DIRECTOR
Stanley Tucci
SCREENWRITER
Howard A. Rodman
based
on the articles
Professor Seagull and
Joe Gould's Secret by
Joseph Mitchell
PRODUCERS
Beth Alexander
Stanley Tucci
Charles Weinstock
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Maryse Alberti
MUSIC
Evan Lurie
EDITOR
Suzy Elmiger
CAST
Ian Holm (Joe Gould)
Stanley Tucci (Joe Mitchell)
Hope Davis (Therese Mitchell)
Sarah Hyland (Elizabeth Mitchell)
Hallee Hirsh (Nora Mitchell)
Celia Weston (Sarah)
Patrick Tovatt (Harold Ross)
Susan Sarandon (Alice Neel)
Patricia Clarkson (Vivian Marquie)
Nell Campbell (Tamar)
Steve Martin (Charlie Duell)
Aida Turturro (Waitress)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 104m
U.S. release: May 26, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Stanley
Tucci films
reviewed on this site:
- Big
Night
|
Near
the beginning of Joe Gould's Secret, the New Yorker
essayist Joseph Mitchell (Stanley Tucci) is describing his next
piece -- about a local bar -- to his wife. He asks if that sounds
boring. She says it depends on what happens; he says nothing
happens. She shrugs and says, well, then it depends on the skill
of the writer. Or the director, I'd say. In this era of concussive
movies deathly afraid of losing the audience's attention for
two seconds, Stanley Tucci has a deep, and deeply satisfying,
respect for stories in which nothing much happens. In this movie
and his directing debut Big
Night (I missed his second, the screwball homage The
Impostors), Tucci sets the scene, introduces interesting
characters, and then lets us eavesdrop on them for a while. It's
fitting, then, that his new movie is about a pair of eavesdroppers.
Mitchell, a transplant from North Carolina who feels comfortable
among the working class and bohemians of New York (this is
the '40s, after all), finds himself drawn to a notorious but
well-loved local character -- Joe Gould (Ian Holm), a whiskered
free spirit who lives on charity (he likes to ask strangers and
friends for "contributions to the Joe Gould Fund")
and is assembling an epic oral history of New York. Much like
Mitchell, Gould finds truth and nobility in the random snatches
of conversation and displays of life he sees and hears on the
street. Mitchell and Gould become friends, and the two temperamentally
opposite yet fundamentally alike men roam the flophouses and
poetry readings of the city.
If done a bit differently -- the laid-back Mitchell and the overwrought
Gould enter a place, Gould makes a scene, Mitchell shakes his
head affectionately and grins -- it would feel too much like
an odd-couple movie, like too many other films we've snored through.
But Tucci, directing a screenplay by Howard A. Rodman based on
Mitchell's two New Yorker essays on Gould, approaches
the material as a study of two different kinds of observers.
Mitchell keeps his distance; Gould gets right in the thick of
things, tearing off his clothes at a party, crashing a snobby
poetry reading, keeping up a madcap stream of patter. It's not
long before we realize that someone as garrulous as Gould doesn't
make the best listener or chronicler of the language of the streets.
He likes the sound of his own voice too much.
We like the sound of his voice, too, thanks to Ian Holm, as explosive
here as he was implosive in The
Sweet Hereafter. It's a very actorish performance --
it's a very actorish role -- but Holm takes such joy in
Gould's theatrics (while still suggesting the essential despair
of the man) that it never reads as overacting. After a while,
you see Gould's rants and exploits as what they are: the cries
of a lonely man who refuses to be forgotten. Generously playing
straight man in his own movie, Tucci makes Mitchell a kind, soft-spoken
man whose patience is considerable but only goes so far. A key
confrontation scene between Mitchell and Gould, which uncovers
the mystery of the title, is all the more affecting for being
low-key.
Adding poignance to Joe Gould's Secret is Tucci's fond
reanimation of the New York of the '40s, a city that still had
a place for people like Gould. Today, legions of Joe Goulds die
on the street unnoticed every day in America, but Tucci doesn't
push this; we see Gould booted from his apartment and covered
in sores, but it's presented as just another fact of Gould's
life. Indeed, most of the movie is refreshingly light and good-hearted;
you relax as you realize you're not going to get any manufactured
conflicts or Hollywood plot points (Mitchell has two cutie-pie
daughters, and it's a damn relief to know they're not going to
be kidnapped or something). On the basis of the two I've seen,
a Stanley Tucci movie is an easygoing experience; you sit back
in comfort, knowing you're in the hands of a director who keeps
things simple, loves actors, respects words, respects silence
even more, and never goes for sentiment or sensation when he
can simply opt for truth. |