Split Decision: “Blue Moon”

In the Split Decision series, our writers pair up and face off on an Oscar-nominated movie one loves and the other doesn't. Tonight, CLÁUDIO ALVES and NICK TAYLOR discuss Blue Moon...

CLÁUDIO: Since I'm the one organizing the Split Decision convos, I end up trying to assign everyone at least one film they love, or like, so they have something to defend against the naysayers. Sadly, that usually means I get to fill in the grumpy contrarian roles in most of the volleys I do. Not so this year, since I made sure to assign myself Blue Moon. I caught it at TIFF right after Nouvelle Vague, ready to be disappointed as I was by Linklater's French misadventure. And yet, what I got was one of the director's best films in a while, a text besotted with the musicality of florid verbiage and performances to match. It was love at first sight. I gather your experience was very different. Please share with the class, dear Nick. 

NICK: It was not! I really wish Linklater had given Blue Moon the same stylistic care he applied to Nouvelle Vague…

I just don’t like most of what the camera is doing in Blue Moon, namely the “realist” lighting scheme that makes the Sardi seem dingy and cavernous rather than debonair and exclusive, falling on the actor’s faces the way it does without a care for flattery or dramaturgy. Maybe it’s a choice to enable the casual energy of watching the best/worst person you know piss their life away, but I find it gracelessly applied. More than that, the many tricks used to integrate the incredible shrinking Hawke into the environment feel more conspicuous and stagey than the acts of twincest in Sinners and Mickey 17. You know I hate anamorphic lenses!!

All that bitching against a movie I don’t hate so much as find tedious, but let me at least end this with a compliment I know you’ll love: I think the whole project deepens a great deal once Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers shows up. The performance is very quietly strong, and Linklater seems to wake up his camera to really shape his scenes with Hawke. It’s a shame he seemingly made no inroads to getting an Oscar nomination, but the Silver Bear is very well-deserved.

 

CLÁUDIO: It's funny. I sort of agree with you about the aspects of cinematography and staging you're identifying, but I don't reach the same qualitative conclusions. Namely, I don't think it would be in Blue Moon's best interest to portray Sardi's as debonair or exclusive, or aspirational in any way that would validate Hart's potential belief that, by virtue of being there, he is someone of worth and importance and worthy of fawning admiration. Moreover, I feel like there's an unacknowledged tension within the film, text, and performance: Hart sees the dinginess of his situation and his surroundings, but simply decides to act in direct opposition to that awareness. To me, this is dramaturgically juicy, rather than deficient. I'd also argue that a similar pastiche to what Nouvelle Vague has going on would be disastrous. I already find it pretty bad for that other flick, but it would further dispel the potential conversations the audience can have with Blue Moon, reducing the pull toward active viewership to a passive nothing. 

Moreover, I feel that the audiovisual devices capture the tone of Hart's work and this version of his persona in a more interesting way than anything in Nouvelle Vague does in its approach to Godard and the rest of the Cahiers gang. Blue Moon is ugly, but ugly cinematography isn't necessarily bad cinematography, no matter how much AMPAS has programmed us to think of postcard prettiness as the greatest quality to appreciate in such things. Watching the film, I was rather fascinated by the grey haze that seems to permeate the frame and render contrast low. It feels like walking into a room saturated with cigarette smoke to the point I could practically smell that acridness, and sense the sting of hot smoke caressing my eyes.

The framing is also much more interesting than you're giving it credit for. I love the interplay between the deserted foreground of the bar, often leaving the foyer out of focus but in frame, full of background life whose revolving movement is almost a mockery of the stagnation surrounding Hart and his fellow patrons. And the visual gags about his shortness are funny, reminding us that, for all intents and purposes, most of these artists on screen worked within comedic registers that often leaned toward a not-quite-vulgar but certainly broad humor.

