FORM, CONTENT, AND GENRE: THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY

Front: Bill Cooke (Sean Williams), his daughter Ronnie (Becky Byers). Back: "houseguest" Conor (Jason Howard)

Both my parents were (and Mom still is) ardent fans of genre fiction: crime for Mom, SF for my late Da. Mom never had much use for SF and Dad constantly snarked about crime fiction—this disagreement is kind of a tip-of-the-iceberg signifier of their eventual divorce—and while it sucks to have people you love fighting with each other and all that, the reason I bring this up is that, by accident, I ended up having a zillion conversations about the characteristics of two different genres with two very intelligent, knowledgeable people.

All these deep thoughts on the nature of genre have led to me founding and becoming a firm believer in the Cat/Biscuit Principle (“you can put a cat in the oven but that don't make it a biscuit”) of Genre: the presence of familiar genre elements do not necessarily place a given work within that genre. For example, Michael Bay's Transformers pictures are not science fiction in spite of having robots, aliens and Shia LeBeouf fucking his way through the Victoria's Secret catalog. (Let's not dwell too long about my theory that the Transformers movies transcend genre due to Michael Bay's auteurism overwhelming any attempts to categorize them as anything but his; his authorial signature may be the vague feeling that his work is the product of a pair of quasi-sapient testicles dipped in cocaine, but it is a signature nonetheless.)

There is also another level of achievement for genre pieces, once they pass my standard to be allowed to even exist—oh, trust me, the best part of creating your own aesthetic theories is getting to be a total fucking prick, don't let anyone tell you any different—which is: being good. This sounds simple, but if it really was that simple, nothing would suck, and lots of things suck, so, y'know, QED and shit. So, how does something become good? To use an example from film, let's not fuck around at all, let's look at Citizen Kane. One key reason why it's so great is because, as the story of a bold, innovative man, it used bold and innovative techniques. It's a movie about trying to unearth secrets, and makes masterful use of shadow. Also, everybody turning the whole “Rosebud was his sled” thing into a joke can stick their dick in a boat propeller; having the dying thoughts of A Great Man™ be of the last link to his childhood innocence before he was taken away and had greatness thrust upon him is true, simple, and profound, and it's a final not-so-subtle “fuck your expectations” finger wag at the audience.

So what does Citizen Kane have to do with three independent theatre pieces in Queens seventy years later? Aside from being awesome, the only tangible link is in melding form with content so that neither exists (or at the very least, is as strong) without the other. The Honeycomb trilogy, consisting of the plays Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign, sprang forth from the mind of playwright Mac Rogers, and was brought to life by Gideon Productions, which aside from Mac consists of Sean and Jordana Williams (the latter of whom directed all three plays), Sandy Yaklin, and most recently Shaun B. Wilson. In the interests of full disclosure, I need to mention that these people are all friends of mine, but we should be perfectly clear about one thing: this is not me praising my friends because they're my friends. I've already told them in person how much they rule, on many occasions, some of which I wasn't even drunk. But here's the thing: all three shows and the totality they comprise considered as a whole are something uniquely great and about a hair away from being perfect.

