Tape
Seen 23 August 2006 in my living room
* * (out of 5)
Tape is a film that shows that even greatness has limits. Based on a play written by Stephen Belber, who also penned the nearly word-for-word screenplay, the dialogue is just higher than realism, the performances just a bit over the top, the set nicely confining, and the directing very invasive. And it all works very well. On stage.
Seriously, there’s not really any reason for this to be blown up to the screen. The play is just about as perfect a script as one can find for the stage. But Richard Linklater decided to push longtime collaborator Ethan Hawke a little further, so I decided to give it a shot.
Hawke plays Vince, a drugged out deadbeat. He is the renter of the Lansing, MI hotel room where the entire film takes place. We see him pouring one beer down the drain as he drinks another, and decorating his room with them – making him look much worse off than he is. He’s soon joined by Jon Salter (Robert Sean Leonard), who we soon find out is his best friend from high school, and who is premiering a film at the Lansing Film Festival, which Vince has apparently come to support. As they chat, you get a good idea of how their friendship in high school worked – Vince was off the wall, and Jon was the quiet guy – neither benefiting more from the friendship, but each bringing something very different. Eventually, Vince moves away from beer and onto pot, and once he convinces Jon to smoke with him, talk turns to Amy Randall, a high school girlfriend of Vince’s who John slept with at the end of their senior year, ten years earlier. Vince is convinced that something happened that was less than consensual, and he’s determined to get it out of John… something that gets even more complicated when Amy (Uma Thurman) shows up at the door as well.
It’s a great little premise, and Belber’s script is fun to listen to for awhile. Leonard and Hawke certainly sound like they’ve known each other for some time – there’s a pretty decent established history between the two guys, though less so once Thurman enters the picture. Performance-wise, Hawke is great… it’s a very high-energy role for him, a little different from what I’m used to seeing. Leonard is less so, as there’s not a huge amount of difference between Jon Salter and his current Dr. Wilson on House, MD. Not that that’s a bad thing, since I love that show, but… it gets kind of bland for 90 minutes when there’s nothing else to look at.
Read the rest at HBS!
* * (out of 5)
Tape is a film that shows that even greatness has limits. Based on a play written by Stephen Belber, who also penned the nearly word-for-word screenplay, the dialogue is just higher than realism, the performances just a bit over the top, the set nicely confining, and the directing very invasive. And it all works very well. On stage.
Seriously, there’s not really any reason for this to be blown up to the screen. The play is just about as perfect a script as one can find for the stage. But Richard Linklater decided to push longtime collaborator Ethan Hawke a little further, so I decided to give it a shot.
Hawke plays Vince, a drugged out deadbeat. He is the renter of the Lansing, MI hotel room where the entire film takes place. We see him pouring one beer down the drain as he drinks another, and decorating his room with them – making him look much worse off than he is. He’s soon joined by Jon Salter (Robert Sean Leonard), who we soon find out is his best friend from high school, and who is premiering a film at the Lansing Film Festival, which Vince has apparently come to support. As they chat, you get a good idea of how their friendship in high school worked – Vince was off the wall, and Jon was the quiet guy – neither benefiting more from the friendship, but each bringing something very different. Eventually, Vince moves away from beer and onto pot, and once he convinces Jon to smoke with him, talk turns to Amy Randall, a high school girlfriend of Vince’s who John slept with at the end of their senior year, ten years earlier. Vince is convinced that something happened that was less than consensual, and he’s determined to get it out of John… something that gets even more complicated when Amy (Uma Thurman) shows up at the door as well.
It’s a great little premise, and Belber’s script is fun to listen to for awhile. Leonard and Hawke certainly sound like they’ve known each other for some time – there’s a pretty decent established history between the two guys, though less so once Thurman enters the picture. Performance-wise, Hawke is great… it’s a very high-energy role for him, a little different from what I’m used to seeing. Leonard is less so, as there’s not a huge amount of difference between Jon Salter and his current Dr. Wilson on House, MD. Not that that’s a bad thing, since I love that show, but… it gets kind of bland for 90 minutes when there’s nothing else to look at.
Read the rest at HBS!
posted by Matt S. at
11:34 AM
2 Comments:
I don't know that the problem is it's just too suited for stage to be transferred to film; I think there are two bigger factors at work.
(1) Nothing was done to make it a movie. Plenty of plays have been adapted to film and worked, but the successful ones recognize that they've got the close-up to work with and give the cast some room to move around.
(2) Linklater used amazingly crappy digital photography, maybe not even HD-quality. This film is painful to look at; when I saw it at a film festival a few years ago, it was like watching a terribly preserved 100-year-old movie. Just dreadful.
By
Jason, at 1:46 PM
It's not that it couldn't be made into a decent film, but I think doing it would take away a lot of what I like about it as a stage play, and since that's the form that I've come to appreciate it, I feel they'd be better off not associating it with the play. The intimacy and proximity doesn't transfer as well on film. It just looks like Linklater doesn't have a clue how to shoot it (which I think he did, it was just a bad clue).
And yeah. It's really, really ugly.
By
Matt S., at 2:09 PM
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