We can agree on Scott, at least. Though I'd extend compliments to the acting prowess of Hawke and Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White. Don't care much for Cannavale, but I seldom do. He's much more enticing as Rose Byrne's off-screen reptile-buying husband than as a performer. I presume you're bored by all these men, too, if you single out Scott alone. 

NICK: Cannavale’s bartender is a sounding board and purveyor of jokes I find less interesting than the piano player or E.B. White. I blame the performance, since the broad, bawdy comedy is spread across the whole show. What was Hart’s hand-wringing about the audience for Oklahoma! yukking it up at third-rate jokes?

Hawke deserves a deeper dive later on, but I want to push back on your cinematographic assertions. The atmosphere of choking cigar smoke is nothing, and by the time Hart and Elizabeth are sharing stories in a closet, it becomes a decent strategy. Still, I don’t think it would hurt Blue Moon’s depiction of Lorenz Hart to better physically define his surroundings. Why not let Sardi’s be debonair when Hart is grasping for as tangible and beautiful a future as he can? Blue Moon can still gain the advantages you describe in framing if there’s more depth to the imagery.

Maybe it’d be more declamatory than the fog, or it could make the pregnant wait for Elizabeth and Richard and Oscar more tangible, reminding us that Lorenz is on pins and needles for his lifelines even when he’s retching about bad lyrics.

The cavernous gaps between Hart and the slowly growing population of the bar create some nice dramatic tension, but the shallow focus often comes across as exemplifying Hart’s self-fascination. The editing doesn’t help, mostly ping-ponging between who’s talking and robbing us of the chance to learn more about the other characters by seeing their reactions to Hart. Whenever the framing or editing makes room for bodies to invade Hart’s conversations rather than filling in the background, I got excited, but it’s rare. I get Linklater’s strategies, but they feel like easy ways to editorialize on Larry’s endless monologues.

CLÁUDIO: You're looking for beauty in a film where only filigreed words can provide the respite of aesthetic pleasure. And that's intentional, and, to my eyes, dramatically purposeful. Love the way Qualley's gloriousness is described in a thousand different ways from Hawke's mouth, yet, when she manifests, there's no way she can live up to his spiel. Moreover, the film sabotages her not just by an unbecoming hair color and costume palette, but also by the lack of glamour lighting and the low contrast of the digital cinematography, which makes her look not too dissimilar from all the other folks wasting their lives in this purgatorial Sardi's. She's the murk at the end of a bottle whose glass has been roughened into opacity, the splotch of gray that you can't quite scrub away from an ashtray. They all are, even the successful people who come in later, in black tuxedos, rendered ashy by this cinematographic device. 

I won't deny that there are other strategies to get these ideas across on screen, prettier strategies. Yet, this one works. Indeed, for as much as, between the two of us, I'm the one always going on about form, I have to commend a film that does have a cogent formal approach, even if it's not one that beckons audiovisual pleasure. A style that prickles and smothers is still a style. And that intentionality, combined with coherence, is what I ask for.

But back to the splendor of verbiage: Hawke's garulous excess, even Qualley's to a certain degree, feels like an attempt to spell away the dark, convincing themselves and others that they are living the debonair life you yearn for the film to show. These lost souls are all Sally Bowles singing her way into believing the lie that life is a Cabaret (it's not). They are all singing, of course, even without a backing track, a tonal change, or coloratura. Because these words they compose have a musicality to them that stands starkly against the misery. That's never more evident than when a lyricist and a critic suddenly find a kinship in their love of words, or when a debutante manages to summon sensuality into a movie where that was but an unpersuasive concept until she found the right way to describe the expanse of smooth skin down a man's back. 

And in this, I feel Linklater and Kaplow are putting forward an actual meditation on Hart, his relationship with his art. They have a take on him and that dynamic that may not be accurate, but reveals something one cannot find on a Wikipedia page or even in a well-researched biography. Watching Blue Moon, I actually felt like I was part of a conversation about Hart as an artist, which is exacerbated by the simple choice not to feature any of his work at all. Sorry to beat a dead horse, yet I can't help but compare this to Nouvelle Vague, which seems to express no opinion or reading whatsoever about the artists it depicts, past presenting reproductions of their work and fawning elegiacally about them.

