The Inner Life of Martin Frost (Paul Auster, 2007)
Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 8:04 pm
As this was just released on DVD I wondered if anyone else had seen it yet. I was interested in it because I used to be a rather big fan of Auster, not so much now (more on that in a minute). Whatever the case, I still believe he is defiantly inventive enough to merit attention, though he seems intent on wearing down my good will.
For those who don't know, Martin Frost is yet another of Auster's narratives on the metaphysical travails of life as a novelist. I have to admit that it worked better for me the first six or seven times. Here we have a slightly dazed looking David Thewlis filling in as Auster's spiritual proxy, going through all the familiar motions of higher intellect neuroses. He retires to a country house where he can be undisturbed by outside influences (almost all of Auster's protagonists as far as I remember were somehow economically self-sufficient; the better to accommodate their, ahem, metaphysical travails); here he endures several minutes of pensive onscreen freedom of mind until suddenly he is joined in bed by a mysterious Irene Jacob. He reacts in shock--though fear not, this is not Auster's The Morning After. We are led to believe that Jacob is a doctoral student in philosophy (of course) who happened to have been offered the country house by coincidence (another Auster staple) for the same weekend as Martin. Naturally, there's more to it as it turns out her character shares the same last name as Martin's first name (hmmmmm) and she is supposedly infatuated with the reticent novelist. As though any further evidence were needed that this whole project was, at its core, Austerian wish fulfillment we are treated to several, increasingly arbitrary and laughable scenes the whole purpose of which seems to be to get Jacob's top off. Whether that is sufficient inducement for viewing is, obviously, up to you. FWIW, on those rare occasions when she is fully clothed Jacob takes to wearing a shirt with the word HUME emblazoned across the front.
Really, it's a pretty humiliating role and she does her best but there's very little support. Auster has no eye at all and he tries to film everything in a flat, static way to sort of acknowledge and make up for that I suppose (making some of the compositions in Lulu on the Bridge look radical by contrast). In other words, he doesn't bother much with aesthetics--at least I can't glean anything from such a presentation. This is a problem though as his narrative sorely needs this kind of propping up and embellishment. Without some sense of style of form the entire endeavor is a veritable flat line. Unfortunately, he is content to rely upon wearisome, whimsical details like naming two characters Jack and Diane. Thewlis meanwhile doesn't seem to know what the hell is going on and basically just tries to stay out of the way. A sound strategy as Auster's narrative starts to spiral out of control (as much as something this tightly wound can spiral at all). Jacob acts as a muse for Thewlis but, as he finishes his new fiction, she begins to sicken and we get the point that she is some kind of genuine celestial muse whose mortal condition is inherently connected to the completion of Frost's work. The metaphysical implications of this are of interest to me but, as has been the case in much of his recent fiction, Auster can't be bothered to actually follow through or make any attempt to systematize his ideas and so we are left with a bunch of scatter shot notions of nothing adding up to much, a general hollowed out malaise and, finally, a vaguely unsatiated sense of ultimate I-could-have-been-doing-something-else uselessness.
We are, however, treated to yet another one of those scenes of a writer having his work tossed to the winds (as in Celebrity and Wonder Boys for instance) as some lame illustration of liberation. But it's also meant as an indicator that the "socially maladjusted" writer figure can be saved (or in the case of Celebrity penalized) via a break with immersion in his vocation, which is ultimately depicted as an almost purely therapeutic preoccupation. The decision to salvage him is usually made by someone else who points toward a more viable life of appropriate social integration and supposedly renewed vitality. Auster should have taken the opportunity in this film to place a moratorium on this obnoxious cliche.
Having said all that there are a few compensations here in the form of two late appearing characters. Michael Imperioli plays a plumber with literary ambitions (of course) who stumbles (or maybe not!) into Frost's orbit. He's a pretty interesting character of the sort Auster used to actually know how to integrate into the work. And, mercifully, he's often funny as hell. Whether this was intended or something Imperioli had the good judgement to infuse into his portrayal I don't know without the script here in front of me. I suspect heavily it's the latter. I'm not entirely convinced Auster even realized the character was funny. Then there's the even later appearance of the confused muse for Imperioli (hence the fact that his writing is bad); the notion of this character is where we stretch the limitations of credibility for the whole scenario to their breaking point, as any clarity or coherence is basically tossed out the window. There's justification for this, however. Auster's daughter Sophie plays the part, though it would be more accurate to say that she really just embodies it. She isn't a particularly interesting actress but she does have the kind of radiance to her visage that must have been the intention for Jacob. Here at least he gets it right and can thank his dp for setting up the lights properly. I'm not crazy about Auster using this part as essentially an audition reel for his daughter, though given the vague wispiness of any actual role for her to speak of I guess it's a case of no harm no foul. The ultimate resolution to the story is, unfortunately, too ludicrous, mawkishly sentimental and haphazardly thrown together to have much impact. The score is excellent, however.