The Honeycomb trilogy is an alien invasion story, and one unlike any other I've ever seen or read. Your bog-standard alien invasion story has the aliens come to Earth, fuck some shit up, and eventually get defeated by the pluck of the spunky, outnumbered humans. While it may sound a little like hair-splitting, there's a difference between an alien invasion story and a story about aliens. The act of “invasion” reflexively gets most people's back up, and being people, we tend to side unambiguously with people. Fuck aliens, they come from other planets, that shit's fucked up. What Mac (sorry, it's weird to call him Rogers, and even weirder to call him Mr. Rogers, for obvious reasons) does with the Honeycomb plays that's so great is back up the moral nuance truck and just unload: the aliens—or, as they call themselves, “the people of the Honeycomb”—are a hivemind that remembers everything that has ever happened to any individual, where all are one and one is all. They are a peaceful race, enlightened in many ways humans are not, but they are not by any means perfect. Prior to the events of Advance Man, the Honeycomb finds itself stranded on Mars, its own planet long since fucked, where they're discovered by the first manned mission from Earth to Mars. Earth being pretty fucked up too, the astronauts let the Honeycomb talk them into coordinating a covert invasion, after which the re-vitalized Honeycomb will assume control of a “terraformed” Earth (or whatever the Latin is for the Honeycomb's home planet, since “terra” is Earth, making terraforming Earth sound a little like dividing by zero), with humans in a subordinate capacity. The trade-off for humanity, kind of a brutal one, is that we get to stave off ecological disaster . . . but a whole fuckload of us have to die. Considering that the Honeycomb, like any living entity, wants to stay alive at all costs, the existential quandary of having to kill a bunch of people is something they'll regret but will nonetheless totally do. Their human collaborators' existential quandary is similar: unless a bunch of pretty fundamental things change, humanity is going to fuck the Earth uninhabitable, so the only way for humanity to survive is for a bunch of us to die. Of course, not everyone's going to just happily accept that, which is why the astronauts have to plan the whole thing in secret.

This all happens before the first play, Advance Man, even starts. The play itself takes the form of a living-room drama, a staple of naturalist/realist theatre, and takes place entirely in the living room (natch) of the Cooke family. Bill, the patriarch, was the lead astronaut on the Mars mission and the covert invasion plans. Telling the story mostly from the perspective of Bill's teenage children, daughter Ronnie and son Abbie, and wife Amelia helps keep the parceling of information gradual and organic. Not to mention, having a range of characters provides a range of perspectives on the increasingly ominous behavior of Bill and his colleagues, especially the mentally damaged (or is he....?) Conor. The sensitive Abbie has a close bond with Conor and has been, unwittingly, drawing pictures that closely resemble the Honeycomb and its insectoid people for years. Ronnie is the stronger sibling, creating not only a neat reversal of typical gender expectations but someone to question the strange goings-on in the Cooke household, with that desire arising from character rather than simple plot expediency.

That, in a nutshell, is what makes the Honeycomb plays work as drama rather than an essay about the uneasy human relationship with The Other, be it terrestrial or extra-. It's also what lends such emotional weight to the climax of Advance Man where, the cat decidedly out of the bag (Ronnie's running around with a gun desperately trying to put a halt to the conspiracy), Abbie pushes The Button that's going to trigger the invasion just to see what happens. It's a moment that's true to the character as already established, and to the whimsical, stochastic nature of existence itself: the end of the world as we know it happens, in large part, because one guy said what the fuck.

Blast Radius picks up many years later, with the Honeycomb firmly in control of Earth, and humanity existing in a post-technological state in which a lot of people can barely remember The Time Before, Abbie is a big Vichy muckety-muck (and in a long-term romantic relationship with Conor, who as revealed in Advance Man is in fact a Honeycomb consciousness occupying Conor's human body; with the telekinetic link to the Honeycomb severed, “Conor” now finds himself developing a kind of hybrid consciousness deriving from the experience of the Honeycomb within the limitations of the human mind). Ronnie is a key figure in the human resistance, which is centered in houses devoted to caring for pregnant women, in part because the people of the Honeycomb—known colloquially by the epithet “bugs” by non-Vichy humans (note: the Vichy parallel is my own, not Mac's)—are icked out by human childbirth. The former Cooke household has become one such house, which is how Blast Radius is set in the same (albeit distressed by the apocalypse) room as Advance Man. And, in that room, we observe Ronnie and Abbie's conflict, Conor's increasing empathy for humanity, and even the resistance, which seizes on the discovery of a fatal Honeycomb weakness to launch a counter-attack. Of course, nothing being simple, that weakness consists of a chemical reaction whereby a Honeycomb byproduct the people call “bug water” (I'm not sure exactly what it is, though it doesn't matter; its semiotic value is the important thing, not exactly how it works), when ingested by a human being, causes that human being to explode. And so, Ronnie's counter-offensive consists of recruiting 51 human suicide bombers to blow up Honeycomb installations. In persuading them, she faces the obstacle of this being something she herself is not going to do (being pregnant), as she plans to lead the resistance in the aftermath. Of course, nothing being simple, the father of her unborn child ends up having to be one of the 51. As does Conor, leaving Abbie without the love of his life as well. Yeah, the end of Blast Radius is fucking intense.

