A Master Builder

Working with Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn spent years translating Ibsen's gargantuan play, The Master Builder.   Shawn and Gregory assembled actors and, then, "workshopped" the theater piece for another dozen years or so.  (The film version is directed by Jonathan Demme).  In his lucid adaptation, Shawn seems to have treated Ibsen's source material as a series of problems to be solved.   The most serious challenge posed by the original text (known in Norwegian as "Master Builder Solness") is the work's vast and intimidating length -- the play runs four and a half hours if not cut.  Ibsen conceived his play as a version of Faust and the shadow of Goethe's immense "chamber" play looms over the Norwegian's text -- to use Harold Bloom's critical jargon, The Master Builder arises from a "strong misreading" of Goethe's poem:  Faust's quest is for a pleasure so intense that his enjoyment of it will cause him to say that time must stop so that this moment can be eternally savored ("Verweile dich, du bist so schoen!"); Ibsen converts Faust's essentially hedonistic survey of all earthly pleasures into a more abstract exploration of the naked "will to power" (a theme implicit in the second part of Goethe's epic).   Master Builder Solness has transacted dark business with infernal powers -- he calls them the "helping powers."  As a result of these undertakings, and based upon a terrible crime, Solness has become a famous architect, a man feared by all who know him, and a monstrous tyrant.  Solness is highly intelligent and self-aware and he grasps that his power derives in a direct way from the suffering of his family and colleagues:  he bullies his wife and carries out an affair with an office-worker beneath her nose; a fire that Solness may have set (and from which he certainly profited) has destroyed his wife's palatial estate but, thereby, afforded the architect an opportunity to subdivide the land and build houses on it -- the structures that have resulted in his fame and fortune.  The fire and its sequel have embittered in the most literal sense Solness' wife -- after the blaze, her maternal milk soured and killed the Builder's twin sons when they were only a few weeks old.  Solness torments his former benefactor, the senior partner in the architectural firm and cruelly denigrates the old man's son, Ragnor -- Wally Shawn as the Master Builder pronounces "Rag - noooor" as if the word itself were some kind of foul obscenity.  Ragnor is, in fact, a skillful architect and, perhaps, even more ingenious than Solness, but the Master Builder has seduced his fiancée and humiliates the young man in order to destroy his self-confidence and keep him tied to the firm as a fawning subordinate.  Solness knows that there is a price to pay for all of the misery that he has inflicted on others -- he no longer believes in God and, although church designs were his earliest successes, he will not work on commissions of that sort -- nonetheless, he installs great phallic towers in all of the homes that he builds, steeples of the sort that once graced his churches but that now rise into the sky as monuments to his own pride.  Ibsen imagines a mysterious young woman arriving in this infernal milieu -- she claims that Solness "violated" her when she was merely 12, a dozen years or so before the action that the play represents and she appears, suddenly, and out of nowhere.  Her motives are unclear -- she describes herself as a "wild mountain creature", half feral, and she has a marvelous, clear, and penetrating laugh.  We don't know whether she has come to revenge herself on the Master Builder or to seduce him into an affair with her.  This young woman encourages the Builder to have a more "robust conscience" -- she says that he must be like the old Vikings who abducted women from their homes, raped them, and, then, caused those women to fall in love with their very brutality and impudence.  The character of the young woman is problematic -- she cuddles with Solness and seems to genuinely desire him, although there is an aspect of retribution in her encounters with the Builder.  Of course, on an objective and literal level, it seems unlikely that a beautiful young girl, the victim of what seems to have been a pedophiliac rape, would have any actual sexual interest in the much older, and physically unimpressive architect.  (It's a problem that dogged many of Woody Allen's later movies).  Ibsen seems to have conceived of the young woman as a kind of avenging fury, but he also makes her into a figure of wish-fulfillment -- she seems to want to destroy the Masters Builder by having some kind of sexual relationship with him.  Thus, the character is caught between her symbolic role as an agent of retribution and Ibsen's desire to depict in quasi-realistic terms an improbable love affair between an elderly man and a much younger woman.  Shawn solves this problem by treating the girl as entirely allegorical -- she represents Death, and like the dark clad and morosely threatening figure in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal", she has come to snatch Solness from his death bed and usher him into the land of the shades.  (She encourages Solness to haul a garland up to the height of the tower on his most recent mansion knowing that the old man has vertigo and will likely plunge to his death.)  