Stage Beauty

source: Stage Beauty

This film came and went in the cinema I go to. I went to see it on the last day it was on (which really wasn't very long at all) and I absolutely loved it. I don't think this film got the praise that it deserved. Billy Crudup has the perfect face for a Stage Beauty - he is effeminate in costume, yet a stunning man without the visage he dons for his Desdemona. Claire Danes pulls off her part wonderfully, especially the scene after she 'rescues' Crudup from the tavern, and the final rehearsal scene for Othello. Rupert Everett plays a wonderfully divine King Charles (with his little spaniels) and Zoe Tapper plays the ex-orange seller to perfection. The comedy and more emotional scenes in the play combine brilliantly. Bravo to all involved in this truly great film. If you didn't get the chance to see it in the cinema, I certainly recommend you to go out and rent it!

You just do not see good films like this being advertised anymore! This movie totally exceeded my expectations. I loved everything about it. First of all the story was a new twist on an old subject. Granted, I know there has been movies about men posing as women in the arts previous, but none told like this one. There is no right or wrong answer to any of the questions this movie poses. The idea of sexuality, masculine and feminine is so complex. The writers know this and do not try to explain it or give their view about it in one hour and forty-nine minutes. Rather they just indulge you in a time and place where plays were just that, acting. No glamour, no starlets, no paparazzi, just acting. I applaud everyone who participated in making this film. I had to roll the credits back at the start of the film in order to re-read that Robert De Niro was one of the producers of this film. I enjoyed this movie tremendously and a bit dishearten that I did not take the time to see it in the theater. I will not make the same mistake twice and now I will have to buy it for my collection!

Nearly all my viewing these days is from recommendations by readers of my comments. About two dozen of them recommended this because my interest is "folded" movies. For instance, this is a play made into a film about an actor playing an actor who is a man playing a woman, who by the end plays a woman playing a man. And it is done with the kind of intellectual self-reference that I admire. There are lots of self- referential lines, and the thing is built around Othello, who Welles turned into our first folded film Shakespeare. Lots of commentors write about the ordinary values in a film, so I concentrate on the folding alone. And that gives the impression I don't value the delivery of an immediate experience. In particular, I have a dear friend who truly understands acting and whose first value film has to do with whether actors touch her. She points out the dryness of folding with no blood. So the comment this time will be on how perfectly the folding merges with and is supported by the acting. It all works as it is supposed to, with the complex structure baring your soul Storiwise, this is halfway between the overproduced "Shakespeare in Love," and the mawkish "The Dresser." (It has an inside joke about "The Dresser" in the Lear carrying scene.) But it all centers on the actors' physicality and how that physicality surrounds words. The actual story is about that as well: it starts with one approach to actors' physicality with text and moves at the end to another approach that grabs you and pulls you out of your seat. You see the on screen audience behave the same way. Its due mostly to the way Crudup understands and embraces the intent of the filmmaker, and how that director reshapes everything to be carried by the actor. Claire Danes hasn't impressed me in the past, but here she is the ground from which Crudup flies. So she is supposed to be emotionally flat in her projection (as is her character) and translucently beautiful. It works. Eyre's last project was much more ambitiously folded, containing two threads from the life of Iris Murdoch played by two different actresses. The intent was to have them create a shared being even though they never had scenes together. One of our greatest folding actresses, Kate Winslet was involved, but bossy Judi Dench would have none of those "modern ideas." So the film failed. Kate was to have been the girl here but backed out at the last minute, just as the story indicates, and Claire stepped in. An added fold: Billy and Claire really did become real world lovers, with Billy leaving his pregnant girl friend. There's that idea again: fearless acting. Smart words, folding, Shakespeare, sex, immediacy and potency in acting, apt energy in the camera. What else could one want? Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

He is exquisite, Billy Crudup I mean, but not as a woman. Strangely enough he is more feminine as a man than he is as a woman. Look at him in "Almost Famous" perfect. Shaped like a flamenco dancer, rhythmic, sexual, casually overpowering. In "Jesus's Son" just by waking up at the beginning of the film, he, his character, gets you. Here he seems at odds with the feminine aspect of his character. His Desdemona is a performance. What perhaps I'm saying is that I admired the performance but I didn't feel it. I was aware of its quality but I couldn't taste it, as I have done with previous Billy Crudup creations. Another strange thing, Clare Danes. I think she's one of the most interesting actresses of her generation and here you enjoy her enormously when she's on but her character is now a blurry dot in my memory. What remains most vividly in my mind is Rupert Everett's sensational turn as King Charles. All said and done, try not to miss it.

This film is waste of time, I went to see it at a free preview screening, don't waste your money! The story does not hang together between the two main characters, there is too much "old fashioned" acting labouring the point of the gestures of the classical training. The crowd scenes are poor with all the characters overacting creating the "authentic" bustle of London. They end up acting in the way that the film tries to parody. My general impression was that they did their best to present it as a period production with plenty of effort on the costumes and scenery, but forgot to put a convincing story together. The strange inclusion of Irish music didn't add to the film either.

