 |
 |
 |
 |
 | |
 |
|
The stage is bare. The audience is ready, waiting to be swept away. Suddenly, a young man, shrinking into himself like a very old man, scuttles into view. He is gibbering and mumbling under his breath, and you can't quite catch what he says. Then you get it: "To be, or not to be: that is the question"- and so on, the whole speech rattled off as if the young man had learned his oratory at a racetrack. He is not really thinking, not if he can help it. His mind is under siege, and his sole desire is to free it as fast as possible. Here, you tell yourself, is a Hamlet of the moment - hurried and homeless, stranded so far from happiness that it makes him laugh.
Ralph Fiennes's Hamlet, in a production directed by Jonathan Kent, is coming to New York from London; previews begin this week, and the show will open at the Belasco May 2nd. A sizable slice of the audience, I suspect, will be made up of moviegoers tempted away from the multiplex and into the spit-and-cough of live performance by the prospect of observing an idol in the flesh. And flesh is what they will get. As if to prove how easily he can slough off the sheen of his cinematic presence, Fiennes offers up a Hamlet helplessly in thrall to physical sensation. He greets his mother with a kiss, of course, but need it be quite so long? The rest of the court looks away, embarrassed. At one point, he even kisses Claudius. By the time Fiennes plants his lips on Yorick's mucky skull, as if curious about the taste of mortal soil, you can taste the rot yourself. The one person who needs to be kissed, of course, gets short and cruel shrift: in the course of directing Ophelia to a nunnery, he casually flips up her skirt and grabs her by the crotch.
In typical Fiennes fashion, "Hamlet" will complicate rather than confirm what we know, or presume we know, about Fiennes's range and reach. American audiences, primed for an evening of nobility, will find it streaked with nastiness; the serious young scholar nips around the stage like a spider. The question is: What makes Ralph run? Was he always like this?
Fiennes lives in southeast London, between the districts of Peckham and Dulwich, with his wife, the actress Alex Kingston. "I'm not going to move anywhere in a hurry," he says. "We're making our home really a home, like a pair of shoes that become a part of you." And part of the Fiennes tradition. The young Ralph - born in Suffolk, shifting later to Dorset and Ireland - grew up in what was, by all accounts, a full and gifted household, the kind that English novelists perpetually struggle to invent. He was the eldest of six children: his sister Martha, has become a director; one brother Joseph, is himself an actor. Their father is a photographer; their mother wrote novels under the name Jennifer Lash, and started painting seriously in the nineteen-eighties. She died of cancer in 1993, a remains a sustaining influence. Shortly before her death, she saw "Schindler's List."
His acting career began a decade ago. The young Fiennes, living in London, had dropped out of art school in Chelsea, switched to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and became a regular at the National Theatre. He won good notices for his work in "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and a Brain Friel version of "Fathers and Sons," and then spent four seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing roles like Henry VI, Berowne in "Love's Labour's Lost," Edmund in "King Lear." Doing Shakespeare, he has said, taught him that the actor "must stop getting in his own way." In 1992, he made a TV movie called "A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia"; it was this performance, with its quality of intense repose, that is said to have caught the eye of Steven Spielberg. Hence, "Schindler's List," and the role of S.S. Officer Amon Goeth. Our first sight of Fiennes showed that something was new: not just the razor-cut hair, or the heaviness that seemed like a surplus of sheer hatred, but the certainty that we were no longer watching an act. He was not getting in his own way. Hunched in the rear of a staff car, Goeth is driven through the ghetto of Krakow, holding a handkerchief to his face - because of either a bad cold or a reluctance to breath alien air. Asked if he has any questions, he says, "Yes, why is the top down? I'm fucking freezing." It is a terrifying introduction; if he had merely complained about the Jews around him, we might have grasped the nature of the man, but he doesn't even notice them. In his mind they are already canceled out.
In the space of two years, and two movies, the face of Fiennes has become America's most haunted, a storehouse of dark thoughts. In casting the role of Charles Van Doren for "Quiz Show," Robert Redford needed a sacrificial lamb, someone to be led astray and gutted by TV, a clean and clever all-American; he chose an all-Englishman. So far, Fiennes has not put a foot wrong; he sidestepped from kill-guy to fall guy, then crunched the two together and made his next move. At the age of thirty-two, he knew it was time to play Hamlet. "I have a feeling that if I'd played it when I was, say, twenty-three or twenty-four - I don't think I would have investigated in quite the same way," Fiennes explains. "Investigated" is the right word. There are moments in the production when he seems to be not playing the part so much as studying its pathology: "O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space - were it not that I have bad dreams." Untersturmfuhrer Goeth would understand.