I wanted to finish this by tossing out the general question as to what others think of Auster's work, including his film work. As I said I have a great deal of respect for the early stuff, including the magnificent Art of Hunger and Invention of Solitude but so much of the more recent work feels like an indifferent, lazy retread. What is worse is that its quality calls into question just how inspired much of the earlier material actually was. I fear I might even be cool toward The New York Trilogy if I looked at it again. For me his last book of any real merit was the excellent, truly spectral Leviathan, though I do have a certain amount of affection for Timbuktu. Martin Frost actually originated as a reference within his torpid novel The Book of Illusions and was initially designed to play as a short feature; it might have succeeded as that. As to the rest of the film work, Smoke is by all accounts one of the finest possible blends of an iconoclastic authorial sensibility and the demands of cinematic presentation. The less said about the one off Blue in the Face, however, the better. Philip Haas' Music of Chance was a very good adaptation and I would have liked to have seen what Haas could have done with Frost (his essentially four character adaptation of The Blood Oranges was superb and amongst the best movies of the 90's). And, of course, I keep wondering whether I should go back to his flawed, fascinating Lulu on the Bridge. Certainly it has deep problems that are really irresolvable but it has great appeal to me as well, mostly because I admire what he's going for and the effervescent mood remains properly uncommunicable and ungraspable like a memory of a singular experience. Still, what's most interesting about that film is what did not make it in. I read the script for Lulu prior to seeing the film and was initially very disappointed that all the scenes of the movie-within-the-movie were cut--these scenes related to a new adaptation of Pandora's Box and seemed integral to me as they worked to situate what was happening in very precise terms; they acted as a dialogue-response to the Harvey Keitel scenes. I couldn't believe Auster had cut them, but then I saw them in the deleted footage and realized that in translation from text to screen they revealed themselves to be a different tenor than I expected and Auster was right to cut them. These weren't scenes that were poorly done; indeed a case could be made that they were individually the most effectively done in the whole picture and yet they did not work within the whole. I realize that the fact that some scenes don't transition well from page to screen is no news flash but what fascinated me was just how vital they seemed to be on the page and yet how much they would have dislocated the tone on screen.
Ultimately though, I would say Wang's Center of the World was the best thing Auster ever had anything to do with but, perhaps tellingly, he didn't have much to do with it at all.
For those who don't know, Martin Frost is yet another of Auster's narratives on the metaphysical travails of life as a novelist. I have to admit that it worked better for me the first six or seven times. Here we have a slightly dazed looking David Thewlis filling in as Auster's spiritual proxy, going through all the familiar motions of higher intellect neuroses. He retires to a country house where he can be undisturbed by outside influences (almost all of Auster's protagonists as far as I remember were somehow economically self-sufficient; the better to accommodate their, ahem, metaphysical travails); here he endures several minutes of pensive onscreen freedom of mind until suddenly he is joined in bed by a mysterious Irene Jacob. He reacts in shock--though fear not, this is not Auster's The Morning After. We are led to believe that Jacob is a doctoral student in philosophy (of course) who happened to have been offered the country house by coincidence (another Auster staple) for the same weekend as Martin. Naturally, there's more to it as it turns out her character shares the same last name as Martin's first name (hmmmmm) and she is supposedly infatuated with the reticent novelist. As though any further evidence were needed that this whole project was, at its core, Austerian wish fulfillment we are treated to several, increasingly arbitrary and laughable scenes the whole purpose of which seems to be to get Jacob's top off. Whether that is sufficient inducement for viewing is, obviously, up to you. FWIW, on those rare occasions when she is fully clothed Jacob takes to wearing a shirt with the word HUME emblazoned across the front.
Really, it's a pretty humiliating role and she does her best but there's very little support. Auster has no eye at all and he tries to film everything in a flat, static way to sort of acknowledge and make up for that I suppose (making some of the compositions in Lulu on the Bridge look radical by contrast). In other words, he doesn't bother much with aesthetics--at least I can't glean anything from such a presentation. This is a problem though as his narrative sorely needs this kind of propping up and embellishment. Without some sense of style of form the entire endeavor is a veritable flat line. Unfortunately, he is content to rely upon wearisome, whimsical details like naming two characters Jack and Diane. Thewlis meanwhile doesn't seem to know what the hell is going on and basically just tries to stay out of the way. A sound strategy as Auster's narrative starts to spiral out of control (as much as something this tightly wound can spiral at all). Jacob acts as a muse for Thewlis but, as he finishes his new fiction, she begins to sicken and we get the point that she is some kind of genuine celestial muse whose mortal condition is inherently connected to the completion of Frost's work. The metaphysical implications of this are of interest to me but, as has been the case in much of his recent fiction, Auster can't be bothered to actually follow through or make any attempt to systematize his ideas and so we are left with a bunch of scatter shot notions of nothing adding up to much, a general hollowed out malaise and, finally, a vaguely unsatiated sense of ultimate I-could-have-been-doing-something-else uselessness.