One critique of yours I can tangentially co-sign is that Blue Moon is very much closed on Hart to the point you get Linklater relinquishing his best attributes as a director of actors. There's none of that ensemble hangout vibe and conversational flow of his most entertaining work - even Nouvelle Vague! Only one lonely man, sucking up all the oxygen in the room yet managing to suffocate in that abundance, making a fool of himself while he gasps his way into an early grave. It's an individual character study to a discomforting degree, ugly in a myriad of manners, sad when it's funny, and always flirting with the grotesque.

I guess one could call it cruel.

NICK: Well, Lorenz Hart wanted to see the beauty in everything, so I would like to know if Sardi's is beautiful at all! Cruelty is fine. I think it's achieved quite effectively here, wafting over everything like cigar smoke with the occasional ash being flicked directly at Hart and company. The best thing Blue Moon has going for it is how well it evokes Hart at the last moment of his life before everything bottoms out. The vain and grasping fantasies of being saved by Elizabeth, the condescension at Rodgers’ populist ascent, and envy to be alongside him, the self-pitying streak tinged with “objective” superiority and self-recrimination are as vivid a cocktail as anything Cannavale’s bartender could mix.

Hart's own contradictions and vanities make this study more specific. I love his obvious dye job and combover, hanging on for dear life. The hag fagging, a Laura-esque blend of covetousness and validation, brings out some of the tenderest notes in Hawke's performance when they're alone together. Watching Larry's two lifelines leave the bar arm-in-arm, while his own attempt to follow them is thwarted by his own fears and delusions, is as aching a finale as I could've hoped for. I just don't believe Linklater needed to give in to Hart's bloviating, let alone in a fashion I find so dull.

Hawke isn't dull for a solitary second, calibrated as much for a Broadway stage as Linklater's camera. I like the work, and I'm pleasantly happy to see him get nominated for Best Actor this year. I'm not as besotted with his turn as you are, but he's very entertaining. I can't tell if it's a plus or a minus that Hawke's Hart doesn't impart a ton of backstory in his carriage or body language, despite how flowery and theatrical he is. He gets the point across, with no cracks to his facade, but I think we're missing out by Hawke not really muddying the waters between what Hart is trying to manifest through sheer force of will and what he thinks his conversation partner wants to hear.

Scott's physicality and line readings evoke a history, adding dimensions beyond what's expressly written into Richard and Larry's scenes. Granted, you can see Hart's guard drop with Elizabeth, which is especially valuable since Blue Moon puts them together for a good chunk of the last third. But again, I don't think the value of where Blue Moon finished compensates for the path it took to get there. Now that that's off my chest, I'm really excited for you to tell me how I'm wrong for not loving Hawke! Go off, queen! 

CLÁUDIO: Because I can't seem to stop comparing Blue Moon to other movies this year, I'd like to draw a line connecting Hawke to a performance I know you have a wealth of affection for - the Song Sung Blue folk, specifically Hugh Jackman. Now there's an actor who meets his character's sweaty need to entertain head-on, blurring the line between performer and performance, because, after all, that has always been his mode of being on screen or on stage, or wherever. Hawke is not that kind of entertainer. More often than not, he either earns or demands your attention, never grovels for it with naked want and strain. Here, though, he's basically asked to be Hugh Jackman. Only, for all that Blue Moon is cruel, I don't think it wants to take pleasure in Hart's social and sentimental shortcomings. So it allows itself to be enthralled and lets the showman put on a show without being questioned outright. The ugly formal framing is a manifestation of doubt, and the rare reaction shot that diverts our gaze from Hart adds to that skepticism. And yet, there's generosity at play.