The final installment of the trilogy is where we really get into unexplored (or extremely rarely explored) territory, in SF terms: what happens after the good guys win, not to mention the question of whether we, humans, are the good guys, and they, the aliens, are actually the bad guys. Sovereign picks up after the revolution, when humanity is back in control and the “bugs” almost completely eradicated. Ronnie is hard at work re-establishing a working government, and serving as regional governor, when her security forces capture Abbie, a wanted man for his service to the Honeycomb. With the bulk of the play consisting of Abbie's trial for whatever they can pin on him—as he points out, quite accurately, the stuff he did wasn't illegal until his side lost—Sovereign wraps up the trilogy by explicitly examining who was right and who was wrong, and because the whole trilogy has centered on Ronnie and Abbie (and Ronnie has appropriated the Cooke home as her headquarters and thus the action once again takes place in the same room, now featuring a memorial to “the 51” from Blast Radius), that question ends up boiling down to whether Ronnie and Abbie were/are right and/or wrong. Of course, nothing being simple, they're both right in some ways, and wrong in others and ultimately, there's no place for either of them in the world, and all they have is each other, bringing the trilogy which, for all the world-building and the dozens of other great characters that populate what we see of that world, has essentially been about them to the perfect emotional point of closure.

Taken as a whole, the Honeycomb trilogy is one of the finest and most singular works of science fiction that I've ever encountered. It's a story that can only be SF, and as currently constituted, a story that can only be told in the medium in which it was: the stage. Each play was written specifically as a particular kind of play: Advance Man, as above, was a living-room drama, Blast Radius quite Shakespearean in form if not language (which was colloquial modern), and Sovereign Greek in the same way. They each are in every way works of and celebrating the stage. It sounds redundant, but a work must be what it is before it can be great; by “be what it is” I mean it needs to be fundamentally of its medium. That's why Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made and that's why the Honeycomb trilogy is a—maybe the—masterpiece of science fiction theatre.

And it's one I don't really want to see turned into a movie or TV show. It'll cease to be what it is if it's “opened up” (a phrase describing a process that can be a mixed blessing for a play adapted to film; sometimes a play is too fundamentally a play to be “opened up”). This is not to say that I don't want to see Mac Rogers write for TV or film. I do. I think he'd be great at it, and eagerly look forward to the day when he does, and not even as a barnacle or anything, as a fan.

I know this piece has been primarily about the writing in the Honeycomb plays, and I don't want to slight any of the other artists whose work contributed to the productions. Here are the pages for Advance Man, Blast Radius, and Sovereign. Every single person listed on all three of those pages ruled at what they did. And they all should be damn proud. I know I get excited about stuff but nothing you've just read is an exaggeration.

Well, maybe the boat propeller thing.

BOOK TO FILM TO STAGE: BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Ken Simon (L), Victoria Anne Miller (R), Bunny Lake Is Missing

So, last night I went to the theater. The reason why I have to write about it here on my own site is because otherwise it would be a massive conflict of interest, considering that it was at the Brick, where almost every play I've ever written and/or directed was staged, and where a very large chunk of my acting took place as well. Among the creative personnel of the play I saw, an adaptation of (mostly) the novel and (to a lesser extent) movie Bunny Lake Is Missing, are a number of good friends of mine, so it's up to you to decide whether I'm being objective. I mean, I am. (Ed. Note: blah blah blah “inasmuch as any human being is capable of objectivity at all” yeah yeah etc etc)

Anyway, a ways back when my friend Ken Simon told me he wanted to do a stage version of Bunny Lake Is Missing, I was like “AWESOME” because I'd seen the movie and could talk your ear off for days about Otto Preminger's cinema de je ne sais quoi, because oh man when Otto Preminger was behind a camera really good things happened, and his pictures were often greater than the sum of their parts and had an ineffable something extra. First of all, dude directed Laura, and Laura's one of the greatest goddamn movies of all time. All the awesome is right up front in that one, with Dana Andrews puttin' in work as a cop who gets a little in over his head investigating a case involving Gene Tierney (Gene Tierney bends the corners of the fucking universe in this movie), and there's Clifton Webb (!!!), and basically you either need to see Laura if you haven't yet or watch it again if you have because Laura's Laura.

