The film releases of recent years telegraph an interest within the industry to return to its theatrical roots — or at least a belief that there’s money to be made by turning to Broadway for inspiration. The latter impulse is proving itself to be true, with Wicked grossing over half a billion dollars worldwide in under four weeks. Wicked (ahem, Wicked: Part One) isn’t alone in 2024’s year of musical releases: The screen adaptation of Mean Girls the musical captured the theatre kid hearts of TikTok, Joker: Folie à Deux and Emilia Pérez have presented original, arthouse musicals for an adult audience, and Disney continues its attempts to recapture its renaissance era with Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King — while perhaps more successfully replicating the vibe of direct-to-video sequels.
For all these flashy celebrations of theatre on the screen, the resulting products are often empty sketches that are more interested in capitalizing on Theatre Kid Energy than understanding why the art form has persisted for centuries. These films view theatre as an artifact to improve upon rather than embrace. This has led to an influx of musicals afraid to be musicals — and arguably even films afraid to be films.
In defense of the color-grading and lighting choices in Wicked, director Jon M. Chu said, “I think what we wanted to do was immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place. Because if it was a fake place […] then the real relationships and the stakes that these two girls are going through wouldn’t feel real.” This quote reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what made classic movie musicals like Singin’ in the Rain and the original Wizard of Oz great, but the legacy of theatre’s interplay with cinema isn’t absent from our screens. What would 2021’s Drive My Car be without Uncle Vanya or Past Lives’ artistic sensitivity and Challengers’ sense of drama without power-couple Celine Song and Justin Kuritzkes’ background as playwrights? Wicked may serviceably adapt the source material, but it’s so bogged-down in its self-consciousness that you can sense the TikTok 9:16 aspect ratio closing in.
Other than The Piano Lesson and La Cocina, the best films of 2024 may not be direct adaptations of stage works, but many are still indebted to the medium. Their interplay with theatre brings us closer to a real-life emotional truth — and an understanding of the audience’s role as spectators — that’s missing from many of these more obvious references to theatre.
A decade before Annie Baker’s feature debut Janet Planet, her Pulitzer-prize winning 2013 play The Flick began with the projection of a film. Baker’s stage directions describe, “Images that we cannot decipher are being projected. Dust motes are illuminated by the light.” The film occupies the fourth wall between us and the movie theater set, filling the space within. “Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness,” a character will later say, meditating on the transition to digital that now almost exclusively dominates cinema. “Film is light and shadow and it is the light and shadow that were there on the day that you shot the film.”
Baker’s indisputable affection for cinema is felt in Janet Planet, an intimate snapshot of a mother-daughter relationship through one summer in the early 90s. At first blush, Janet Planet isn’t noticeably cinematic. Baker’s body of work includes nine plays produced in the span of 15 years, and her tendencies as a playwright — even considered radical for the stage — are in full form. Dialogue is sparse amidst stretches of quiet. Like several of Baker’s plays, Janet Planet is about characters who long for intimacy but who are trapped within their interiority.
In theatrical terms, Janet Planet more closely resembles a “memory play” than a movie. The movie isn’t narrated à la The Glass Menagerie by our 11 year-old protagonist Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), but undoubtedly we are in her point-of-view, seated within her memories. Baker takes the quiet realism of her plays and uses light, shot composition, editing, and sound to heighten that reality in the way memory often does. It is when the movie draws the most attention to this heightening that we feel even more grounded in our connection to its truths; when light hits mother Janet at just the right angle and she glows; when the camera lingers on her hand across a boyfriend’s belly, rising and falling with his breath; when the bathroom mirror fractures the image of Janet and Lacy; when the sound of the air in the trees is particularly loud, or the tone of the sun particularly yellow. These aren’t quite images of reality, but rather tableaus of memory, immersing us in Lacy’s keen observation of the adults around her.
We leave Lacy’s point-of-view for possibly the first and only time in the moment Baker describes as “the center of the movie.” Janet listens as a possible suitor recites an excerpt of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fourth Duino Elegy. “Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play!” reads a line in the poem, reflecting on what to make of life once it reaches the end. Baker commented on the inclusion of the poem to Filmmaker Magazine, sharing, “to me, that poem captures some kind of ambivalent spirituality of childhood, and the feeling of being watched and being the watcher.”
“Watching” is recurrent through Baker’s plays, and even in Janet Planet, Baker never tries to make us forget that we are watchers. Not only do we watch the world through Lacy’s eyes, but we watch Lacy — perhaps the only ones watching Lacy through these moments, a responsibility underscored in the final frame of the film. Janet may be the center of Lacy’s universe, but we see Lacy in the light, too, and for nearly two hours, she is the center of our focus.
Janet Planet isn’t this year’s only release concerned with the intersection of parenthood, memory, and theatre. Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan bring a metatextual awareness to Ghostlight as grieving patriarch Dan Mueller stumbles into a starring role in a community production of Romeo and Juliet. The tradition of the ghostlight is to tend to the hauntings that superstition suggests take place in every theater. Some believe we leave the single light on to ward ghosts away, but others believe the light guides spirits through the dark. As the events preceding Ghostlight and their impacts on the Mueller family are slowly revealed (played by the Mallen-Kupferers, a real-life family of Chicago actors and theatremakers), the production itself becomes Dan’s ghostlight. Dan sees theatre as an opportunity to escape and be someone else despite barely understanding himself. But the deeper he sinks into playing Romeo, the closer he is to the ghost he’s trying to escape. The beauty is in how he finds a way through the light.
