DVDs: Blow, Gabriel, Blow

Last spring, I reviewed the DVD premiere of Night and Day, the 1946 Hollywood biopic about Cole Porter that is notorious for its cavalier attitude toward the facts. At the end of that review, I noted that De-Lovely, the new Porter biopic that was just about to be released, would, at the very least, have to be better than Night and Day. I was wrong.

Directed by Irwin Winkler and written by Jay Cocks, De-Lovely borrows its structure from All That Jazz. As the film opens, an elderly, dying Cole Porter is visited by "Gabe" as in "Blow, Gabriel, Blow", an angel-of-death figure that poor Jonathan Pryce is stuck with trying to embody. Gabe takes Porter to an empty theatre, where a stage show is enacted that consists of scenes from Porter's life. As in All That Jazz and even A Christmas Carol, Porter is taken on a tour of his past.

The film attempts to deploy Porter's songs to reflect the action or mood of a scene. They're not presented in chronological order; a sequence in the '20s may be accompanied by a song written a decade or more later.

Much was made of the fact that, unlike Night and Day, De-Lovely acknowledges Porter's homosexuality, or at least indicates it, even if it never seems to offer Porter the potential for a genuine romantic relationship of the sort he supposedly had with his wife, Linda.

But if it is more accurate about one aspect of Porter's life, De-Lovely isn't scrupulous about sticking to the facts. Linda was, in fact, eight years older than Porter, yet the role is taken by Ashley Judd, who is about twenty years younger than Kevin Kline, who plays Porter.

In general, De-Lovely is a more realistic depiction of Porter's life than Night and Day. But for all of its ambitions, it's a relentlessly flat affair. With Kline and Judd struggling valiantly against the odds, the dialogue scenes are hollow and fail to ring true. Worse, De-Lovely slights Porter's music. The songs are often fragmented, and, even when they're not, they're alternately rendered by Kline, deliberately adopting a weak voice to ape Porter's, or by one or another of the numerous pop singers Elvis Costello, Alanis Morissette, Diana Krall, Sheryl Crow who pop up here and there throughout the film.

The performances of these star vocalists are a mixed bag, their deployment a gimmick that doesn't pay off, and one that reaches its nadir with Crow's tuneless "Begin the Beguine." But then such attempts at reaching a younger audience are usually doomed to failure; it's unlikely that fans of these artists will rush out to attend a film about the life of Cole Porter.

Few of the songs get their due, and the film is hopeless at supplying any sense of what Porter's musicals were like. There's a particularly misleading Kiss Me, Kate sequence, in which Kline reprimands "Miss Morison," who's seen singing a line from an opening number which the actual Patricia Morison wasn't in. That's followed by an even more ludicrous depiction of "So in Love," here plopped down in the wrong scene.

Mixed in with all the pop stars, three bona fide musical-theatre performers make appearances. John Barrowman Sunset Boulevard, Anything Goes plays an actor having trouble delivering "Night and Day" who is coached by Porter. Caroline O'Connor Chicago, Mack and Mabel is glimpsed as Ethel Merman the name is never mentioned, leading "Anything Goes." And Peter Polycarpou, who appeared with Pryce in the original cast of Miss Saigon, plays Louis B. Mayer and is part of one of the more elaborate and sillier musical sequences, "Be a Clown."

Although he looks too old for the early scenes and sports unfortunate make-up in the final ones, Kline does as well as anyone could with the central role. But even Kline can't make De-Lovely fly. I didn't catch De-Lovely last summer, deliberately waiting for the DVD. I had hoped it would at least rank as a fascinating failure, but it turns out to be largely lifeless. Perhaps it's time for a DVD of another contemporary director's take on Porter, Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love.

The De-Lovely DVD bonuses include deleted scenes, several featurettes on the making of the film, and audio commentary by Winkler, Cocks, and Kline.

RAGTIME Paramount

E.L. Doctorow's acclaimed 1975 novel Ragtime is a difficult book to dramatize. With principal characters simply named "Mother," "Father," and "Mother's Younger Brother," the book contains no conventional dialogue, and is written in a passive, distanced tone.

Then too, the novel offers a kaleidoscopic view of American life at the turn of the century, combining fictional with real-life figures and embracing at least four sets of principal characters. These include an upper-middle-class family in New Rochelle; a Jewish immigrant named Tateh on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; Coalhouse Walker, a Harlem pianist; and Evelyn Nesbit, whose husband, Harry Thaw, murdered her lover, the architect Stanford White.

In Ragtime, it's not so much the plot that counts as it is the evocation of a moment in time. And any adaptation is obliged to make the novel into a more manageable, more straightforward narrative. In 1981, a film version was directed by Milos Forman One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, from a screenplay by Michael Weller, who had previously collaborated with Forman on the movie of Hair.

Shot in New York and London, the Ragtime film managed to distill the complex source material down to 155 minutes. Doctorow had suggested a multi-part miniseries. The film's producer, Dino De Laurentiis, insisted that the large cast include at least one big movie name, and when Jack Nicholson suddenly became unavailable, Forman was able to persuade James Cagney to come out of a twenty-year retirement to play the police commissioner. Mandy Patinkin played Tateh; an unknown Fran Drescher appeared briefly as Tateh's unfaithful wife; Debbie Allen was Sarah, the mother of Coalhouse's son; novelist Norman Mailer played Stanford White; and Donald O'Connor was glimpsed as Evelyn's dance instructor.

The resulting film proved controversial. In his New York Times review, critic Vincent Canby described it as "sorrowful, funny, and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory....I'm not at all sure that anyone who has not read the book will have any idea what's going on much of the time, or why."

Although it won no Oscars, Ragtime's Academy Award nominations included nods for supporting actor Howard Rollins' Coalhouse and supporting actress Elizabeth McGovern's Evelyn, screenplay, cinematography, art direction, costumes, and original song and score Randy Newman.

For more than an hour, the film manages quite successfully to juggle the various strands of the story, adeptly mirroring the novel's panaromic effect. Then, the focus shifts almost exclusively to Coalhouse, to his fight for retribution over injustices done to him and how his actions affect the New Rochelle family. As a result, the film becomes a more conventional, less interesting narrative, with the character of Tateh suffering the most.

The Broadway musical adapted from the novel ultimately did a better job of balancing the stories, and even managed to include such historic figures as Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, and Harry Houdini, all absent from the film. True, Coalhouse got the final bow in the show and could be considered the lead character. But Tateh, Mother, and Father were of almost equal importance.

The bonuses on Paramount's recently released Ragtime DVD include a track of sporadic audio commentary by Forman and executive producer/assistant director Michael Hausman. There's a twenty-minute documentary, Remembering "Ragtime", in which Forman notes that the film would not be made today because it would be too expensive, and because, failing to sufficiently condemn Coalhouse's terrorist actions, it would not be considered politically correct.

Also included is a ten-minute deleted scene featuring Evelyn, Mother's Younger Brother, and Emma Goldman, the latter character otherwise unseen in the film.