A lot of people (including, in weaker moments, myself) would have just hung 'em up there and then, but Otto Preminger wasn't done being awesome. The next twenty-plus years saw a whole bunch of really well-composed shots, willingness to explore transgressive themes, and a whole bunch of “so and so was really good in that . . . like, better than normal even” performances. And then there was Bunny Lake Is Missing.



It's not one of his best movies, but a) the bar was fucking high and b) it influenced a lot of better movies; the bit with having the Zombies be in it doing a couple songs was one of the first instances of that “hey, let's have a band be in the movie doing a couple songs” trend like when Antonioni got the Yardbirds for Blow-Up, which trend Woody Allen made fun of getting the Lovin' Spoonful for What's Up Tiger Lily. Andrew Sarris thought Bunny Lake was good and Andrew Sarris liked lots of really good stuff. It has Laurence Olivier in paycheck mode (which weirdly probably worked better for the movie than Laurence Olivier in “I FUCKING MEAN IT” mode, and for all I know he might have made a conscious choice to play the role as if he was in paycheck mode for that reason. He was Laurence Olivier, after all.) Carol Lynley holds it down fairly effectively in the lead (and looking at her is never a chore), but it's Keir Dullea's creepy incesty performance that's most memorable; he quietly had a pretty good run there in the mid-60s playing weird guys, culminating with 2001. The picture gets a little goofy in places and departs a bit far from the realistic or even plausible, but it's stylishly executed. I mean, it's Otto Preminger. Goofy, unrealistic, and implausible is no match for him, Otto Preminger'll make you a good movie out of that.

The movie departs from the book in a number of ways, most notably the setting, transplanting the action from New York to London. And where it ends up being a kind of proto-Swinging London picture, the book, published in 1957, was very much a thing of Old New York. The play, taking more from the book than the movie, comes across as a film adaptation of the book the year of its release: while part of the initial period of classical noir, it feels like a hybrid between that and what they called “women's pictures” at the time, but like the kind of “women's picture” Douglas Sirk made, with lots of nice lighting and Technicolor but a prevailing self-conscious sense of the material's limitations and ridiculousness.

We open with Blanche Lake going to pick up her daughter Bunny from nursery school, only to be told (by a combination of unseen voices and a couple actual people; nota bene, the unseen voices are a lot more informative and certain than those of the actual on-stage actors. Just file that one away for future reference) that Bunny has never been a student at the school . . . and that there's no proof that she's ever existed. DUM DUM DUMMMMMM!!!!

One difference between the play and the previous iterations of this material—that all friendship and so forth aside I thought was pretty fucking brilliant—is that the design and performances actually do an excellent job of convincing the audience that Blanche Lake really is nuts. As Blanche, Victoria Anne Miller teeters right on the exact median between concerned young mother and delusional cuckoo, but it's mainly the choice to have so many of the people she goes around talking to about her (allegedly) missing daughter be invisible voices. Even though I'd read the book (a really long time ago) and seen the movie (not quite as long a time ago, but it was still a while back) this design choice—part of a brilliant goddamn sound design job by Chris Chappell—had me wondering whether the big reveal in the play was going to be that Blanche Lake was making the whole thing up. That's powerful stuff right there.

