A Master Builder
Vanya on 42nd Street is, to date, my favorite film of the year. The more I revisit it, the more I suspect it might be one of my favorites of all time. So discovering that Wallace Shawn had attempted something of a spiritual successor — this time with Ibsen instead of Chekhov — was cause for celebration.
I'll admit that I'm more of a Chekhov man than an Ibsen one, but so much of what I loved about Vanya was not the script or the play itself; it was the interplay between the idea of theater and the idea of film. Vanya suggests a synthesis of the two forms through a shared goal of enchantment; the performances are great and the material is great, but all the fourth-wall stuff is meaningful on a level beyond devotion to the play itself.
A Master Builder comes two decades later, directed this time by Jonathan Demme (of Stop Making Sense and a slew of others.)
Demme appears to be going for something quite different -- or at least achieves (though that implies a certain intentionality) a much different effect. A Master Builder feels less like a sequel to Vanya and more like a spiritual rebellion against it: naturalistic performances are replaced with exaggerated ones; calm, steady, invisible direction is replaced with jarring cuts and off-putting close-ups; the warm, decrepit charm of the crumbling playhouse on 42nd Street is replaced with sterility and cold tones. Put simply: Vanya wants you as close as possible, and A Master Builder is insistent on pushing you away.
And consider myself pushed! There were more than a few moments during this film where I felt uncomfortable — not because I was grappling with something difficult, or reckoning with what the film was trying to tell me, but because everything simply felt so jarring in a way that seemed poorly architected rather than intentional.
(Hagerty was great, though.)