Ghostlight isn’t interested in playing for the balcony. Like Janet Planet, Ghostlight is intimate and meditative while using the camera to show gestures that might otherwise be lost on the stage. But if Janet Planet is about looking back, Ghostlight is about the impulse to avoid the past, and how theatre’s guise of “make-believe” is a way back to ourselves and a way to understand the ghosts as they once were.
For as much as Ghostlight finds the theatrical process a source of healing, Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is as equally attentive to the navel-gazing that occurs when looking to make-believe as escape. But even so, the movie’s mean, frantic, genre-bending spiral is fully immersed in the theatrical stylings it pokes fun at.
Stylistically, A Different Man refutes realism. Bizarre strangers stare with exaggerated facial expressions. The bronze Abraham Lincoln in the park is not really a statue, but a man. The doctors speak with the affectation of mad scientists. A Different Man’s New York is a dishonest city, and we follow Edward, a man who believes that his appearance is what hinders him from honestly and vulnerably sharing himself with others. Postmodern may not be the right word to describe A Different Man, but there are present shades of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double; the relationship between performer and audience, the splitting that results in the actor’s “double,” and the relationship to watching. If watching is a tender act in Janet Planet, A Different Man’s take on spectatorship holds a far more malicious tone.
A miracle drug that “cures” Edward’s disfigurement provides him an opportunity to kill the version of himself that he hates, but as time zooms forward, Edward — now rebranded as Guy — can’t resist the temptation to connect with his former neighbor Ingrid under his new identity (the reunion is unknown to her) and integrate himself in the play she’s written about his past life. It’s an opportunity to learn if another person — particularly one he’s attracted to romantically — sees him for his honest self. Instead, he only encounters the shadows of who he once was and who he’s trying to be.
Artaud writes, “Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.” And thus, Edward, wearing the effigy of his old face, is confronted by the double of Edward that exists in Ingrid’s play, ripe to be rewritten, and Oswald, a man who Edward feels has stolen his life.
For centuries, human beings have always found a way to reality through heightened works of art. It’s easy to believe that the artifice inherent to theatre or cinema is an obstacle to be overcome in order to reach something true. We are but humans plagued by our own main character syndrome — why shouldn’t a “realistic” world have the saturation we add in our memories, the warmth we imbue in our joy, or echoes we hear in our worst paranoia? Do we not look back at our life or forward toward our dreams as spectators? “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools,” Shakespeare writes in King Lear. From Shakespeare, to Rilke, to Annie Baker, there has never been a more apt analogy for what it means to experience real life than the theatre.
That King Lear quote is the entrypoint that brings Divine Eye (played by the real life Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin) to the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program in Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing. The true-story nature of Sing Sing runs the risk of falling into the traps of inspiration porn that flattens the nuances of its characters’ circumstances into a story that services the spectator, inviting us to tend to our sympathy as we watch a group of incarcerated men transformed by the power of theatre. But the movie’s emphatic urging to “trust the process” indicates more nuanced intentions. The film takes great strides to make clear that theatre won’t change the conditions that suppress the men incarcerated at Sing Sing. If anything, the “rehabilitation” program is revealed to only provide the legal system with further cause for scrutiny — a feel-good story isn’t enough to overcome biased distrust. But as explored through many of this year’s films, it is through theatre’s promise of escape that one can be closest to themselves and their collaborative community. This is not a group of men who need to be changed, but liberated from all that suppresses them: Anger, insecurity, legal hurdles (both Sing Sing and Ghostlight draw subtle comparisons between theatre and the American legal system), isolation, and scarcity. Also like A Different Man, we witness the mirroring of two men, but unlike Aaron Schimberg’s film, the stage is not a colosseum for adversaries, but a place for these men to coach one another through their shared experiences.
Over 10 years later, it’s hard not to feel for The Flick’s eulogy to celluloid; the absence of light in contemporary cinema has been a point of contention for cinephiles in recent years. Sometimes jokingly described as the “Netflix sheen” — the desaturated, glossy but underlit look disguising the seams of CGI that Wicked suggests is realism. The sense memory Baker describes in The Flick of the projector’s light is a production trick that reminds us of the everyday beauty of the movies. These films not only understand theatre nor the spectator, but they understand the value of light.
Sing Sing is a much different movie if the rays of light captured on 16mm film aren’t filling the isolating, concrete cell blocks. Janet Planet doesn’t work as a memory play without the hazy glow of summer. The production of Romeo and Juliet in Ghostlight doesn’t carry the same fleeting beauty of resurrecting a ghost if the low-budget set-construction isn’t backed by the glow diffused by the scrim. Adam Pearson’s performance of “I Wanna Get Next to You” in A Different Man doesn’t quite taunt Edward the right way if it isn’t lit with the same magnetic hues that illuminated Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. Light is not about the walls or the performances, but the senses that make up the space in between. Light, like theatre, is a fleeting process. Film has the unique power to capture the brief, wordless emotions that we feel rather than articulate. It’s time more filmmakers begin trusting the process.
loved this!!