But—spoilers for those who haven't read the book or seen the movie or play—Bunny Lake really is missing. In what appeared in the moment to be an awkward bit of plotting, we step back from Blanche's POV and have a scene with two guys—shrink Ken Simon and flamboyant writer Walter Brandes—who are revealed to not be conspirators in the Bunny-napping as Blanche had thought but just a couple dudes on that “oh, you silly hysterical woman” trip. They swing into action to help Blanche, and everything turns out okay and she's reunited with her missing daughter. The climax is a bit sudden and way too neat, but a number of touches point to the writer, director, and cast being aware of how artificial the climax is, foremost among which is Justin Holcomb's “I seriously do not give a fuck” cop delivering the infodump of just how the hell they managed to find Bunny and just why the hell they didn't believe she even existed in three parts, having to be summoned back to finish expositing. Holcomb's vaudevillian tightness makes the scene, and the pulpy material, quite funny.

The play does a good job of simultaneously acknowledging that the material is kind of ridiculous without ever laughing at it, an important balance, because really. If you're going to do a show just to laugh at it, ya know, go fuck yourself. You're not above the material. But maintaining a bit of perspective on the artificiality of the thing while simultaneously reveling in it—Josephine Cashman's supporting turn as a martini-drinking hardass is a good example: she seems to be having a great deal of fun with the role while never talking down to it—makes for an entertainment that's self-aware without being cloyingly so, and keeps things light.

This Bunny Lake Is Missing is a fine piece of stage noir, with excellent design (as well as Chappell's terrific sound design, Amanda Woodward's lights suit the mood very well) and with the exception of the (unavoidably) cumbersome scene changes, it's a crisply directed—collaboratively by adapter Simon and Patrice Miller, who's rapidly building a body of work in indie theatre on which she can hang any variety of hats but most certainly her own—piece of work that will hopefully see a more extended run than its current (ending today) two-week run at the Brick. With the evolution of cinema and theatre, classic noir, with its long takes and shadowy visual aesthetic, almost plays better on stage now. Maybe I'm just saying that because this show was good, maybe I'm just saying that because I want to see more snappy dialogue and awesome costumes onstage, whatever. Bunny Lake Is Missing was a lot of fun.

STAGE TO FILM: CARNAGE & A DANGEROUS METHOD

I recently had the opportunity to see two movies awaiting release, both by acclaimed, veteran filmmakers, both based on plays: Carnage, adapted (from Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage) and directed by Roman Polanski, and A Dangerous Method, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play The Talking Cure and directed by David Cronenberg. Aside from being based on plays, these movies have little in common, but having watched them within a few days of each other I started thinking a bit about theater, film, the fundamental differences between them as media, and the challenges presented by adapting a work from one to the other.

This is something that's gotten harder over the years. For a period of several decades defined roughly as between the advent of sound and Technicolor (somewhere within which, or overspilling by a few years or so, is Hollywood's first Golden Age) the predominant style of filmmaking in Hollywood—and in the many world cinemas that take their cues from it—was such that adapting a play for the big screen entailed, to modern eyes, not much more than adding a couple establishing shots and closeups of movie stars. There was, clearly, more to it than that, but until about the beginning of the 1960s, adaptations of plays made up a large enough percentage of total movies that they stood out no more than adaptations of novels or any other pre-existing source material.

As cinema began to evolve into an increasingly distinct medium, with shorter takes, more fragmentation through editing, and the resultant effects of both on narrative style, it became harder to adapt plays for the screen without heavy alterations (a process often referred to in the reductive but not entirely inaccurate phrase “opening it up”). Also, theater has changed both in form and cultural cachet in the ensuing decades as well, reaching the point, today, where mainstream theater and mainstream film are thoroughly different beasts. Most theater pieces with sufficient brand recognition to catch Hollywood's attention are musicals, and every couple years or so, a studio will make one, though of this limited number an even more exclusive group truly work as cinema (though the way he edited the musical numbers drove a lot of people batshit, and he's no Bob Fosse, I still like Rob Marshall's Chicago; on the other hand, Rob Marshall's Nine was godawful, so maybe it's the old “broken clock is right twice a day” thing. . . .)

