Blue Moon

 I like Blue Moon (Richard Linklater, 2025) and recommend it with reservations.  The movie has an unlikely subject, demise of the great lyricist Lorenz (Larry) Hart and observes the Aristotelian unities -- it takes place in what feels like real time in one location and with limited number of actors.  Obviously, the picture is a hobby-project, a movie made for the sheer love of the script and its subject, and the film is lovingly crafted, a work ripened over a dozen years.  (Linklater is patient and takes time on his projects; Boyhood was shot over a period 13 or 14 years.  The director wanted to use his favorite leading man in the lead role but didn't think the handsome actor, Ethan Hawke, looked sufficiently ravaged to play the role -- and, so, Linklater waited a decade for Hawke to age into the part.)  The movie has a claustrophobic aspect, shot on a single complex set in Dublin, a set that simulates the appearance of Sardi's, a famous restaurant and bar, popular with show-folk, in New York's theater district.  Essentially, the movie consists of a series of monologues interpolated between snatches of very witty and allusive dialogue.  The picture, therefore, will not be to many people's tastes.  A half hour of it put my wife to sleep.  It is more akin to Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre than to recent biopics about Johnny Cash, Dylan, and Springsteen.  The speeches and the clever repartee carry the movie.  Furthermore, the show has no real dramatic arc and has no place to go.  These defects, if they can be so characterized, are consistent with the film's subject matter --  the hero Lorenz Hart is washed-up, a self-destructive alcoholic and he has literally no place to go; his luck has run out.  As a man of the theater, it is appropriate that the film is also a very theatrical and stagy interpretation of events involving him that it portrays.  The burgundy red, lushly upholstered piano bar with its walls of framed caricatures, is a sort of "no exit" set, a portrait, as it were, of the inflamed interior of its protagonist's soul. 

Larry Hart has spent 25 years making highly acclaimed Broadway musicals with his partner Richard Rodgers.  Hart is tiny, about five feet, bald and unsightly.  He defends himself with his wit which is cutting, razor sharp, and self-deprecatory.  Alcoholism has limited his ability to work as Rodgers' partner.  While Larry was drying out in the Doctor's Hospital  (where he will die in a few months at 47), Rodgers composed the music for Oklahoma with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein III.  The show is a huge success, although Larry thinks it's simple-minded, conventional, and sentimental.  It's war-time and the show is defended by Rodgers and others as being an idealized work intended to raise spirits and morale during the fighting.  Larry, although he admires the musical more than he cares to admit, tends toward satire -- he mocks Hammerstein for always going for the easiest and most obvious rhyme ("grand" / "land" for instance).  Hart leaves the show early -- he's seen rehearsal productions in New Haven -- and goes to Sardi's  where an after-party is planned.  He engages  in banter with the bartender played by Bobby Carnavale.  The bartender is gruff but kindly and he hesitates to serve Hart since he doesn't want to jeopardize his sobriety.  The lyricist is waiting for a girl with whom he has fallen in love, Elizabeth Weidell -- this is a 20 year old that Hart theoretically desires.  In fact, he's probably gay and his passion for the young woman is a creepy blend of possessiveness, masochistic fawning, and voyeurism -- he wants her to regale him with stories of sexual encounters with fellow students at Yale where she is studying.  Hart, the piano-player, and the bartender quote lines to each other from Casablanca and imitatethe actors in the movie.  Hart mournfully cites Humphrey Bogart's line from the movie:  'I knew then that nobody would ever love me like that --" a key citation in the film.  Oscar Hammerstein III, a huge beefy walrus of a man, and Richard Rodgers come into Sardi's with their entourages and a mob of patrons and backers.  Elizabeth, whose mother is a backer, appears.  Rodgers has bought her flowers and some other gifts, some of them intended to commemorate a trip to a lake in Vermont which Hart remembers with great (and misguided) tenderness.  (Hart's infatuation with Elizabeth doesn't keep him from flirting with the boy who delivers the flowers -- he invites him to his party after the party, a big soiree for which he has retained the "Golden Gate Quartet".  Hart keeps inviting everyone that he meets to his party but it's obvious that no one is going to come -- success is a magnet and, after Sardi's, everyone (including Elizabeth) intends to attend the part of Rodgers' place; people seem embarrassed by Hart's invitations.  After some more monologues and dialogue, Hart makes his plea to the girl in the locked coatroom at Sardi's (he has prevailed on the coatroom attendant to let him importune Elizabeth in that place).  She tells him about a sexual encounter with a handsome boy with whom she is hopelessly in love.  After intercourse, the man has "ghosted her" -- he hasn't called for the four months since the interlude.  Larry is strangely excited by the story.  She says that although the man was impotent in their first encounter and has avoided her after their second interlude, she would, nonetheless, drive thirty hours across the country to see him again.  Larry remarks that no one will ever love him like that.  Elizabeth admits that she loves him but "not in that way."  Larry understands; he says that in every love affair there is someone who gives love and someone who, more or less, passively receives the love given to them.  The party at Sardi's is over.  Larry introduces Elizabeth to Richard Rodgers who seems a little too interested in her -- she leaves to go with him to his party.  The pianist plays "Blue Moon", Larry's most popular song, but a composition that he doesn't like because it is too simple and too sentimental.  In the opening shot, we have seen Larry collapse in an alleyway in a rainstorm.  A title tells us that Larry died at Doctor's Hospital four months later after being found in the gutter half-frozen to death.  He dies at 47.  Rodgers goes on to compose another 15 successful Broadway musicals with Hammerstein.  

The film is understated and laced with interesting allusions to World War Two era culture in New York City.  The characters are carefully drawn in depth:  Rodgers, for instance, who has jilted Hart is portrayed as a man driven to the limits of his patience by Hart's self-destructive drinking; he seems to wish Hart well and this is not merely a theoretical aspiration -- he actually agrees to hire Hart to write lyrics for a revival of a show that they co-authored years ago.  (It's a Connecticut Yankee and Hart did in fact scratch out five new songs for the revival, before his drinking killed him.)  We see a young Stephen Sondheim, apparently nine years old, sniffing dubiously at the rhymes in Oklahoma and pronouncing the prosody sloppy and simple-minded.  (Hammerstein has brought the boy to Oklahoma)\. George Roy Hill, the film maker from Minneapolis who made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, gets a brief cameo as a starstruck Yale theater student.  The great essayist E. B. White also appears in the film as a fellow alcoholic, writing notes as he sips on a martini and exchanging quips with Hart -- it's a fine, dignified part that grounds the movie and keeps it from spinning into the untethered fantasies in which Hart is trapped.  (Hart is given credit for the idea behind E. B. White's children's book, Stuart Little - spelled with a "u" as Hart insists; this is pure fantasy.)

If a movie leaves a lingering series of ambiguities and complications in the viewer's mind and if it is pleasing to contemplate those uncertainties -- the film's negative capacity as it were -- the day after watching the picture, then, I am willing to account the movie as very good, a successful enterprise.  If you are still sorting through the intricacies in the film several days later, then, the picture was, I think, excellent. Linklater is a softspoken director who works directly without any flash or spurious glitter -- it's easy to underestimate him.  But he is certainly one of our best contemporary film-makers.