In order to establish the young woman as resplendent, enticing Death, Shawn stages the first fifteen minutes of the play as a death-bed scene.  The Builder is connected to heart monitors and dying at home.  From his death bed, he conducts a long and terribly cruel interview with his senior partner, played in this adaptation by Andre Gregory.  Both Gregory's character and Shawn's Master Builder are dying, but Solness insists upon degrading the old man so that he bursts into tears, weeping hysterically and crying out that Solness is destroying him by ruining the career of his son, Ragnor -- Gregory's performance here is faultless and courageous; he achieves the grandeur of total abjectness, like a figure cowering at the edges of one of Dostoevsky's novels.  (The movie suggests something of the megalomania and egotism in architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and the relationship between Gregory's founding partner in the firm and Solness is similar to the tormented oedipal drama between Wright and Louis Sullivan or between Wright and his own students -- a kind of dance of death.)  Shawn seen fully upright is little, simian, and unprepossessing -- but, for the first third of the movie, he is flat on his back, growling out demands and orders and threats:  he is like a terrible, imponderable boulder of a man, an image of vast, immobile and fearsome force -- this is all accomplished by Shawn using the full register of his voice, wheedling, declaiming commands fiercely, sometimes, even slipping into a falsetto pitch to importune his followers into complying with his will.  This is a tremendous performance and once we see Shawn embracing the girl or otherwise upright and in dialogue with her, the titanic power of the supine figure on his death bed casts a shadow over the action and we see the Builder as huge and terrible and monstrous.  The acting of everyone in the movie is beyond reproach.  Demme films the action in tight fleshly close-ups derived from Carl Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman -- the interiors of the rooms are all flooded with marvelously clear and brilliant light, the refining glare of the short Northern summer.  The picture exists primarily as documentation of a remarkable theatrical endeavor and the acting has a sort unmediated directness, a kind of clarity and simplicity that gives the performances a peculiarly vibrant and hallucinatory precision.  It seems to me that the characters don't depict mixed emotions -- rather, they show particularly clear, distilled primary emotions:  rage, jealousy, fear, lust.  But these primary colors, this fundamental vocabulary of emotional states follow one upon another with lightning, quicksilver rapidity:  the Builder progresses from rage to cloying sentimentality in the scope of only a few seconds.  His nemesis, the mysterious young woman, explodes with murderous anger and, then, an instant later is laughing girlishly, a sound as pure and musical as a mountain stream cascading into some piney fjord.  I suspect that people will be arguing about Shawn's conception of the play and his radical editing of the text for many years to come.  It is inarguable, however, that all of the figures in the film have the majestic bas-relief presence of reality -- they are, at once, true to life and bigger than life.  (The North American premiere of this film was at the Provincetown International Film Festival on Sunday, June 22, 2014 and I saw the film in the huge, Spartan, and uncomfortable meeting hall on Commerce Street in that village.  It was like seeing the picture in a Shaker meeting house made by the men who built whaling vessels.  Wally Shawn, Andre Gregory, and Jonathan Demme entered the hall during the closing credits and answered questions for a half-hour after the showing.  Shawn looked small, sun-burned, and half of his face was buried in gloomy shadow -- lights were directed at the stage and Demme, as well as Gregory, who are taller had to shade their eyes to address the audience, although their faces were illumined -- not so for the much shorter Wally Shawn.  Most of the questions related back to My Dinner with Andre, apparently, a seminal experience for many of the people in the audience.  People seem to feel closely related to Wally Shawn at least due to Malle's film and everyone in the crowd addressed him as "Wally."  Andre Gregory lives in Truro a few miles down the Cape and he said that he felt like a "local boy who had made good" -- he walks with a cane but still is an impressive figure.  As is typical to this sort of event, the questions were either self-aggrandizing speeches or trite.  Jonathan Demme was very deferential to the two actors; he noted that the film was produced under very low budget constraints and shot in seven days -- two days over schedule.  The wonderfully pure and radiant light in the film was all produced within a studio, although it looks completely natural and is almost transcendentally bright.  After the show, Julie and I walked down to the pier where our car was parked.  The play very much concerns towers and it was odd to see the great spire of the Pilgrim Memorial, a granite column rising 260 feet over the dunes and the little town.)