Despite movie musicals being far rarer than movies about people sitting in rooms talking, adapting plays about people sitting in rooms talking is far harder than it is a musical, in terms of making the end result “feel like a movie.” Something like David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross feels like a play that someone filmed rather than a movie, consisting as it does of a series of long dialogue scenes taking place in a limited number of locations. It's an extremely rare adaptation of a play that escapes this dynamic, though it does happen. The movie of Six Degrees of Separation, also adapted by its playwright, John Guare, is a fairly decent example. (Though now that I think about it, both those pictures are almost 20 years old . . .)

Sometimes, a filmmaker will embrace the staginess and theatricality when adapting a play, as Roman Polanski does with Carnage. The play, God of Carnage, is a piece for four actors, on one set, and “opening it up” would turn it into, essentially, an original screenplay about the same themes. Being confined to the apartment is fundamentally important to the piece being what it is. Roman Polanski, whatever else can be said about him, is not dumb, and his adaptation is not only set entirely in one apartment, but a not terribly large one.

After a dispute between two kids that results in one (the son of Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) knocking a couple of the other (the son of Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly)'s teeth out, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz go over to Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly's place to try and sort things out. The next hour and twenty minutes consists of them failing miserably.

Carnage is soooooo close to being really good. The four actors are all very much brand names—Reilly is the only one yet to win an Oscar, though he's been nominated and also is John C. Reilly, which is Gaelic for “dude can fucking act”—and the writing is sharp, and intelligent, with the two couples' shifting allegiances and the gradual revelation of each character's core self providing some interest. The only problem is, Carnage gets so much right that the things it doesn't stand out more. All four actors practically sweat blood (particularly Jodie Foster in a role that she's ever so slightly not right for for reasons that are a little beyond my ability to explain), acting up a storm, but this more serves to obfuscate how thin each character is on paper. They come across as four thumbnail sketches of different upper-middle-class archetypes than people, and try (and, credit where credit's due, mostly succeed) as the actors do, there are isolated tiny moments throughout where both the thinness and mundanity of the characters shine through.

Though, in spite of the fact that it kind of sounds like I'm saying it sucks, and in spite of the fact that it just ends without anything really being resolved (which may be, and probably is, the point), Carnage is still well worth a look for the sheer talent on display both behind and in front of the camera. Its concerns are personal rather than global, and thus within a very small frame of reference, but hey. So are a lot of things in life. And Christoph Waltz is great in it.

Much different—and I have to say, much more to my liking—was David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, which tells the story of how, in the years prior to World War I, Sabina Spielrein is brought to Carl Jung, who uses Sigmund Freud's “talking cure” to treat her “hysteria,” after which she becomes a major part of his life and work, and Freud's as well. She'd go on to become one of the first women psychoanalysts, treating such luminaries as Jean Piaget, but the movie leaves off well before then, focusing on her years with Jung and Freud.

The picture is being marketed as if it's a big steamy love triangle, and it has its steamy and kinky moments, though what it really is is the story of three incredibly smart academics who are in various degrees of denial about how fucked up they are. And, as such, it's a lot more compelling than some dumb quotidian sex story, and actually makes the sexy bits that much sexier.

After Jung (Michael Fassbender) determines that part of what's making Spielrein (Keira Knightley) freaked out and twitchy is that she's into BDSM (at a time when being a young woman who's into BDSM means your dad sends you to Switzerland if he's progressive), he decides—for reasons that have a lot more to do with his boner than science—to help her explore.

This is where it helps that this impeccably designed and gorgeously shot movie is directed by David Cronenberg, because once Spielrein and Jung get going, A Dangerous Method delivers on some good kink, boy, believe you me. It's just tame enough to not scare the squares, while still being vivid enough to be like “Damn . . .” It's rare that a (relatively) mainstream movie shows a woman having an orgasm, and Spielrein has a massive one, at the hands (literally) of Jung, who responds half afraid at the forbidden nature of what he and his (kind of sort of former) patient are up to and half thinking to himself “I made some good life choices.”