While writing, I'm re-watching passages of the movie and am reminded of the peculiar love Blue Moon has for its lead, in direct contradiction to the cruelty it lets fester. Or they're the same thing, two sides of the one coin. And it's not just the camera and the textual edifice giving shape to this tale. It's the community within. For as annoying as Hart would be in real life, these people are endeared to him, they care for him.

Scott's performance is the easiest to praise, in part, because he makes the subtext running through the whole thing the main text of his characterization. He is the face of Blue Moon's reluctant, bruised, and mildly revolted grace extended toward Hart and Hawke's portrayal. In fact, for all that, I agree that the flick isn't an ensemble piece. Hawke's work only makes sense when shaped by Scott, Qualley, Kennedy, Lees' pianist, and Delaney's Hammerstein, even Giles Surridge as that handsome delivery boy. Though he is Blue Moon's flamboyant centerpiece, I never get the feeling Hawke's Hart is playing for the camera as much as he is playing for his in-movie audience. 

On another note, there is a backstory there, though not expressed in the usual ways we understand the imparting of emotional journeys that go beyond a narrative's borders Because Hawke lets in moments of quick recalibration, not to mention self-consciousness whenever Hart is slightly thrown for a loop and must reconsider the social operetta of which he is writer, director, hero, villain, and clown. In how he maneuvers through these people and these types, I see years of learning exactly how to perform for them, so that he can be a sad sack of a man demanding attention and still be tolerated. There are also limits he hints at. Hart, as embodied by Hawke, is all too willing to be an active participant in his own humiliation. But only when it's happening on his own terms. When his control slips, you see it in a new tension about his frame, or a scurrilous gesture that's a bit too sloppy. You see the Hugh Jackman in Song Sung Blue jump out, the naked need for outside approval. The most obvious example is when Hart is on the floor, a parody of a supplicant, but the film includes several such glimpses.

If Moura weren't in play, Hawke would be my slam-dunk pick from this year's Best Actor crop. For these reasons and others. for how far he allows himself to go into the misbegotten and obscene side of this man, tragic yet so upsettingly recognizable from dipsomaniac nights spent in the company of self-pitying theater people. I love how "too much" he is, the tastelessness on display, the control mixed with strenuous effort that's so rare in the actor's filmography yet so right for this part. I would never have expected the Ethan Hawke of past Linklater collaborations to sink his teeth into this role and the register it entails, giving himself to it rather than combating it with out-of-place effortlessness or casual cool. And when all is said and done, I'm so happy to be surprised by an actor. Especially by one so far into his career, whose personas and tricks and go-to strategies I thought I had figured out already.

NICK: The combination of annoying and entertaining - a fine line for almost all homosexuals who think they know anything about art - is quite a feat in Hawke’s performance. You have a real talent for making me appreciate aspects of films I didn’t feel bowled over by. Like you, I also watched Blue Moon again while writing this volley. I still stand by my grousing at the beginning, but you’ve made me appreciate the look and feel of Blue Moon as a real strategy, rather than just directorial laziness. Can it be both? Maybe!

Jokes aside, I’m glad I watched it again, if only so we could have this fun conversation while we dissected Blue Moon’s tics. I’m looking forward to having a completely different conversation with you about Drag Race as soon as we wrap this up. Oh my god, what would Lorenz Hart’s favorite Rusicals be? I bet he’d hate me just for writing that sentence into existence. What was I saying about setting jokes aside? Anyway, this has been very lovely, Cláudio. Thanks for the great chat. 

CLÁUDIO: Thank you, too! It's always nice to talk movies with you, even and especially when we disagree about them. I never feel like we watched different stuff, only that our tastes and perspectives led to distinct conclusions. Never a bad faith argument, never the sort of thing that drives me crazy on social media and has me bitching endlessly on group chats. Speaking of which, can you imagine the nasty things that would be said about Hart in the Sardi's regulars' GC? Talk about being read to filth.

Previous Split Decisions:

• TRAIN DREAMS, with Juan Carlos Ojano and Cláudio Alves