by Brendan Foley
Whenever I hear a director talk about their dream movie, about the project that they’ve chased for decades, about the art that they believe will be their masterpiece, my mind turns to this speech from Miller’s Crossing, delivered by Marcia Gay Harden after hearing her lover mention a dream in which he chased his hat. She says:
“And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn’t a hat anymore and it changed into something else…”
Many of the best writers and directors spend decades of their lives chasing a particular hat. And when they finally caught up to it, maybe they found it as wonderful as they’d always imagined. But sometimes…
Well, sometimes you get fucking Winter’s Tale.
Michael Ritchie fell in love with The Fantasticks when he saw it off-Broadway. So did a whole lot of other people, as the musical, with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones, ran for 42 years and 17,162 performances, the longest running musical out there. Ritchie was determined to make it into a film and spent decades wrestling the material up onto the big screen.
Every frame of the finished film, now on Blu thanks to Twilight Time, glows with that passion. The Fantasticks is a work of incredible beauty, with a huge open frame capturing miles of gorgeous Americana. The film trades in on a sort of mythic version of the America of the ’20s, and the result is a world that is both heightened and recognizable.
That works well for the almost folk tale-eqsue structure of the narrative. In a bygone era, two best friends, Amos (Joel Grey) and Huckabee (Brad Sullivan) conspire to play matchmaker with their children Luisa (Jean Louisa Kelly) and Matt (Joey McIntyre). To drive the two together, the fathers pretend to be feuding, creating a forbidden romance angle that renders both youths irresistible to the other. Now needing to end their supposed feud, the fathers turn to mysterious figure named El Gallo (Jonathon Morris) who has arrived in town with his travelling circus. The plan is for El Gallo to pretend to be a villain so Matt can rescue Luisa. The plan goes off without a hitch, and that’s when the troubles begin.
Ritchie utilized live, on-set singing a couple of decades before Tom Hooper was hailed as a genius for pulling the same trick on the Les Miserables, with hidden ear pieces allowing the cast to keep time while actually singing. While the technique doesn’t make much difference in the big, booming solos, it is felt during the quieter or faster songs, as the actors are able to find a genuine give-and-take, finding the emotional pace of a scene and playing to that as opposed to trying to keep time to a phantom soundtrack. Morris’ final rendition of ‘Try to Remember’ is pitched halfway between a song and a prayer, and it’s a lovely little incantation to the close out the film.
On a surface level, The Fantasticks is a lovely thing, full of wonder. But there’s something about this material, or at least how this material was approached for this movie, that resolutely resists cinematic translation.
And that’s the thing about these dream movies: filmmakers can spend so much time on “Can I?” that they never quite get around to the “Should I?” and I think if Ritchie had really asked himself if The Fantasticks had some cinema in it, the answer would have been no.
Reading about the play, it strikes me as a very internal piece of work. The show is staged with the bare minimum of sets, up to and including having an actor stand in one spot to represent a wall. There’s no specific time or place for the show, and the second half extensively utilizes fantasy sequences to show the two naïve heroes gradually learning more about the darkness that exists in the real world beyond the bare stage.
So even as I was impressed by the stunning vistas and the impressive set design, there’s a feeling that it is all wrong. It’s like trying to get a cat to fly a space ship. Sure you’ll get some great pictures out of it, but that thing ain’t taking off.
Jones and Schmidt wrote the screenplay, and that rigidity shows. At no point does it seem like anyone made any tough choices about how to define this narrative as a cinematic experience, as if believing that the material itself was so strong that it would work regardless of the medium. This, it turns out, is not correct.
Beyond the fact that many of the lines are cringe-inducingly written and read (McIntyre in particular seems permanently confused about what the words coming out of his mouth mean), none of these characters register as actual people. Besides the fact that they are all monumentally stupid (again, something that works better on a stage, when you the audience member have to supply reality to what you are seeing) the characters are all broad, indistinguishable archetypes, archetypes that we have already seen deconstructed a dozen times over.
And that’s probably the most damning thing about The Fantasticks (well, if we’re being honest, and we do strive to be, the most damning thing would be the song that works really, really hard to wring laughs out of the word ‘rape’): It simply missed its window. When The Fantasticks opened off-Broadway, I’m sure its bare sets, small cast, and introspective view was a welcome antidote to the bombastic romantic spectacle of the main stage. The Fantasticks is a small story about small people who are taking incremental steps towards being better, wiser individuals. Taking the broad archetypes of Broadway’s traditional romance and adding some weight to them, taking the normal endpoint for one of these stories and actually wrestling with the consequences and implications, these are all things which must have seemed revolutionary when the show debuted.
But by 1995, and certainly by 2015, we’ve gone so far beyond postmodern that we’ve probably wrapped back around to modern again. These clichés have been eviscerated over and over again, to the point that having characters remark on how life isn’t actually like you expect from fairy tales is itself as been-there-done-that as most fairy tales (Into the Woods learned that the hard way). Again, The Fantasticks probably struck a chord against the musicals of the ’50s and ’60s, but by the time they got around to filming the damn thing, the things it was reacting against are now decades past relevancy.
If you are a fan of musicals or of breathtaking cinematography, definitely watch The Fantasticks. But as a movie, it is frustrating and half-formed, a dream that never quite made the leap to the waking world.