Most of A Dangerous Method is given over to the collaboration and eventual split between Jung and Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and the role Jung's young patient has in that split. The movie looks gorgeous, and avoids the “let's play dress up” tone that pervades many period pieces; it feels quite contemporary, which is largely due to the lack of affect (for the most part) to the writing and performances, both of which are abetted by Cronenberg's terrific direction.

Just about the only thing in the whole picture that keeps it from being completely seamless is Keira Knightley's performance as Spielrein. Fassbender and Mortenson are jaw-dropping good as Jung and Freud, particularly Viggo, he's fucking astonishing in this, and almost completely unrecognizable. Vincent Cassel shows up for a couple minutes as the mischievous fifth business character who convinces Fassbender's suffocatingly buttoned-up Jung to undo a couple buttons (specifically on his trousers), and he's great, even if he's mostly playing “Vincent Cassel” (it should be noted that there is nothing at fucking all wrong with Vincent Cassel playing “Vincent Cassel”). And Sarah Gadon—of whom I'd never heard before this, but for whom my eyes shall ever be peeled henceforth—is heartbreaking as Jung's wife, bound by society and tradition in ways Spielrein is decidedly not, trapped being a mother and having to turn a blind eye to her husband's infidelity and always coming second to his work.

All of the major cast, in other words, give tightly managed, sharp performances that hit all the necessary beats (and not mechanically at all, with considerable flair) except Keira Knightley. For a very large part of the first act, she's twitching insanely all over the place, until Jung's therapy chills her out, and after that, whenever she gets agitated, a lot of the twitching and odd vocal rhythms come back. In just about every scene, you see her trying to fit in and get on the other actors' rhythm but never consistently staying there. A lot of this has to do with the character of Sabina Spielrein going through the exact same thing—she's convinced that she's nuts, and she's not entirely off-base—and, at certain points in the movie, Keira Knightley absolutely nails that balance, but there are other points where she juuuuuuust misses with it. A lot of those misses, being just a hair flat or sharp on a given note, are due to her lacking the formal acting training that a lot of her co-stars have, but the thing is, the raw power of the moments when she's on-key are too. Most crucially, though, Spielrein's intelligence is something we're shown rather than told about. This is something that's true of Fassbender, Viggo, and Vincent Cassel too, lest one think I'm being condescending and going “Awww, lookit the girl, she's so smart, ain't that cute.” It's more that all the other smart people in the movie are more even-keeled and organized, so you never stop to think “Are they smart?” and she's so over-the-top crazy at first that it takes a while to sink in that she actually is really smart, not really hitting home until about the third act when she's talking about her thesis with Freud. That scene clinched it for me: she may not always hit it exactly, but Keira Knightley is quite good in the movie, and her being a little nuts and distracting at times fits with her character's role in the story. Also, the fact that she's awkward and not conventionally va-va-voom sexy (which is not to say that there aren't a couple heart-stopping shots of her, because there are) adds to the sense of Spielrein as a troubled nerd, which, considering that this is a world very much of nerds (their early 20th century variety, at any rate), fits. Finally, it's fitting in terms of form and content that a character who is so much the dramatic focus of the narrative be the focus of so much of a review of that movie.

A Dangerous Method is particularly timely, being set at much the same part of the 20th century as we are, today, in the 21st. Old ways of thinking are giving way to new, and much like Fassbender's Carl Jung, we're experiencing the dual feeling of fear and excitement at the unknown and unknowable future ahead. The movie balances a feeling of the old and the contemporary that speaks a lot more directly to the modern age than Carnage, set in the present, does.

But the two are different enough movies that comparisons aren't exactly fair, and with A Dangerous Method being released in the US on the 23rd and Carnage not until December 16th, enough time will have passed for viewers of both that any juxtapositions not for the purpose of looking at two different ways to adapt a play for the screen can be avoided. Both are well worth seeing, and will certainly be in the year-end discussion for acting (and in A Dangerous Method's case, design) awards, though Fassbender's performance in A Dangerous Method will almost surely be swept aside in his penis' quest to win an Oscar for Shame. Such are the vagaries of award season.