Cayle Chernin Blog
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Myths are defined by Richard Anderson in SHE as: “as the product of collective imagination, with certain stories being retold, universal themes kept alive, a collective image portrayed – things that are true for ALL men”
They say: “It’s who you know”…and in a way, my life used to be about other people ‘knowing me’ - being aware of who I am, what I can do – not to be celebrated or even liked, but recognized and therefore employed, hopefully to the utmost of my ability..like BABETTE’S FEAST, to be able to do my best work.
My Mother would advise, “it’s good to be ‘Know-en’” giving this important word a two syllable delivery even though it’s not.
And I do know a lot of people, mind you, my ‘people-hungry-to-be-know-en’ days are far behind me and I’ve come to realize, it’s not who you know, but rather who knows you, and I’m not even sure about that.
In the new movie EVENING, Meryl Streep in a one scene cameo, and with her inimitable talent, resigns: it wasn’t all that important anyway: one’s past, one’s secrets, one’s first and most important mistakes, one’s life.
It only matters as Phil Ochs sang: “to a small circle of Friends”.
EVENING plays on all the 20ieth Century elements that contribute to the Myth of our times, Hollywood milks it for all its worth, squeezing tears out of us from the first moment that Vanessa Redgrave faces the camera full of feeling and provokes with her greatness, our feelings and sets us up for the emotional blood bath that rages from her deathbed.
Still, was lovely to go to the Movies on Saturday afternoon to watch EVENING with My Mother and her old and dear friend, who’s memory is failing, to put it gently. I originally suggested to my octogenarian Mother, delicately, that maybe we didn’t want to go and watch Vanessa Redgrave on her deathbed, but Mummy being non-sentimental, said, “what the Hell”.
EVENING is .. “the big screen adaptation of Susan Minot's best-selling novel.. follows a 65-year-old cancer patient Ann Grant Lord, who reflects on a weekend in her youth when she met the love of her life, as her two daughters try to come to terms with her impending death while struggling with their own issues”. (from an on line movie site)
Redgrave hallucinates back to the early time of first love, a period portrayed in the movie as a cross between Cat on A Hot Tin Roof and Street Car. It definitely owed something to Tennessee, (Williams, that is) this story about a young man, Buddy, who hides his ‘gay’ and loves Clair Danes (Young Vanessa) and Harris, the good doctor, unsuccessfully.
In the movie, there’s a lot of weeping, boys who can weep, everybody’s weeping actually. Buddy cries a lot, course he’s drunk for days and kisses the boy everybody’s in love with, Harris, who is really a bit ordinary compared to these intense people.
Definite Homage to Paul Newman as Tennessee’s ‘charming loser’. Newman was the Brick, the Hud, the Hustler, all those guys who really may have been in love with Skipper though married to Maggie, all those beautiful sensitive men with the charm of the defeated, memories of their 80 yard run pouring from a bottle of mother’s milk drawn the breast of Lady M.
Harris, who everyone loves, the maid’s son, who grew up with these rich kids, is a Paul Newman look-a-like without the self-loathing. His Skipper isn’t gay, he’s normal, except for a Hollywood star turn singing ‘Time After time’ with Clair Danes which is the movies most contrived and unconvincing moment..you can just see them cooking it up..his Chet Baker delivery to her full voice (seemed dubbed by a stronger singer, but I could be wrong, just that it was so Hollywood you’d expect them to do that) was not believable. My Mother turned to me and rolled her eyes derisively. We weren’t buying it.
In spite of the so beautiful Vanessa in full close up, weathered and aged – my Mother and her friend thought Meryl looked better, because of course, for that generation, it’s not only about being know-en, but it’s all about how you look!
Natasha Richardson’s bedside chat with her Mother is touching because of the fact that we are watching a real mother and Daughter. (thought I was in a Henry Jaglom movie for a moment, where the fact/fiction line is on the line, and indeed in Deja Vue, I think it was, Henry had a scene between Vanessa and her mother, Rachel Kempson, who was advancing into Alzheimer’s at the time) and of course her Father Sir Michael’s homosexuality resonates here too. And contributing for me to the reality-Hollywood feel, Mamie Gummer, Streep’s real daughter plays her in the flashbacks. Looks amazingly like her mother, but it was hard to tell from the Movie, if she has what Meryl has – a talent so great!
They milked The Myth for all it was worth, and I saw that Tennessee Williams who really was the playwrite of the 20ieth Century, is still the playwrite of the 21st Century because his plays are the stories of our Mothers and Father in some cases Grand mothers/Fathers who lived in a World that they grew old and we grew up in, and that World is still defined by the agonies of human relationships and sexual confusion. Human Drama, the days of our lives.
Recent History, or Herstory, as I said at an Actra Panel of Women in The Biz, shows that there’s a lot of spilt milk under that draw bridge B.C, Before Birth Control, BP, before Peak Oil and ‘The Pill’ - we’ve come a long way, baby and yet, it’s still the same old story, time after time, Blanche Dubois’ gay young husband, suicides in shame after she shrieks her disgust upon finding him with another man. In this variation and updating of the myth, Clair Danes tells Buddy to “be a man” and kiss a man if he wants to, not pretend he’s pining for her, and sends him into a drunken collision with a car.
The great Glen Close delivers the Mother’s grief and animal outrage, pain of loss as it may look on the most selfish of us. She’s so good at that.
But still and all, glad I saw it, especially with Mother, I cried a lot too, annoyed about being manipulated – however, the good acting made up for a lot, Collete, of course, and Streep in for the finish, and Redgrave, I can watch endlessly, doing anything.
And because I’m about to embark on importing my screenplay ACROSS TIME into my new expensive screen writing program.. (my old one, has been playing tricks, scrambling the formatting, making me look bad, so I had to spring for the latest version)..this script has been in my life for a while and I would love to have it read. I would love to have Jason (J. Brown) create a 3 D worm hole, for the falling through time sequences and use the old footage I shot of John Henry Nyenhuis as young Marcus Adeney for my docu-portrait of him: THE MAN WHO COULDN’T LOSE.
The two time frames, in EVENING reminded me that my concern about my two time periods in ACROSS TIME are not a problem, I felt I’d solved it two drafts ago, anyway.
Alzheimer’s is a popular theme and though my first draft was generated from the time in the 90ies when I worked as a video producer in the Education Department at Baycrest Geriatric Center and was researched thoroughly in my years running Living literature, a program I did in Nursing Homes though the Board of Education, reading aloud to my captive audiences of residents, the discoveries I made are still relevant and thanks to an extraordinary physician at Baycrest, Dr. Guy Proulx, are still ahead of their time.
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