We are, however, treated to yet another one of those scenes of a writer having his work tossed to the winds (as in Celebrity and Wonder Boys for instance) as some lame illustration of liberation. But it's also meant as an indicator that the "socially maladjusted" writer figure can be saved (or in the case of Celebrity penalized) via a break with immersion in his vocation, which is ultimately depicted as an almost purely therapeutic preoccupation. The decision to salvage him is usually made by someone else who points toward a more viable life of appropriate social integration and supposedly renewed vitality. Auster should have taken the opportunity in this film to place a moratorium on this obnoxious cliche.
Having said all that there are a few compensations here in the form of two late appearing characters. Michael Imperioli plays a plumber with literary ambitions (of course) who stumbles (or maybe not!) into Frost's orbit. He's a pretty interesting character of the sort Auster used to actually know how to integrate into the work. And, mercifully, he's often funny as hell. Whether this was intended or something Imperioli had the good judgement to infuse into his portrayal I don't know without the script here in front of me. I suspect heavily it's the latter. I'm not entirely convinced Auster even realized the character was funny. Then there's the even later appearance of the confused muse for Imperioli (hence the fact that his writing is bad); the notion of this character is where we stretch the limitations of credibility for the whole scenario to their breaking point, as any clarity or coherence is basically tossed out the window. There's justification for this, however. Auster's daughter Sophie plays the part, though it would be more accurate to say that she really just embodies it. She isn't a particularly interesting actress but she does have the kind of radiance to her visage that must have been the intention for Jacob. Here at least he gets it right and can thank his dp for setting up the lights properly. I'm not crazy about Auster using this part as essentially an audition reel for his daughter, though given the vague wispiness of any actual role for her to speak of I guess it's a case of no harm no foul. The ultimate resolution to the story is, unfortunately, too ludicrous, mawkishly sentimental and haphazardly thrown together to have much impact. The score is excellent, however.
I wanted to finish this by tossing out the general question as to what others think of Auster's work, including his film work. As I said I have a great deal of respect for the early stuff, including the magnificent Art of Hunger and Invention of Solitude but so much of the more recent work feels like an indifferent, lazy retread. What is worse is that its quality calls into question just how inspired much of the earlier material actually was. I fear I might even be cool toward The New York Trilogy if I looked at it again. For me his last book of any real merit was the excellent, truly spectral Leviathan, though I do have a certain amount of affection for Timbuktu. Martin Frost actually originated as a reference within his torpid novel The Book of Illusions and was initially designed to play as a short feature; it might have succeeded as that. As to the rest of the film work, Smoke is by all accounts one of the finest possible blends of an iconoclastic authorial sensibility and the demands of cinematic presentation. The less said about the one off Blue in the Face, however, the better. Philip Haas' Music of Chance was a very good adaptation and I would have liked to have seen what Haas could have done with Frost (his essentially four character adaptation of The Blood Oranges was superb and amongst the best movies of the 90's). And, of course, I keep wondering whether I should go back to his flawed, fascinating Lulu on the Bridge. Certainly it has deep problems that are really irresolvable but it has great appeal to me as well, mostly because I admire what he's going for and the effervescent mood remains properly uncommunicable and ungraspable like a memory of a singular experience. Still, what's most interesting about that film is what did not make it in. I read the script for Lulu prior to seeing the film and was initially very disappointed that all the scenes of the movie-within-the-movie were cut--these scenes related to a new adaptation of Pandora's Box and seemed integral to me as they worked to situate what was happening in very precise terms; they acted as a dialogue-response to the Harvey Keitel scenes. I couldn't believe Auster had cut them, but then I saw them in the deleted footage and realized that in translation from text to screen they revealed themselves to be a different tenor than I expected and Auster was right to cut them. These weren't scenes that were poorly done; indeed a case could be made that they were individually the most effectively done in the whole picture and yet they did not work within the whole. I realize that the fact that some scenes don't transition well from page to screen is no news flash but what fascinated me was just how vital they seemed to be on the page and yet how much they would have dislocated the tone on screen.
Ultimately though, I would say Wang's Center of the World was the best thing Auster ever had anything to do with but, perhaps tellingly, he didn't have much to do with it at all.