Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon is simply exquisite

March 31, 1943: in Sardi’s restaurant on West 44^th Street, the great lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart (Ethan Hawke) props up the bar, shoots the breeze with barman Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and pianist Morty (Jonah Lees) – and awaits with dread the arrival of his former musical partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), after the opening night of Oklahoma!, his first Broadway smash with new librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney). 

Richard Linklater’s movie – my favourite at this year’s London Film Festival – is the ninth he has made with Hawke; an exquisite chamber piece about thwarted love, the pain of looming obsolescence and the sense of an ending. Rodgers and Hart wrote some of the greatest numbers in the American songbook: My Funny Valentine, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Isn’t It Romantic? and the classic 1934 ballad from which the film takes its title. But Hart’s drinking, depression and spiky personality spelt doom for their collaboration.

Hawke is sensational as the diminutive, damaged song master who, in real life, was only five feet tall. Compressed, cramped and combed over, he seems to be shrinking before our very eyes, a genie being put back into the bottle (of bourbon, in this case). But his patter is clever and unrelenting, a tragic monologue delivered with screwball timing. 

He thinks Oklahoma! is terrible, loathes the exclamation mark, but knows with every fibre of his being that it will be a huge box-office hit. As Rodgers, Scott is a magnificent foil to Hawke, overjoyed by his show’s triumph, irritated by his former partner’s sardonic asides, but also guilty about abandoning him. When he offers Hart the chance to revive their musical A Connecticut Yankee, it feels like (and is) a consolation prize.

“Oklahoma! is too easy?” Rodgers asks his onetime mentor in disbelief. “The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy? You’ve just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry.” To which Hart replies: “It’s too easy for me.” 

And therein lies the problem: Rodgers intuits that wartime audiences want the straightforward release of musical sentimentality. Hart insists upon work that, like himself, is “emotionally complicated”. 

Alongside this artistic sundering, he has also set the stage for his own romantic demolition; believing himself to be in love with a 20-year-old Yale student, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), whom he introduces as his “protegée”.

Though he claims to be “ambisexual”, Elizabeth treats him as an adored gay friend – “I love you, just not in that way” – and thinks nothing of telling him in detail about her sexual encounters with another man. 

As she confides in him in the privacy of the cloak room, Hawke’s face is a mesmerising study in salaciousness battling with despair. I was reminded of Emily Dickinson’s lines: “A great Hope fell/ You heard no noise/ The Ruin was within.”

Linklater and his writer Robert Kaplow are plainly in love themselves -with this period of Manhattan music, letters and style. It is no accident that Hart spots and strikes up a conversation with the legendary New Yorker essayist, EB White (Patrick Kennedy) – “Andy” to his friends. Magician that he is, he nonchalantly gives White the idea for what will become his first children’s book, Stuart Little (1945).

Meanwhile, Hammerstein is accompanied by an over-confident young teenager identified only as “Stevie” (Cillian Sullivan) – but none other than Stephen Sondheim himself. The great New York photographer Weegee (John Doran) also makes an appearance.

One of the films of the year – and soon to be followed by Linklater’s joyous take on the French New Wave of cinema, Nouvelle Vague (January 30).

Suggested Reading

Step inside Wes Anderson’s world

Matthew d’Ancona

THEATRE

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (@sohoplace, London, until February 21, then touring the UK)

Remarkably, Jeremy Herrin’s compelling production marks the first occasion that a John le Carré novel has been adapted for the stage. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) was his third work of fiction, a sharp cry of rage written in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall’s construction, that became a global bestseller. In 1964, le Carré – real name David Cornwell – left MI6; his cover already blown, it transpired, by the Cambridge spy Kim Philby.

Having failed to save his last joe in the East German praesidium, Karl Riemeck (Mat Betteridge), Berlin station chief Alec Leamas (Rory Keenan) returns to London to be debriefed by the head of the service, Control (Ian Drysdale). Would he like one final mission and the chance to bring down Hans-Dieter Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery), the cruel DDR spymaster?

This involves Leamas feigning a decline into drunken uselessness: not much of a stretch, as he is already strung-out and disillusioned. Sent to work at the Bayswater Library for Psychic Research, he begins an affair with his new colleague Liz Gold (Agnes O’Casey), an idealistic communist who knows nothing of her lover’s past in the secret world. Meanwhile, Leamas bides his time, waiting for an invitation to defect by one of Mundt’s people in London.

