‘Blue Moon’ Review: Richard Linklater’s Latest Misfire
More exhausting than it is compelling, Richard Linklater fails to meaningfully illustrate who Lorenz Hart is in his chamber piece, ‘Blue Moon’.
There’s not much Richard Linklater can’t do in terms of playing with different generic conventions and filmmaking techniques, but there’s also not much he can do in actively making these films worthwhile experiences for the viewer. I recognize that I may be one of the few dissenting voices on the American filmmaker who has amassed a reputation as a storied auteur, having prolifically crafted many works that have stood the test of time in the pantheon of independent cinema. Yet, I always fail to connect with his craft, as the screenplays he consistently works on are of varying degrees of mediocre to great. Films like Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, and Hit Man are the outliers of an otherwise forgettable filmography, but I always give him a chance to blow me away, to see if I can board the same wavelength as other filmgoers.
With Hit Man being as good as it is, expectations for his latest motion picture (of two) released this year, ‘Blue Moon’, were reasonably high, coming off the heels of a Silver Bear for the Best Supporting Performance at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. In that regard, Andrew Scott, who portrays Richard Rodgers, is more than deserving of the accolade he received at the Berlinale, embodying the legendary composer with a real sense of play that we immediately latch onto his desire to move on from his collaborations with Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) following the skyrocketing success of Oklahoma!
Hart was supposed to write the songs for the musical that would give Rodgers an even bigger reputation than he already had. However, crippling alcoholism and emotional distress caused the composer to collaborate with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) instead. Richard would like to partner with Hart once more, who vows that he is entirely clean and sober. Still, he fully knows that this will no longer be possible by the time he receives the adulation of a generation, which will eventually lead to the formation of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and, eventually, their most significant success, The Sound of Music.
Of course, Linklater doesn’t focus on this aspect. That said, astute viewers will recognize how Hart’s downfall was a massive benefit for Rodgers, and that he didn’t need to cling to an unreliable, compulsively alcoholic partner whose time in the spotlight was long gone by the time Oklahoma! invaded American theatres. We meet Hart in 1943, during the opening night of the show, as he walks out early to Sardi’s, where a celebration of its premiere will be held momentarily. In this section, we see a more refined sense of Linklater’s aesthetics than in recent memory (even Hit Man had far too sterile photography), which gives an alluring prospect that Blue Moon, essentially a theatrical chamber piece, may offer more than meets the eye.
Since Ethan Hawke is much taller than Lorenz Hart, a game of perspective must be employed. Instead of relying on CGI, Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly utilize old-school stagecraft techniques to make Hawke appear smaller than he is, and the results are staggering. As the movie never leaves Sardi’s for a good chunk of the runtime, one could’ve thought Blue Moon wouldn’t care about its aesthetics, since the film heavily relies on the mile-a-minute line deliveries Hawke performs as the acerbic, but lonely, Hart, who repeats his favorite line from Casablanca, until it becomes a fact ingrained in his very being: “Nobody ever loved me that much.”
Yet, there’s actual thought in Linklater’s mise-en-scène – deliberate blocking to slowly reveal characters populating the environment makes the bar feel immersive and lived-in, before the camera hones in on Hart’s complex facial expressions, still grappling with the bottle and pushes it closer to him, knowing that it will only bring him more pain and misery, instead of being done with it altogether. After all, he swore Richard and even Sardi’s bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), that he is finished. But we know what alcoholics mean when they say this... The interactions, through Robert Kaplow’s words, feel genuine and textured, and how Linklater plays with space gives it real heft before he gets to the meat of the story.
And yet, the dialogue-driven exchanges between Hart, Eddie, piano player Morty “Knuckles” Rifkin (Jonah Lees), and his muse, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley) begin to feel tiresome relatively quickly. It exhausts more than it illustrates on the complex figure of Lorenz Hart, beyond the songs that still stand the test of time, even more than eighty years after his passing. Hawke himself is irreproachable and pours his heart and soul into a portrayal that may very well be his best collaboration with Linklater yet (a high bar to cross, considering the “legendary” status the Before trilogy holds in the eyes of the public consciousness, though this critic was never that big of a fan).
We feel his anguish as he contemplates his future, aware that Rodgers will not be able to collaborate with him once Oklahoma! becomes a sensation, and that even if he gives up the bottle entirely, his reputation will still be in the gutter. That said, Hawke’s performance only goes so far in a film that presents him with cyclical dialogues that never delve into who Hart is beyond his approachable and friendly surface. There’s an added layer of pain that Linklater refuses to explore, even when he attempts to cut deep in the relationship he holds with his “irreplaceable” Elizabeth, in an exchange where the two should theoretically open themselves up, but with little to no emotional impact.
The way in which Hart tires everyone in the movie is the point. However, there’s still no instance where Linklater takes the time to actively sit with the protagonist for even a brief second, which would allow us to peer into his soul further than simply repeating the same stories without necessarily asking why Hart’s own personality preceded his downfall. It’s interested in the macro details of his life, but not in the micro aspects that would make Hawke’s towering turn as the songwriter feel three-dimensional. As a result, Blue Moon quickly turns into a distant drama that shines in its aesthetic impulses and theatrical performances, but feels difficult and limited in helping us parse what’s most important to retain about Lorenz Hart as a public figure, and, most importantly, as a human being
If it weren’t for Andrew Scott giving the best on-screen performance of his career, Blue Moon could’ve been as worthless as most of Linklater’s oeuvre. There’s hope he could make something worthwhile in his next movie, about one of the most radical movements in all of cinema history, with Nouvelle Vague, which this critic is about to see at the time of the writing of this review. If he examines the why behind Jean-Luc Godard’s conception of cinema, it could genuinely be something special…