The day after the new production finished it's London run, I was slated to meet Fiennes, and didn't know what to expect. With his hair over his collar, he still looked like Hamlet, but Hamlet playing hooky from Elsinore for a day. Fiennes is naturally grand of gesture; his hands rubbed at his chest to indicate distress, as they had done onstage, and, in trying to give some sense of the atmosphere on location for "Schindler's List," he flung his arms wide - Spielberg, in other words, was really flying. Previous accounts of Fiennes report a reticence, an indwelling solemnity that can leave you with a chill, but the man himself is equable and outgoing, asking as many questions as are put to him. What he does do is check himself in mid-speech, feeling his way to an answer instead of serving up what he already knows. This may well be a Hamlet hangover; there were points of tension onstage when he seemed genuinely struck by ideas - never entertaining them, but suffering their assaults. During the great rant against Claudius - "Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!" - Fiennes knocked his own forehead with his fist, as if the shake the adjectives out one by one. Is this what happens to the voicing of Shakespeare: a growing sense of struggle, a descent from air to sullen earth? We think of Olivier as smooth and oiled, but he was rough and athletic by comparison with Gielgud, who intoned the lines like a bishop saying grace; and Gielgud was a comedown after what we know about the Victorian ululation's of Henry Irving, who would surely crack us up if he performed today. Each new wave of Shakespearean players believes that it is toughening up the act of the previous generation, tightening the nuts, getting its hands dirty; Ralph Fiennes makes even Richard Burton sound a bit bombastic, but you can bet that in ten or twenty years' time some thuggish new Hamlet will remember the Fiennes routine as tasteful and polished, like old silver.
One of the problems with having fiendish good looks is that you can tempt almost anyone to do almost anything you want, whether your victim wants to or not - particularly if not. That was the driving irony or "Quiz Show," in which the golden boy himself became the tempted one, soaring into fame like Icarus. The movie reminded us that appearances count; that a star is made in the gaze of a lens, before dramatic technique - however skilled - has time to kick in. You can tell a star just from a still. Some of Fiennes's best scenes even look like stills: he is most beautiful when he's holding steady, and Van Doren is never more steady than when he's locked alone in guilt.
You need to go a long way back to find such a severe case of self-possession; it was only when I was watching "Quiz Show" for the second time that I noticed how the Fiennes profile matches that of John Barrymore. No wonder Redford scrutinizes Van Doren from the side or in half-face shots; for all his bearing, and for all the rich, back-of-the-throat tones in which he delivers his lines, Fiennes is like a silent movie star in his ability to carry a close-up, to let his eyes and his composure do the work for him. We stare at his as our grandparents stared at John Gilbert - as Garbo stared at him, asking herself what was going on behind the perfect front, what her lover might be thinking of. In Gilbert's case, the answer was "Very little"; in Barrymore's, "A gin and tonic." In the case of Ralph Fiennes, it's perplexity, and the pleasures that it threatens to spoil. At first glance, his characters feel disparate, but then you think again: Hamlet and Van Doren and Goeth - the chronic soliloquist with his head in his books, the preppy sweating in his soundproof booth, the sag-bellied sadist picking off distant Jews from his balcony. If there a ground bass to Fiennes work, a rhythm that beats beneath all three roles, it is loneliness driven to extremes.
His next extreme comes with "Strange Days," a science-fiction thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow, in which he costars with Angela Bassett. The film is being readied for summer release; Fiennes had to spend a couple of days looping the soundtrack before he opens in "Hamlet." Recalling the long, breath sucking chase sequences in Bigelow's "Point Break" and "Blue Steel," I am relieved to hear that the new movie has more of the same. Stills of the picture, which is set in 1999, show Fiennes looking woundingly handsome in black leather pants, with his shirt ripped open, plainly in all kinds of trouble - looking more like Hamlet, in fact, than Hamlet does. This character is "hugely lonely," according to Fiennes. "He's in love with someone who doesn't give a shit about him, he's living on memories of a past time. He goes back to his apartment, a sort of hellhole, all these bits of software around, pizza cartons, Chinese cartons..." Put like that, it has the true stink of the loveless, although one hopes, for Fiennes's sake, that he will not be doomed to plots of unrequited passion. He has made a love story - a 1992 version of "Wuthering Heights," with Juliette Binoche - but it was not a success; maybe the results will be better with "The English Patient," an adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel. Again, Fiennes will star opposite Binoche, and you can't help worrying about the two of them together, both so adept at conveying privacy - graceful, easily bruised, but tough to crack.
If there is any love in the work of Ralph Fiennes, in comes in "Quiz Show." Looking back on the movie, you find the exposure of media fakery slightly fading away; what stays with you, instead, is a couple of scenes between Fiennes and an infinitely relaxed Paul Scofield. In the first we see Charles in the kitchen at night, cooling his cheek with a bottle of milk as though he were burning with shame, before being joined by his father for a talk about old times; in the second, the two men lock horns in a lecture theatre. Why should these sequences mean so much? Is it because they distill the argument of the film into its purest form - Icarus coming clean with Daedalus? Or is it because they remind you of "Hamlet," of another young prince trying in vain to live up to his father? "Hamlet is such a meeting point for so many strands in one's life - other things one has done - that inevitably everything feeds in at one point," Fiennes says. Only with a few actors do you get this feeling: a sense that every role is gathering nourishment from the previous one and seeping subtly into the next. By this logic, then, "Hamlet" was waiting to happen. There's no getting away from the damn play.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on October 24, 1997
EL STEPHO