David Eldridge remains true to the source material, giving George Smiley (John Ramm) greater prominence without violating the spirit of the original. The actions that Smiley, supposedly on sabbatical, coaxes from Leamas – and their terrible consequences – set the scene for the great trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979); and for A Legacy of Spies (2017) in which, many years later, the Leamas case is reopened.

Five years since le Carré’s death, the imaginative world he created is flourishing. The second season of The Night Manager premieres on New Year’s Day on BBC One. Matthew Macfadyen has been cast as Smiley in a new series, following in the footsteps of Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman; and le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway is working on a follow-up to the acclaimed Karla’s Choice (2024).

TV/STREAMING

The Death of Bunny Munro (Sky/Now TV)

It is hard to overstate how perfect Matt Smith is for the lead role in this adaptation of Nick Cave’s weird, brutal and tragic novel, published in 2009. As Bunny Munro, swaggering cosmetics salesman and shameless Lothario, the 43-year-old actor has all the reckless, destructive charm required by the part – but also the sadness behind the eyes that makes him more than a monster.

When Bunny’s wife Libby (Sarah Greene) takes her own life, he escapes from their Brighton home with nine-year-old Bunny Jr (Rafael Mathé, superb) to stop social services taking him into care. He frames their flight as a grand coastal adventure and an apprenticeship in the seductive art of the sale. “I could sell a bicycle to a barracuda!” says father to son. “I could sell the whole bloody bike shed!”

Junior idolises Bunny Sr – “He’s shaking the money tree, getting ready for the big one. Right, dad?” – but knows full well that this rollercoaster ride cannot last long. Libby appears often, and movingly, in apparition: “Your dad’s not brilliant at looking after anyone who’s not your dad.” 

Across six episodes, we behold Bunny’s psychic collapse, fuelled by pills, chain-smoked Lambert & Butler and endless shots of Scotch, in a world where salesmanship and virility are coterminous. The cheap product you call “Barry White in a bottle” is still a cheap product. The chat-up lines stop working. 

Director Isabella Eklöf and writer Pete Jackson make inspired use of the English seaside and its bleached melancholy. Cave and Warren Ellis supply original music to supplement a steady flow of terrific needle-drops fit for the 2003 setting: The Cure’s A Forest, John Cale’s If You Were Still Around, The Waterboys’ Be My Enemy, Linda Perhacs’ Hey, Who Really Cares and many more.

PS: hat-tip to TNW founder and editor-in-chief Matt Kelly for recommending Stranger Than Kindness, a wonderful Nick Cave virtual exhibition curated by the Royal Danish Library and Nick Cave Productions. You can find it here.

EXHIBITION

Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals (Tate Britain, London, until April 12) 

If there were a “Rumble in the Jungle” to crown the greatest English painter of 1750-1850, it would be fought between JMW Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). Their birthdates separated by less than 14 months, the two men were competitors, fellow Royal Academicians and often friendly acquaintances, pushing back the frontiers of landscape art in a thrilling contest that, in truth, lasted beyond Constable’s death.

I approached Amy Concannon’s magnificent exhibition – which features 196 pieces, displayed in 12 rooms – as an avowed member of Team Turner. But the sheer physical impact of Constable’s “six footer” paintings is formidable; The White Horse (1819), for instance, does not so much portray the English countryside as recreate it. 

As the contemporary artist Bridget Riley writes in the exhibition catalogue: “It is carried out with such conviction and mastery. Nothing escapes attention from the beautifully clouded sky to the foliage and its reflection in the water. Gericault and Delacroix saw in Constable a new way forward for painting.” Though he was a creature of place – the Stour Valley, specifically – the cloud paintings assembled here reflect an imagination that was never confined or deterred from experimentation.

In June 1831, The Englishman’s Magazine characterised the difference as “Turner’s fire and Constable’s rain”. And it is true that Turner was more restless, more audacious and more theatrical – the mighty washes, storms and drama of his work prefiguring not only impressionism but many features of modernism.

Shade and Darkness – the Evening of the Deluge (1843) draws from a familiar Biblical story an image of cosmic dread. The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons (1835) depicts the crucible of a new political and social age. In all the portrayals of myth and history, his subject is always the daunted human psyche.

In June 1829, London Magazine said that Constable was “all truth” and Turner “all poetry”. On my very subjective scorecard, Turner still wins on points. But this exhibition – one of the best of the year – makes me want to go back for a rematch.