommended for viewers who have magic glasses that will make DeHaan and Galifianakis disappear from the frame, Tulip Fever hopefully opens today (9/1) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center downtown and the Paris Theatre uptown.

Prague Rock City

For many of us, 1968 means only one thing: Soviet tanks rolling through the streets of Prague. Rock ‘n’ Roll, Tom Stoppard’s latest play, identifies another significant event with that year—the formation of The Plastic People of the Universe, the underground (by necessity) Czech rock band that would become a symbol of Communist oppression when arrested and imprisoned in 1976 (background info from Stoppard here). Spanning decades from the bleak days of Husák's hard-line regime to the heady promise of the Velvet Revolution, Rock ‘n’ Roll tells the Plastics’ story obliquely, through the eyes of an average Czech rock fan and his English friends.

Music and freedom are intertwined in Rock ‘n’ Roll, but the political implications of rock are initially lost on Jan, a young philosophy student and record collector who voluntarily returns to Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion, having studied in England with a prominent British Marxist professor, Max Morris. Though not political, Jan’s love for the music of the Plastics and other western bands forces him into a dissident’s life.

The first act moves through the years in a rapid-fire succession of scenes, as Jan is increasingly harassed by the state and reluctantly pushed into pro-democracy activism. Any record collector’s stomach would turn at the sight of Jan’s record collection smashed by the secret police. All the while, Morris remains faithful to his ideology, despite the evidence he sees with his own eyes when he visits Jan in Prague during a Marxist academic conference. He is a hard-case—after all, he weathered 1956 with his faith in tact.

After thoroughly damning Morris in the first act, Stoppard largely lets him off the hook in the second act. Morris is now a widower living with his daughter Esme and granddaughter Alice, both of whom have sentimental attachments to their neighbor, the reclusive former Floyd band-member Syd Barrett. The scenes are longer, but frankly, it is harder to care about the Morris family dramas. However, when Jan comes for a visit, things pick up steam, as Stoppard challenges preconceived notions of collaboration, emphasizing the difficulty of making moral judgments under an oppressive government.

Stoppard is often knocked for the intellectualism of his plays and characters who talk in academic jargon. Morris would be a prime example of this, a man who needs to exist on a philosophical level to disconnect from uncomfortable realities. However, in a tough, challenging scene, his cancer-stricken wife Eleanor calls him out, demanding he respond to her on an emotional level, with ambiguous results.

As Jan, Rufus Sewell is pitch-perfect. It was not just the accent and mannerisms, but something indefinable in his performance was totally Czech. He actually reminded me of Czechs I have met. As Morris, Brian Cox blusters and bellows, chewing up scenery and dialogue with gusto. In a dual role, Sinead Cusack turns in some of the play’s most electric moments as Eleanor, but her grown Esme comes across a bit milk-toast.

Sewell’s Jan though is the heart of the play. Not really an intellectual because he never finished his degree, and not really a dissident because he was never political, Jan is simply a rock ‘n’ roll fan. However, that in itself was political in Communist Czechoslovakia. He was just one of many dreamers who never had chance under a corrupt system of government. In a telling exchange late in the second act, Jan contemplates immigrating to England, but a former Czech countryman tells him words to the effect of: “you finally have a chance to rebuild your own country, why leave now for an England that only apologizes for itself now.”

Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia, British by way of Singapore, had often spoken out on human rights concerns behind the Iron Curtain, particularly in his collaboration with André Previn, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and his television film, Professional Foul. Here his words crackle with meaning, deftly integrating Czech history into his story and wrapping things up nicely with a perfectly fitting conclusion.

Veteran stage and film director Trevor Nunn keeps the pacing brisk. Rock ‘n’ Roll is effectively staged, particularly in its use of classic rock songs to introduce each individual scene, like U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” an arresting preface to the second act, particularly in light of what preceded. Ultimately that is what Rock ‘n’ Roll the play is about—the power of music. After runs in London and Prague’s National Theater, Rock ‘n’ Roll opened last night on Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, and it well worth seeing, provided the stagehands don’t strike.

(Note: this review is based on a preview performance, coincidentally on the night before I left for Prague.)