This is a movie worth watching several times. It's smart, well made and very well written. Intelligent movies are not that common and this is a beautiful exception. If you loved 'Shakespeare in love' you will most likely not love this one, but if you want something more from your movie experience, this is a movie for you. I do not know why people compare the two, since they are miles apart. 'Stage Beauty' is in a whole other league and has real acting, real dialogs and real humanity, which 'Shakespeare in love' lacks. It is also nice to see the level of effort that is made to make 'Stage Beauty' so real in time and costume. The light, sound and stage is convincing to the max. Billy Crudup makes an exceptional role as Ned Kynaston.

A crude mishmash of *, fellatio and sodomy, with the plot existing only to serve up more filth. The film is clearly intended to cater to homosexuals looking for cheap titillation, by seeing the camera pan around a hairy man's * body. You can see Kynaston get masturbated by two females in a cab, King Charles fellated by a common tart and Kynaston penetrated by Hyde, who later appears clad in only a towel, much to the director's obvious pleasure as the camera pans around and zooms in furiously. There is, however, a sequence where Kynaston is set upon and brutally beaten, which is most pleasing, even though it intended to be sorrowful, when it is in fact glorious.

I was very impressed by Billy Crudup's portrayal of Ned Kynaston, the last of the great English actors who specialized in Shakespeare's female heroines. The only other film I had seen this actor in was 'Big Fish' and that was a performance that, as it turns out, has grown in stature with each subsequent viewing. One of those quiet, difficult roles that Crudup does to perfection, as it turns out. He never over-plays or attempts to steal a scene. And in Big Fish his character is never meant to steal scenes... who could from Albert Finney! But in the hospital room Crudup manages to bash the viewer with quite an emotional wallop, showing a depth that had hitherto gone unappreciated. In 'Stage Beauty' Crudup never resorts to eye-fluttering she-male antics in order to convey his understanding, indeed internalization, of the eternally feminine principals that are so foreign to most men. He avoids what might have been high-camp in the hands of a lesser actor. It is also remarkable how beautiful Crudup IS as a woman. He's not what I'd call a "beautiful" man, though he is very appealing, and his sexuality is muted, both as a gay man in his relationship with the Duke of Buckingham, wonderfully performed by Ben Chaplin (now THERE'S a sexy man!) and his burgeoning interest in Claire Danes' Maria. Though that last relationship never rings very true, nor does the director attempt to shove it down our throats as being really feasible for the homosexual Kynsaston to suddenly desire without qualm the lovely Maria. Danes is quite good in the early scenes as the long-suffering hand-maiden to her male "star" (Crudup). It isn't her fault if the character becomes a tad maudlin in later scenes and a bit more annoying than endearing. She is stretched to the limit in the Desdemona/ Othello scene she plays with Crudup, the latter playing the Moor with uncanny ease, he must be quite a Shakespearean on stage! But Danes is not to be faulted in what is probably a misfire in the concept of this scene, developing as it does out of the stylized acting of Crudup's Desdemona and then leaping wildly into the Method school of acting for this last performance of Desdemona's death. A bit of an anachronism that spoils the film's ultimate impact, but not too much. There is a wonderful performance of Charles II by Rupert Everett. He seems to specialize in royalty and always holds the eye effortlessly. Everett is getting better and better as he gets older. I look forward to the day when he's a cynical old actor like Ian McKellan who can do anything he pleases brilliantly. I always enjoy Richard Griffiths who is here Lord Charles, an obese fop with a rapier wit, delivering some juicy and subtle quips to hilarious effect. The setting is good, if a bit stagy. There is one shot of the old London Bridge with houses and shops built on it that is quite remarkable. The atmosphere of 17th century London is captured quite nicely, which can't have been an easy thing to do. Costumes and other technical credits are beyond reproach. But somehow this isn't a "great" film, but a very good one and worth repeated viewings. 7 out of 10.

We sat for the first few minutes wondering whether we'd come to the right film (expecting a formulaic period romp). And for a little while I was prepared to spend the rest of the evening apologising to my partner for the slowness and oddness of the film. But once our disbelief had been suspended and we'd got used to the cramped feeling of the film (more like a staged version than cinematic at times), we both loved it. I agree that Claire Danes acted well (though the hyperventilation happened once too often) and Billy Crudup brought a complexity to the role that I rarely see in films. The reference to Shakespeare in Love is an affectionate comparison: I enjoyed the light snack of Gwinny, luvvies and Fiennes and have sat through the DVD time and again. But that film had a predictability that Stage Beauty lacked. We didn't know that Stage Beauty's 'love element' would ever work out. I do not see the development of the relationship between Danes and Crudup as a conversion from gay to straight. Instead I see a problematic progress from an imposed gender identity (perpetuated through sexual fantasy by Buckingham) to an un"knowing" but more satisfying state, where it's being yourself (whatever that is) not performing a role that counts. I think that this is relevant to all of us as we perform the roles that we and those who've influenced our upbringing have created for ourselves. We can't easily escape them (and some are more hammy than others in their performance) but the knowledge that life is performative and complex is, for me, liberating. And all that from a costume drama!