Director: Michael Mayer
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Saoirse Ronan, Corey Stoll, Annette Bening, Brian Dennehy, Michael Zegen, Mare Winningham, Glenn Fleshler, Jon Tenney, Billy Howle
Runtime: 98 mins.
2018
When you take it upon yourself to adapt a classic work of the stage, especially one from the revolutionary body of work of Anton Chekhov, especially one that is directly conversant with themes of new theatrical forms versus old ways of thinking, you had better damn well have a salient reason for the adaptation. Michael Mayer's The Seagull does not clear that bar. As far as I can tell, this film has no reason to exist whatsoever. It may be that The Seagull is inherently uncinematic, what with its dense text and discernible lack of onstage "action." That doesn't excuse Mayer's adaptation from being mired in the most blasé choices imaginable.
The Seagull--as I understand it--is a deep dive existential excavation of an artistically inclined Russian family, as well as those who have found themselves attached to the family unit. This heavy meditation on malcontentedness is seen askance through seemingly casual dialogue and punctuated by jet black comedy. The Seagull--as Mayer understands it--is a work of transparent awards-seeking frivolity in which the dialogue carries little impact beyond an excuse for its hyperqualified cast to Act.
And Act they do, they Act quite a bit, sometimes to the film's benefit and sometimes to its detriment. Arguably the lynchpins of the story, Billy Howle's Konstantin and Saoirse Ronan's Nina, are both painfully underwhelming. I wasn't surprised by Howle's shallow cliche of a tortured artist. Ronan is disappointing though, playing what is admittedly one of the more difficult theatrical roles I know of with a total lack of subtlety or inspiration. Nina is a deft needle to thread, but Ronan only offers up her version of a Manic Pixie Dream Ingénue.
The best performances, like that of Elisabeth Moss's Masha, offer the solitary bright spots in the movie. Those bright spots are hidden under a massive bushel by the direction, which does an atrocious job of massaging the respective performances into a coherent whole; they range from attempted naturalism to heightened melodrama to broad comedy. Moss's rich line readings make clear that she is one of the only people on this project who understands how Chekhov ticks, but her efforts are washed out by her surroundings.
Speaking of washed out, the lighting design betrays how little Mayer and his team are clued into the story they're telling. The sunny, oversaturated look of the movie makes it read like a knockoff Masterpiece Theater episode. Meanwhile, the tinkling, condescending score evokes something more like a 90's Hallmark Channel movie.
The end result is cloying. That's not something I want from any media, but it is especially dispiriting when applied to Chekhov. Chekhov's writing is full of crackling life, deep melancholy, and clockwork precision; to replace all that with a thick slathering of cliche is its own form of tragedy.
The one reasonably unique choice in the production is also its most bizarrely wrongheaded. The film begins in media res, jettisoning Chekhov's immaculate dramatic structure for no reason beyond "this is a movie and we can." We bear witness to the perfunctory lead-up to Nina and Konstantin's climactic conversation before flashing back to the play's start three years previous. I do not exaggerate when I say that I cannot even conceive of a sensible reason for this, and it carries the added defect of making us watch the very same tedious scene an hour or so later, exactly when we are most ready for the proceedings to end.
I have gone on about how the movie doesn't have a single decent idea in its head, but I feel there is an even more damning critique to make. It is clear to me that Mayer simply does not understand sadness. This deficiency leaves The Seagull a confused artifact, a broken work of art whose body is at odds with its soul.
1 / 5 BLOBS
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